Apple “most-valuable public company,” kinda

pple has, by one measure at least, become the most-valuable publicly-traded company of all time. If you completely ignore inflation, that is. Which you cannot.

Many sites around the InterWebs are today reporting that Apple has broken the record to become the most-valuable public company that has ever existed. The claim is led by MacRumors, which states that with 937,406,000 outstanding shares at the time of its last quarterly filing, and with the share price hitting $660.73 today, Apple has a market capitalization figure of $619.17 billion.

This beats the previous record, held by Apple’s arch-rival Microsoft since 1999. At that time Microsoft had 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares when its share price hit $119.94. That resulted in a market capitalization of $618.89 billion. Et voila, Apple is now the new record holder and most-valuable company trading publicly.

Unfortunately someone forgot to add inflation into the mix, and doing so changes everything. Adjusting for inflation means Microsoft’s record from 1999 would be the equivalent of $842.5 billion in today’s money. So Apple is still more than $200 billion away from wresting the title away from Steve Ballmer and co.

This does throw up a number of different points of interest however. Firstly, I don’t remember anyone waxing lyrical about Microsoft and its potential to keep on growing in 1999 the way some people are doing about Apple now. If anything Microsoft’s fall from grace, which has seen the company lose three quarters of its market cap, should act as a warning against Apple and its supporters becoming arrogant.

Perhaps it’s more to do with the turnaround in Apple’s fortunes that has occurred more than anything. After all, it has gone from near-bankruptcy to where it is today under the guidance of the dear-departed Steve Jobs. And with a loan from Bill Gates to help set the ball rolling.

Lastly, it should be noted that there are several privately-traded companies much richer than Apple. That still doesn’t take anything away from this achievement, it’s just not quite as big an achievement as some headlines would have you believe.