Originally published at The Atlantic
Apple, a company founded 42 years ago in a Santa Clara Valley garage to make personal computers, is now worth $1 trillion. It becomes the first American company to achieve that feat.
A trillion is an unimaginably big number no matter what you’re counting—but especially when it’s money. It’s the kind of number usually reserved for measures of aggregated national economic inputs and outputs. The 2018 U.S. budget accounts for estimated revenues of $3.6 trillion, and expenditures of $4 trillion. That makes Apple’s market cap as big as a quarter of federal operations. It’s hard to fathom what that even means.