For the first time ever, the five most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization this week were all U.S. technology companies: Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Even at the height of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, the tech industry never swept the market's top positions, Bloomberg reports. Since then, investor dollars have slowly trickled away from long-time multinational superpowers like Exxon and GE in favor of supposedly forward-looking tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Apple has maintained its spot in the top five since 2011.
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