“Alphabet joins the $1trn club” the headline read. It is a very exclusive club—in fact, only three other companies in the world belong to it. The Saudi oil monopoly, Aramco, is the only one that is not American. Microsoft and Apple are the other two. They both have a market value well in excess of one trillion dollars. A fourth monster U.S. corporation, Amazon, will probably join this elite group sometime in 2020.
To put the one-trillion-dollar figure into perspective, consider that as of 2017 only 17 countries in the world had a GNP of a trillion US$ or more. In July 2017, CNBC announced that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—“the richest man in the world”—was the odds-on favorite to become the first trillionaire.