Microsoft overtakes Apple to become the world’s most valuable company

Microsoft surpassed Apple’s market cap on Friday to become the world’s most valuable public company. The change follows Apple’s Thursday earnings, where the company posted strong results but revealed that it lost $6 billion to supply chain constraints. On Tuesday, Microsoft also shared positive earnings boosted by Office, Windows, and its cloud products.

At Friday’s market close, Microsoft’s market cap was almost $2.49 trillion while Apple’s was about $2.46 trillion, according to CNBC. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has passed Apple; the Windows-maker surpassed Apple’s market cap in 2018 for the first time since 2010 and once again in July 2020. (Alphabet has also taken the crown from Apple, surpassing Apple’s market cap in 2016.)

But Apple has been a leader in the markets for some time, being the first US company to hit a $1 trillion market cap in 2018 and, just two years later, becoming the first US company to hit a $2 trillion market cap. (The iPhone is still a massively successful product, after all.) So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Apple retakes the title of the world’s most valuable company sometime soon.