Last week, analyst Andy Zaky revealed that investors are scrambling to plough their money into Apple before the company releases its iPhone 5, and that its stock price will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. And unsurprisingly, Zaky was right. Apple stock hit an all-time high of $636.64 last Friday, but that’s nothing compared to today’s price of $660.73, which makes Apple the most valuable publicly-traded stock of all time.
The company has now taken that title away from arch rival Microsoft. Microsoft held the record for the largest market capitalization after its stock price rose to $119.94 per share on December 30, 1999. With 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares recorded, that made its market cap a whopping $618.89 billion.
But today Apple’s passed that. With its stock price reaching $660.73 today, its 937,406,000 outstanding shares make its market cap $619.37 billion.
However, that’s just taking into account just the raw numbers. MacRumors notes that if you account for inflation, Microsoft would still be top dog, with its $618.89 billion market cap looking more like $842.5 billion in today’s dollars. But the way Apple’s share price continues to climb, and with major announcements on the way, it probably won’t be long before the Cupertino company breaks Microsoft’s record for real.
Via: MacRumors