That’s trillion with a T—Apple hits market value of $1 trillion

The trillion-dollar ceiling has been broken. So who's going to pay for it? (credit: Ars Technica)

Apple, the company Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded in 1976 in possibly not a garage, became the most valuable company in the world in 2012, passing Microsoft as iPhone sales pushed the company into the stratosphere. Today, Apple's dominance of the financial world has reached a new milestone-the company has now topped $1 trillion in market capitalization, the collective value of all its shares of stock.

With a "market cap" of $884.01 billion, Amazon is Apple's closest rival; Google parent Alphabet trails Bezos' technology and retail giant with a market cap of $854.86 billion. Microsoft, from which Apple snatched the title of most valuable company in 2012, is at $827.53 billion today.

Apple's value pushed past $1 trillion as the value of shares rose 3 percent earlier this week following the company's quarterly earnings report and aided by Apple's move in May to begin buying back up to $100 billion worth of stock with its stockpile of cash. The company's stock is now valued at about $207 per share. Some of the boost also comes from Apple's swelling services sales-collectively, Apple's Apple Pay, iTunes, iCloud, and Apple Care services brought in $9.55 billion in revenue for the company in the most recent quarter, up from $9.19 billion in the previous quarter of the year and $7.27 billion in the same three-month period last year.

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