At $1 Trillion, Apple is Bigger Than These Things

With a surge in the markets, Apple Inc. has become the first company to cross the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization. To truly understand the sheer magnitude of that number, here are five things that the electronics giant is now bigger than in dollar value.

With that market cap, Apple is worth over 1% of the world’s GDP according to the latest estimates from the World Bank that peg the world’s output at $80.6 trillion. That also means the company is valued at over 5% of America’s $19.3 trillion GDP.

But that aside, Apple’s market cap makes it larger than the GDP of each of 183 out of the 199 countries for which the World Bank has GDP data. Some of the notable ones include Turkey, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Sweden.

One would think that financial markets that see huge amounts of money change hands every day would be larger than one single company.

But according to the June 2018 monthly market capitalization for stock exchanges compiled by World Federation of Exchanges, Apple is now larger than many stock exchanges around the globe. Some of the financial markets Apple eclipses include  Singapore Exchange, Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and Bolsa Mexicana de Valores.

The U.S. Government’s expenses far exceed its revenue generation, leading to a burgeoning budget deficit which has been a subject of hot political debates, especially through the course of the 2016 Presidential election campaigns.

In its latest report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the federal budget deficit for the first nine months of FY 2018 was $607 billion, much lower than the market cap that Apple commands today. The deficit for the entire fiscal 2018 ending on September 30, is estimated at $793 billion.

While wars cause the destruction of life that cannot be measured, a 2010 Congressional Research Service report estimated the economic cost of wars between 1775 and 2010 and created cost estimates at the fiscal year 2011 constant prices for more current understanding. Based on data from that report, Apple’s market cap exceeds the cost of many conflicts including World War I, the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

There is no doubt that Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man. Forbes magazine pegged his net worth at $148 billion as of Aug. 2, 2018. These 11 people include big guns like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, and Mark Zuckerberg. However, the combined wealth of the top 11 estimated at $831.1 billion still falls short of Apple’s value by a whopping $169 billion.