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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.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
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