Apple hit $1 trillion. Now what?

Previous market leaders, such as Exxon and IBM, generated huge profits but eventually lost momentum and dominance as the world changed

An Apple store.
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"Apple has crossed a psychological threshold as much as a numerical one," said Brad Stone at Bloomberg Businessweek. Last week the company, already "the most valuable business in modern history," attained a market capitalization of $1 trillion, a remarkable number for the personal-computing upstart founded in a Silicon Valley garage by Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak in 1976. Twenty years later, Apple almost died: Businessweek's 1996 Apple cover had the words "The Fall of an American Icon" on an all-black field. That was the year Apple brought back Jobs. His homecoming presaged the introduction of the iMac, iPod, iPad, and the iPhone as Jobs and his lieutenants "parlayed their uncommon obsession with design and ease of use into a historic run." Today, under Jobs' successor, Tim Cook, Apple's valuation is in line with the total economic output of Indonesia, the world's 16th-largest economy; its annual revenue is about the same as the gross domestic product of Finland. This is a corporate scale so great that Apple could acquire any emerging competitor, and no government has the appetite to take it on.

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