$3 TRILLION

In an early sign that its AI investments are already paying off, Microsoft’s market capitalization hit $3 trillion for the first time today.

Microsoft is only the second company in history to achieve this milestone: Apple first hit a $3 trillion market cap in January 2022, and 6 months later it closed above $3 trillion for the first time.

Market cap is the most common way to measure the financial worth of a publicly traded company. It’s measured by multiplying its stock price by the number of common shares outstanding. Obviously, this isn’t the only way to measure the relative size of a company, as it doesn’t factor in debt or other balance sheet items.

But Microsoft’s rise has been astonishing no matter how you measure it, and it is now seeing a level of success that would have been unfathomable just a decade ago when other firms like Amazon, Apple, and Facebook/Meta, Google/Alphabet were busy eating up markets that the Microsoft of yesteryear would have dominated.

We can credit the firm’s back-to-back investments in cloud computing and AI for this shift, and the steady hand of CEO Satya Nadella, who has pushed the company to be more aggressive and public-facing in recent years.

We’ll see if Microsoft can close the day above $3 trillion, but as of this writing—about 1:30 pm ET—the firm is worth $3.01 trillion and is the second-biggest company in the world behind Apple, which is currently worth $3.03 trillion. Perhaps not coincidentally, Microsoft also trailed Apple to a 2 trillion market cap, achieving that milestone in June 2021, 10 months after Apple had.