Just before markets closed on Thursday, 16 January, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, became the fourth trillion-dollar company in the USA. A trillion-dollar valuation doesn’t tell the complete story of the overall economic health of a company, nor is it used in any meaningful way by investors; it’s mostly a cool-looking “vanity metric”.
Apple was the first US company to hit a $1 trillion mark in 2018, followed by Amazon later that same year, and Microsoft hit the $1 trillion mark in April of 2019. The first company ever to hit a $1 trillion market mile-stone was PetroChina in 2007. And late last year, Saudi Aramco became the first $2 trillion company shortly after its debut on the Riyadh stock exchange in December.
The next company expected to hit the $1 trillion market target is Facebook, which was sitting at about $620 billion when markets closed on Thursday.