Apple Lost $180 Billion In One Day But It's Still Worth More Than Most Countries

Dhir Acharya - Sep 07, 2020

A few days ago, a string of record rallies driven by Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, as well as other tech giants caused the stock market to stumble.

A few days ago, a string of record rallies driven by Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, as well as other tech giants caused the stock market to stumble. There were ideas circulating around the reason behind the tech selloff, but some thought that the market was returning to normal.

On September 4, following the stock split on Monday Apple witnessed a huge surge, which cost it $180 billion in just one day. This the largest amount of money any firm in history has lost in a day. Interestingly, even after losing that much money, Apple is still worth more than $2 trillion, an amount larger than almost every economy in the world.

Furthermore, although the iPhone maker lost that much money, its stock price has increased by 65% since January 2020 and 127% since the same time last year.

Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon dominate the stock market in an inexplicable way. Each of them outdoes the stock indexes for firms with large market capitalizations in some of the world’s richest countries. Apple is larger than the SMI Index of the UK, Alphabet is larger than the SMI Index of Switzerland, Microsoft is larger than that of Germany, and Amazon is larger than that of France. Together, these 5 companies are close to making up 25% of the S&P500, up from 11% they owned 2 years ago. This year, the tech stock market is worth a total of $9 trillion, higher than that of the entire stock market of Europe.

From left to right: Tim Cook (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon)

However, it’s important to remember that the growth of these tech firms and the tech bubble as a whole doesn’t reflect a recovery from the Great Recession. Please note that in the past month, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son spent billions of dollars buying tech stock options, meaning the stock market surged due to one billionaire’s bet instead of the companies’ strong fundamentals.

No matter how richer these tech firms are getting, it’s an undeniable truth that people are unemployed, facing food security in this global recession.