World's Top Companies: Who’s in the Exclusive $1T Club & Beyond?

6월 17일

But wait, it gets even more exclusive than a mere $1 trillion! There’s a $2 trillion club with just a single player and a super-duper hyper-elite ultra club of $3 trillion. Can you name the participants?

Being part of the world’s biggest companies isn’t easy. It may look easy — these corporate giants gain billions of dollars in market cap before you make your morning cup of coffee (especially if you’re drowsy after a late-night options trading action).

In this Idea, we look at the dynamic docket of the world's most expensive companies, neatly stacked up in the TradingView Top companies list.

The world has never seen so much money concentrated in a few select companies. Fun fact: all of them had humble beginnings like starting out of a garage and trying to get clients through cold calling — but ended up changing the world with things like the iPhone.

Today, a total of seven companies are worth $1 trillion or more each and three of them boast a valuation of over $3 trillion each. Can you guess the common theme across all? It starts with “A” and ends with “I”.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been popping these stocks to record highs for months now. And there’s no sign of slowing down the insane growth. All of these companies, except for one that’s not based in the US, are listed in the broad-based S&P 500 index and make up about 30% of its total weight. Can you spot them in the S&P 500 Stock Heatmap?

Note that all numbers and rankings are measured by the companies' performances through mid-June of this year.

Let’s roll!

1. 🧩 Microsoft (ticker: MSFT)

Microsoft is the world’s most valuable company worth a staggering $3.289 trillion. The software maker quickly swooped in to lead the AI race by backing ChatGPT parent OpenAI. It has invested $13 billion in the startup.

Microsoft’s growth is largely driven by the adoption of AI across its product suite. Artificial intelligence-powered assistants such as Microsoft Copilot can operate without human intervention or direct commands, making companies’ lives easier and more productive.

💰 Market Cap: $3.289 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $211.91 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: Microsoft's first major deal was with IBM in 1980. They developed the operating system for IBM's new computer, which they named PC DOS. The deal was worth $50,000.

2. 🧩 Apple (ticker: AAPL)

Apple has entered the chat. The iPhone maker just recently figured out how to play catch up in the AI race after doing virtually nothing for a year. Apple Intelligence — the company’s response to AI — got investors excited about the future growth prospects of iPhone sales and overall revenue generation.

The AI announcement, made during Apple’s annual developer conference, helped lift its shares by 10% and propelled the company to the number one spot, dethroning Microsoft. Briefly, though.

💰 Market Cap: $3.258 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $383.29 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: Apple traces its humble origins to Steve Jobs’s garage where he and another founder — Steve Wozniak, would test the products before selling them over the phone. A third founder — Ronald Wayne — was in the company for just 12 days and sold his 10% stake for $800. That stake today is worth more than $325 billion.

3. 🧩 Nvidia (ticker: NVDA)

Nvidia is the highflyer technology company responsible for building out the infrastructure layer of the artificial intelligence revolution. Its coveted AI chips are the hottest commodity for all other technology giants and that’s where Nvidia’s power comes from.

Earlier this month, Nvidia’s market value crossed $3 trillion for the first time, overtaking Apple and becoming the third company to ever breathe the rarefied air of so much money. First place coming soon?

💰 Market Cap: $3.244 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $60.92 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: Jensen Huang, who never interviews wearing anything other than a black jacket, was cleaning tables and washing dishes at his local Denny’s diner. And that’s where he sat with his two friends — hardware savant Chris Malachowsky and software geek Curtis Priem — when he founded his chip making business Nvidia.

4. 🧩 Alphabet (ticker: GOOGL)

Alphabet, parent of search dominator Google, is taking on Microsoft in the rushed race to market an AI assistant. The company’s first generation AI bot, Bard, suffered a major blow at launch (it returned false information). Subsequent attempts failed to present any threat to ChatGPT so Alphabet rebranded it to Gemini.

💰 Market Cap: $2.194 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $307.39 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, initially worked on their search engine project from their dorm rooms at Stanford University. They later moved to a garage in Menlo Park, California, which was owned by Susan Wojcicki, former CEO of YouTube. Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2005. Today, YouTube generates that amount in two weeks.

5. 🧩 Amazon (ticker: AMZN)

Amazon, the ecommerce and cloud computing heavyweight, is riding the AI wave thanks to its cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s the company’s cash cow, revenue generator, profit driver, or however you want to call it.

For the most recent quarter, AWS hit $100 billion in annual revenue run rate — a financial metric that estimates future growth based on current performance. Or the opposite of "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

💰 Market Cap: $1.911 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $574.78 billion

👶 How It Started: Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 after he left his analyst job at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co, inspired by the rapid growth of the internet. He took the risk of selling things online and picked books due to their wide selection and ease of distribution. And the rest is history.

6. 🧩 Saudi Arabian Oil (ticker: 2222)

An outlier in the rankings saturated by tech giants, Saudi Arabian Oil is the world’s largest oil producer. Also known as Saudi Aramco, it’s the single most important revenue source for the Saudi government (makes up 92% of its budget to be exact). In 2022, when energy prices boomed following the Covid lockdown, Aramco pocketed record profits of $161 billion.

💰 Market Cap: $1.783 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $440.80 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: Saudi Aramco was established in the 1930s when Standard Oil of California discovered oil in Saudi Arabia and formed the California-Arabian Standard Oil Company. By the 1980s, the Saudi government had fully nationalized the company, renaming it Saudi Aramco.

7. 🧩 Meta Platforms (ticker: META)

Last on our list of $1 trillion companies and beyond is Meta Platforms, previously known as Facebook. The brainchild of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg had a rough 2022 with more than 70% wiped out of its value and knocking it out of the $1 trillion club.

The following year, 2023, was a lot more generous to the social media behemoth as it gained nearly 200% and jumped right back into a 13-digit valuation. The company was up another 45% for the first half of 2024.

💰 Market Cap: $1.279 trillion

🐮 Revenue: $134.90 billion (2023)

👶 How It Started: Facebook was initially called "Thefacebook" and was limited to Harvard students when it first launched on February 4, 2004. The company’s first office was Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room.

📣 Let’s Hear from You!

What’s your favorite pick of the world’s top seven companies ranked by market capitalization? Let us know in the comments!