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America’s Most Valuable Company in Each Year (1995-2025)

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America’s Most Valuable Company in Each Year (1995-2025)

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Key Takeaways

  • Apple has been America’s most valuable company in almost every year since 2012 (based on Q1 market cap)
  • This chart also shows how stock valuations have ballooned over the past decade

While industrial giants like General Electric were once the most valuable companies by market capitalization, they’ve since been overtaken by tech-driven firms like Apple and Microsoft.

This transition reflects the economy’s pivot from manufacturing and energy toward software, data, and digital infrastructure. In recent years, investor enthusiasm for AI has driven valuations to historic highs, with trillion-dollar companies becoming a new normal.

In this graphic, we highlight America’s most valuable company in each year since 1995, based on Q1 market cap. Numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

Data & Discussion

The data we used to create this graphic was sourced from the American Business History Center.

Year Company Market Cap
(as of Q1, $M)
1995 General Electric 93,322
1996 General Electric 126,523
1997 General Electric 169,388
1998 General Electric 260,147
1999 Microsoft 418,579
2000 Microsoft 492,462
2001 General Electric 407,054
2002 General Electric 401,499
2003 Microsoft 266,037
2004 General Electric 329,240
2005 ExxonMobil 392,636
2006 ExxonMobil 372,792
2007 ExxonMobil 425,795
2008 ExxonMobil 455,929
2009 ExxonMobil 345,815
2010 ExxonMobil 314,154
2011 ExxonMobil 411,638
2012 Apple 568,615
2013 Apple 415,683
2014 Apple 479,069
2015 Apple 724,773
2016 Apple 604,304
2017 Apple 753,718
2018 Apple 851,318
2019 Microsoft 904,861
2020 Microsoft 1,199,550
2021 Apple 2,050,666
2022 Apple 2,849,538
2023 Apple 2,609,039
2024 Microsoft 3,126,133
2025 Apple 3,337,000

Apple and Microsoft Trade Places at the Top

Apple and Microsoft have dominated their competition for many years, frequently swapping places as the biggest company in the United States.

Apple’s ascent is fueled by its ecosystem of consumer electronics and services, particularly the iPhone. Microsoft, on the other hand, owes its valuation to its commanding share of the enterprise software (e.g. Office 365) and cloud computing sectors.

Both companies are developing artificial intelligence and have been working on integrating it into their respective offerings.

Nvidia’s Brief Moment at #1

Nvidia briefly disrupted Apple and Microsoft’s duopoly when it became America’s most valuable company on two occasions in 2024 (June and October).

The company’s massive boom is the result of its GPUs being critical for AI data-center expansion, and a belief that AI-driven technologies will rapidly reshape the world’s industries.

The reason Nvidia hasn’t been featured in this graphic is because it is based on March 31 valuations.

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