Number Crunch

The 5 Biggest Tech Companies Are Now Worth More than Japan’s GDP

In 2020, Big Tech grew to Big-and-a-Half

$7.5 trillion: That’s the combined market capitalization of the five Big Tech companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook — at the end of 2020, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal.

At the end of 2019, these firms’ combined market cap was $4.9 trillion, which means they gained 52% in value in a single year. (If you’re struggling to imagine how much money that is, consider that the United States’ nominal GDP in 2020 was around $21 trillion. Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has a GDP of about $5 trillion.)

Big Tech’s boom was not driven purely by stock market mania. Revenues at all five companies surged through the pandemic, with Amazon’s 44% revenue growth last year leading the charge. The companies have also expanded their workforces and their real estate footprints during a time of surging unemployment and major upheaval in commercial real estate. It’s a reminder that technology companies have not merely been immune to the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, but thrived during it. None of the pandemic winners we’ve seen or written about so far, from Domino’s to Roomba to Zoom, has won the pandemic quite as definitively as Big Tech.

It’s Big Tech’s world now. We just live in it.

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