‘A billion dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A trillion dollars’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple has become the first US company with a market cap of over $1 trillion. This follows a jump in its stock after reporting strong Q3 earnings that saw the iPhone maker surpass both its own projections and analysts’ estimates, while also making a strong forecast for its upcoming Q4 earnings.

Apple hit the $1 trillion mark early this morning when its stock crossed $207.05 per share at 11:48am ET (the stock has since dropped back down slightly). Given the volatile nature of the market, however, it’s possible Apple may not stay a $1 trillion company for very long, or it could bounce back and forth over the $1 trillion mark in the coming days. It technically also isn’t the first to hit $1 trillion, either — PetroChina briefly reached $1 trillion back in 2007, although the stock soon fell below that mark.

But for all intents and purposes, Apple is the first US-based (and, for now, the only) trillion-dollar company on the market. It likely won’t be there alone for long, though: Amazon is also on the verge of hitting the $1 trillion mark after its own positive Q3 results.

Of course, all of this is an arbitrary milestone based on humans’ general tendency to put more weight on nice-looking round numbers as some kind of goal. There’s really no practical difference between Apple’s worth of $999 billion and $1 trillion since it’s still an almost impossibly wealthy and influential company beyond the comprehension of individual people.

But yay, capitalism?

Source: The Verge