America’s Most Valuable Company in Each Year (1995-2025)

Marcus Lu
2025-05-01 08:10:00
www.visualcapitalist.com

See this visualization first on the Voronoi app.

America’s Most Valuable Company in Each Year (1995-2025)

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Key Takeaways

Apple has been America’s most valuable company in almost every year since 2012 (based on Q1 market cap)
This chart also shows how stock valuations have ballooned over the past decade

While industrial giants like General Electric were once the most valuable companies by market capitalization, they’ve since been overtaken by tech-driven firms like Apple and Microsoft.

This transition reflects the economy’s pivot from manufacturing and energy toward software, data, and digital infrastructure. In recent years, investor enthusiasm for AI has driven valuations to historic highs, with trillion-dollar companies becoming a new normal.

In this graphic, we highlight America’s most valuable company in each year since 1995, based on Q1 market cap. Numbers are not adjusted for inflation.

Data & Discussion

The data we used to create this graphic was sourced from the American Business History Center.

Year	Company	Market Cap (as of Q1, $M)
1995	General Electric	93,322
1996	General Electric	126,523
1997	General Electric	169,388
1998	General Electric	260,147
1999	Microsoft	418,579
2000	Microsoft	492,462
2001	General Electric	407,054
2002	General Electric	401,499
2003	Microsoft	266,037
2004	General Electric	329,240
2005	ExxonMobil	392,636
2006	ExxonMobil	372,792
2007	ExxonMobil	425,795
2008	ExxonMobil	455,929
2009	ExxonMobil	345,815
2010	ExxonMobil	314,154
2011	ExxonMobil	411,638
2012	Apple	568,615
2013	Apple	415,683
2014	Apple	479,069
2015	Apple	724,773
2016	Apple	604,304
2017	Apple	753,718
2018	Apple	851,318
2019	Microsoft	904,861
2020	Microsoft	1,199,550
2021	Apple	2,050,666
2022	Apple	2,849,538
2023	Apple	2,609,039
2024	Microsoft	3,126,133
2025	Apple	3,337,000

Apple and Microsoft Trade Places at the Top

Apple and Microsoft have dominated their competition for many years, frequently swapping places as the biggest company in the United States.

Apple’s ascent is fueled by its ecosystem of consumer electronics and services, particularly the iPhone. Microsoft, on the other hand, owes its valuation to its commanding share of the enterprise software (e.g. Office 365) and cloud computing sectors.

Both companies are developing artificial intelligence and have been working on integrating it into their respective offerings.

Nvidia’s Brief Moment at #1

Nvidia briefly disrupted Apple and Microsoft’s duopoly when it became America’s most valuable company on two occasions in 2024 (June and October).

The company’s massive boom is the result of its GPUs being critical for AI data-center expansion, and a belief that AI-driven technologies will rapidly reshape the world’s industries.

The reason Nvidia hasn’t been featured in this graphic is because it is based on March 31 valuations.

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