Sensationalistic headlines are nothing new, but coverage of one of the world’s most beloved firms over the last 24 hours or so has lacked a certain sense of proportion, not to mention accuracy.

By now anyone reading this has seen all the headlines about Apple supposedly taking the trophy as “biggest company ever.” The headlines from some of the world’s leading news outlets were unambiguous:

“Apple becomes biggest company in US history”
“Apple Now Biggest-Ever US Company”
“Apple Biggest Company Ever”

On and on they went; in fact, a Google News search for “Apple” and “biggest” yields a whopping 831 articles. Case closed, right? Apple rules the day.

Well, no. All these headlines ignore basic concepts about the value of money, mainly that it varies from year to year and decade to decade. You don’t hear a lot about inflation these days – it hasn’t really reared its ugly head since the 1980s – but it’s always been there, in the background, steadily eroding the value of the US dollar, albeit at such a slow rate that it’s not really noticeable except over the long-term, with the hype around Apple’s market cap being a perfect case in point.

I hate to break it to all the Apple lovers out there (and I would count myself among them, to a degree), but adjusted for inflation, Microsoft at its peak in 1999 was worth a cool $850 Billion.

To get that big from this point, Apple would have to add the market cap of… Google! Or, it could add the equivalent of two Amazons and then some (hey, it only took Jeff Bezos 18 years to grow his company to a $108B market cap; how hard could it be?)

Perhaps, though, the bigger story was overlooked amidst all the hype: it’s quite telling that the two biggest public firms of all time are in tech. Automobiles, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etc. are nowhere to be found at these heights; American tech firms, specifically software and hardware, in that order (not internet, mind you) are the new Top Guns. This speaks both to the incredible, world-changing rise of IT and, well, to the triumph of what used to be called nerds.

Thanks for reading, and please don’t hesitate to get in direct touch with me with any comments: bill@gothamcomm.com.

Bill Douglass

Afterword: Who will police the (journalistic) police? Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review reported on this phenomenon yesterday, scolding the press for inaccurate headlines and reporting. However, he took the argument over a bridge too far, asserting that IBM’s market cap in 1967, adjusted for inflation, would have been $1.3 trillion. Sadly, this is no more true than the mistaken headlines he set out to expose; the true figure is roughly $192 billion; a stone’s throw from Procter & Gamble – nothing to sneeze at – but hardly a record (he has since corrected the error).