The most valuable company in the world is, once again, Apple. The company’s stock closed at $336.91 on Monday, July 27, lifting its market capitalization to roughly $4.94 trillion and carrying it back past Nvidia at the top of the global rankings, according to MacRumors. The shares are up about 22.5% since late June — a remarkable five-week run for a company this size, adding close to a trillion dollars of value in barely a month.
The two Silicon Valley giants have been trading the crown all month. Apple first overtook Nvidia in intraday trading earlier in July, then ceded the top spot, and has now reclaimed it again, as 9to5Mac reports. The next milestone is obvious: the $5 trillion market cap threshold, which Nvidia was the first company in history to cross. Apple’s intraday high has already touched approximately $4.944 trillion, leaving it within about one good trading day of the mark.
One caveat worth knowing before you quote the number at anyone: market capitalization is calculated from outstanding shares, and Apple buys back its own stock aggressively and continuously. That makes any headline market-cap figure an approximation rather than a precise reading — MacRumors notes the ~$4.94 trillion estimate carries exactly that fuzziness.
A rally that shrugged off price hikes
What makes the run notable is what it climbed over. Apple recently pushed through unprecedented price increases on Macs, iPads and other hardware, driven by the ongoing global RAM shortage that has inflated memory costs across the industry. The stock briefly traded down on that news — investors generally dislike watching a consumer hardware company test its pricing power mid-cycle — but it more than recovered within a week of trading.
The market’s verdict, at least for now, is that Apple’s pricing power is real. Customers keep buying at the higher prices, margins hold, and the memory-cost squeeze that might have dented earnings instead became evidence of the company’s ability to pass costs through. Whether that holds through the fall hardware cycle, when iPhone prices are widely expected to rise as well, is the next test.
A record set during a handover
The symbolism of the moment is hard to miss: Apple is closing in on $5 trillion in the final weeks of Tim Cook’s tenure as chief executive. The company announced its CEO transition earlier this year, with hardware engineering chief John Ternus set to take over and August marking Cook’s last month in the role. Cook is not leaving the company — he stays on as executive chairman of the board — but the near-$5 trillion valuation now stands as a closing statistic on his run as CEO.
If the stock crosses the threshold before the handover completes, the $5 trillion mark will land inside Cook’s final weeks in the job — a tidy bookend for a tenure that spanned the entire modern era of Apple’s growth. Either way, Ternus inherits a company at the very top of the market, along with the harder job of keeping it there through a memory-cost squeeze that shows no sign of easing.
The wider scoreboard
The Apple-Nvidia duel is also a snapshot of where the market’s money currently sits. The top of the global market-capitalization table has become a two-way race between the company selling the picks and shovels of the AI buildout and the company selling the devices in everyone’s pocket. Nvidia got to $5 trillion first on the strength of data-center demand; Apple is getting there on hardware pricing and buybacks. Two very different engines, same altitude.
For Apple, the more interesting question is the one the RAM shortage keeps asking: how much pricing headroom does the hardware business really have left? The last five weeks suggest the market believes the answer is “more than you think.”
