Apple made history on Friday by becoming the first company to reach a market capitalization of $3 trillion. Having briefly breached the milestone before in early 2022, the tech giant never closed above the three-trillion mark until now. On Friday, Apple's share price climbed 2.31 percent to $193.97, enough to give the company a market capitalization of $3.05 trillion. When Apple had first reached a valuation of $2 trillion in August 2020, they were the first U.S. company to do so, but the second overall, after Saudi Arabian oil and gas giant Saudi Aramco had made the first ascent to $2 trillion in December 2019.
After a challenging 2022, which saw the tech sector including Apple suffer uncharacteristic losses, the world's most valuable company returned to form this year. Halfway through 2023, Apple's share price is up 49 percent, boosting the company's market capitalization by more than $900 billion. While this year's tech rally has largely been fueled by AI euphoria, Apple has been an outlier in the sense that it has barely mentioned AI in its latest earnings releases. While fellow tech giants Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have fully embraced the nascent technology and consider its arrival an inflection point, Apple has been remarkably quiet about it, focusing its attention on its new mixed-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, instead.
The following chart illustrates Apple’s unparalleled rise from a struggling $5-billion company in 2000 to world-beating powerhouse over the past 23 years, while also highlighting some of the most notable product launches along the way.
