Apple (AAPL) may soon become the first company to reach a stock market valuation of $3 trillion.

To put the number into context:

  • Three trillion pounds is about equal to the weight of all the apples (fruit, that is) produced in the United States this year--times 300.
  • Three trillion iPhone 13s have enough surface area to cover the U.S. nearly 200 times.
  • Three trillion pennies can bridge the average distance between Earth and Mars 49 times when stacked on top of each other.
  • Three trillion U.S. bills lined up could reach the sun 3 times over.
  • It would take 373,599 years for the average human to breathe 3 trillion times.

Apple's stock has been on an upward climb for the past decade. In August 2012, it became the largest company--by market capitalization--in both the U.S. and the entire world. Market cap is the price of a stock multiplied by its total number of shares outstanding. Apple's current price of $177 puts it at a market cap of $2.9 trillion. If its price rises just $9 per share, it will be the first company to ever reach $3 trillion territory.

However, Apple's stock faces some headwinds, as Morningstar sector strategist Abhinav Davuluri outlines in bull and bear cases for the company here.

But for now, Apple's road to $3 trillion comes as it has far outperformed the rest of the stock market for years.

Apple is currently the largest company in the world, and it has kept its spot among the five largest U.S. companies for the past 12 years. In previous years, Apple and the rest of the fast-growing FAANG stocks (Facebook/Meta (FB), Apple, Amazon.com (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Google/Alphabet (GOOG)) have made a disproportionately high impact on the rest of the market, though 2021 saw the trend begin to fizzle. And Tesla's (TSLA) market influence has grown as the company's market cap increase

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Comparisons with fruit production and trips to Mars aside, Apple's size is massive even when measured against global stock markets. Apple's current market cap is greater than the market caps of entire countries. All public companies that operate in Canada, for example, added up to a total market cap of $2.64 trillion as of year-end 2020, $230 billion less than Apple.

China's onshore market is the second-largest stock market in the world--worth nearly $13 trillion. Apple's market cap is worth nearly a fourth of that.

Apple's current market cap is equal to 13.7% of the U.S.' total 2020 gross domestic product.

How Dominant Is Apple Within the U.S. Market?

Apple makes up almost 21% of all U.S.-domiciled technology companies' total market capitalization. The company's worth is larger than the entire U.S. real estate, energy, utilities, and basic-materials sectors.

Within the Morningstar US Market Index, starting with the smallest of the 1,602 companies in the benchmark, it would take 695 companies combined to rival Apple in size.