Apple becomes first U.S. company to hit $3 trillion market cap

Apple hit a market cap of $3 trillion on Monday, becoming the first U.S. company to do so after "tripling in valuation in under four years," CNBC reports. The company reportedly dropped below the mark shortly thereafter.

A $3 trillion valuation makes Apple "worth more than the value of all of the world's cryptocurrencies," or "roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Britain or India," per The New York Times. It's on the same level as about six JPMorgan Chases, or 30 General Electrics.

A pandemic-driven slew of sales and wide profit margins have afforded Apple a giant stockpile of cash, with which the company's bought back quite a bit of its own stock. In fact, over the past decade, Apple has purchased "$488 billion of its own shares, by far the most of any company," the Times writes, per analyst Howard Silverblatt. Such purchases boost a company's stock price and increase its valuation.

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Though the $3 trillion achievement is "mostly symbolic," it "represents investor recognition of Apple's success over the past few years," CNBC writes. The Steve Jobs-founded tech giant is the first publicly-traded company to ever be worth that much, according to CNN, and now accounts for almost 7 percent of the total value of the S&P 500, per the Times.

All this said, expect Apple's peers to likely catch up soon. Microsoft is worth about $2.5 trillion, while Google is just shy of a $2 trillion valuation. Amazon, meanwhile, is sitting pretty with a market cap of about $1.75 trillion, according to CNBC.