So today Apple closed at $665.15 a share, which apparently pushes their market cap up around $623 billion and makes them, officially, the most valuable company in the history of publicly traded companies. Bigger than Microsoft ever was, even adjusted for inflation, beating the record MSFT set back in December 1999 at the peak of dot-com mania. I had to read that twice. Microsoft in 1999 was basically the only company anyone thought could run the world. Now it's a phone-and-tablet company (fine, and computers, and a little bit of everything else) that's worth more than that.
I don't really have anything clever to say about the number itself. Big number, new record, everyone on my Twitter feed is doing the same napkin math about what $623 billion could buy (a small country's GDP, roughly, someone said Greece's entire economy twice over, I didn't fact check that and I'm not going to). What I keep thinking about instead is the other stock chart sitting right next to it in my head, which is Facebook's.
Facebook IPO'd back in May at $38 a share and it has been an ugly slide pretty much since. Last week, when the first big lockup period expired and a few hundred million more insider shares became sellable, the stock dropped to under $20. Under twenty bucks, on a stock that priced at thirty-eight. That's not a correction, thats basically half the company evaporating on paper in three months. And there's another lockup expiration coming in a few weeks that everyone I know who follows this stuff says will do the same thing again, because there's just more shares than there is demand right now.
I bring this up not because I think its some grand lesson about tech valuations (though it kind of is) but because I actually know someone at Facebook, a guy I went to a conference with two years ago, and he mentioned offhand a couple months back that a decent chunk of his compensation was in stock that vests over four years. Do that math. He's not going to say it out loud but I bet a bunch of people over there are quietly recalculating their finances this month. Meanwhile the guy sitting two desks from him at some other company that happened to IPO at the right time five years ago is fine. Timing is such a dumb, unfair variable in how any of this shakes out.
Here's my actual opinion, since I'm supposed to have one and not just narrate two stock charts at you: I think Facebook's IPO was priced by bankers who wanted to extract maximum money on day one rather than leave room for the stock to grow, and I think that decision is going to follow the company around for a couple years. Whereas Apple just keeps doing the boring thing, which is selling a lot of iPhones and iPads at healthy margins, quarter after quarter, without a single "pivot" or "reinvention" story attached to it. It's not exciting. Nobody writes a hot take about "Apple's execution strategy" because the strategy is make good hardware, sell a ton of it, repeat. Turns out that's worth more than any amount of user growth if the user growth doesn't come with a way to make money off it yet, which is still Facebook's whole problem. They've got 950-something million users and still haven't fully cracked how to make mobile ads work, and mobile is where everyone is actually spending their time now.
Unrelated tangent because it's my blog and I can: I spent forty minutes this afternoon trying to get my mom's new printer to talk to her wifi and eventually gave up and just ran a cable across her kitchen floor with tape over it so nobody trips. 2012 and we still can't make printers work right. Some tech company is worth $623 billion and printer setup is somehow still the same nightmare it was in 2004.
Anyway. Watching two of the biggest tech companies alive right now move in completely opposite directions on the same afternoon is a pretty good reminder that "big tech company" doesn't mean much on its own. Doesn't tell you if it's a good stock, doesn't tell you if it's a good place to work, doesn't tell you anything except that a lot of people are paying attention to it. Which, fine, I guess I'm one of them, or I wouldn't have spent an hour writing this instead of doing literally anything else tonight.