Ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching! Apple’s stock price has been on a tear lately and the company’s shares closed trading on Wednesday at a new high of $124.88. This gives Apple an absolutely massive market cap of $716.7 billion, which once again makes Apple the single most valuable American company ever just one day after it broke through the $700 billion barrier for the first time.
FROM EARLIER: Apple is America’s first $700 billion company
However, Wednesday’s closing number was remarkable for another reason: Apple’s total market cap is now more than the combined market caps of Google and Microsoft. You read that correctly: If you add Google’s market cap of $365.46 billion with Microsoft’s market cap of $349.89 billion, you get $715.35 billion, or $1 billion less than Apple’s market cap at the end of trading Wednesday.
For more perspective, consider that only two other tech-related companies — Verizon and Facebook — have market caps of over $200 billion. And as Benzinga informs us, activist investor Carl Icahn thinks Apple could easily trade at $216 per share right now, which would be more than enough to put it over the $1 trillion market cap threshold.
Whether Apple can maintain this insane value going forward is open to debate, of course, but given its exceptionally high customer loyalty, there’s no reason to think Apple won’t continue posting record profits for a good while to come.
