Apple Becomes Most Valuable Public Stock Ever

Apple today surpassed a record held by Microsoft since 1999 becoming the most valuable publicly traded stock ever, reports MacRumors.

Microsoft's market capitalization peaked on December 30, 1999, reaching an intraday high of $119.94 per share. With Microsoft having documented 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares as of October 31, 1999 in its quarterly earnings report, the company would have had a market capitalization of $618.89 billion on December 30.

Apple's most recent quarterly filing listed 937,406,000 outstanding shares as of July 13, 2012, and with the company's stock price hitting $660.73 today, its market capitalization reached $619.37 billion.


Notably, if you take inflation into account Microsoft's record is actually $842.5 billion so Apple still has a ways to go in order to beat that.

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