Bullish on Trillion-Dollar Stocks

Eight of the nine Trillion Dollar Club members are tech stocks. For the ninth, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple is one-fifth of assets.

-  JAMES K. GLASSMAN

WHO would have believed at the turn of the 21st century that there would be such a thing as a trillion-dollar stock? (Or that the Dow would reach 36,000 for that matter?) At the end of 2000, the most valuable company was ExxonMobil, with a market capitalization—price times shares outstanding—of roughly $302 billion. That's one-fifteenth the value of Nvidia today. Just counting to a trillion incredibly fast, with no bathroom breaks, would take 32,000 years, according to the Q&A platform Quora.com.

In August 2017, however, I wrote, “It may be a matter of months, or more likely a few years, but sometime soon a U.S. company will breach the trillion-dollar mark.” I was more right than I expected.

At the time, I offered estimates of when each would hit a trillion in market cap. Apple (symbol AAPL, $255) was first, as I predicted, but it took just 11 months, a year and a half ahead of schedule. The other four quickly followed: Amazon.com (AMZN, $220) in September 2018; Microsoft (MSFT, $518) in 2019; Alphabet (GOOGL, $243), the former Google, in 2020; and Meta Platforms (META, $734), the former Facebook, in 2021. At that point, I wrote another column, saying, “I’m doubling down and recommending them all.” Sure enough, as a group, they have nearly doubled. (Prices, returns and other data are as of September 30; stocks I like are in bold.)

Today, with the additions of Nvidia, Tesla, Broadcom (AVGO, $330) and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B, $503), membership in the Trillion-Dollar Club (let’s call it TDC) has grown to nine. The combined market cap of these stocks accounts for 41% of the capitalization of all the companies of the S&P 500 index. A mere 10 years ago, the nine largest U.S. stocks had a total market cap of 18% of the S&P 500.