The display isn't necessarily based on the communication style of the leaders of these titans. Huang and Nadella, for example, tend toward a thoughtful and moderate discourse, and even the hyperbolic Musk was relatively restrained in his conversation with Larry Fink (BlackRock) on the main stage in Davos. But the flexing of muscles is evident in the arguments presented, in conjunction with the data.
Apple CEO Tim Cook earned $74.3 million in total compensation for fiscal year 2025. The tech giant hit a market cap of $4 trillion for the first time last year. Cook's pay package included salary, stock awards, bonuses, and other forms of compensation. Apple CEO Tim Cook's salary in 2025 was $3 million, but his total compensation, including stock awards and bonuses, dwarfed that amount.
Broadcom ( NASDAQ:AVGO) isn't a member of the Magnificent Seven, but it's now tussling with those same companies for the largest market cap. The AI chipmaker surpassed Tesla ( NASDAQ:TSLA) to become the 7th largest publicly traded corporation, and it's poised to move further up in the rankings. Meta Platforms ( NASDAQ:META) is an easy candidate since Broadcom briefly had a higher market cap than Facebook's parent company this year.
The stock market is quickly waking up to the fact that is the leading AI software company today. It has overtaken and is less than $200 billion away from overtaking as the world's second-largest company. Overtaking the AI hardware leader, will take a bit more work, as it has a $755 billion lead over Google. Fortuitously for Google, that number is a drop in the bucket these days for Wall Street.
Tesla has made CEO Elon Musk's new compensation package official, as it filed a Form 4 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday. The package officially gives Musk the opportunity to acquire over 423 million shares of Tesla stock ( NASDAQ: TSLA), dependent on his ability to achieve twelve performance-based tranches that will bring growth to the company and its shareholders.
And the stakes were high; if he didn't get that control, he threatened to leave. Shareholders simply could not, did not want to imagine Tesla without Elon. All of that money, power, and control increases for Musk if Tesla reaches milestones based on operations, adjusted profit, and market capitalization. Every tranche, if the goal is reached, will deliver 35.3 million shares to Musk. For instance, the first tranche milestone is a market capitalization of $2 trillion.
It took Warren Buffett nearly 60 years to build Berkshire Hathaway into a $1 trillion conglomerate. Eight AI companies have together gained quadruple that in market value in just over nine months. Whether you think AI stocks will keep booming or burst like the dot-com bubble, the growth of these companies has been unprecedented. Their year-to-date gains alone dwarf the total value of some of America's biggest and best-known companies.
One recent prompting session yielded this: As much as 28% of the benchmark MSCI World Index is now IT companies. "That's huge. Number two is banking and financial services, 10 percentage points lower," the CFO said. He also likes to ask Perplexity which companies have the largest 10 market caps in the world. "Nine of them are tech companies and Broadcom recently threw out Berkshire Hathaway," Asam said. "In 1980, it was just IBM. So software does eat the world."
Amazon's current market cap is $2.4 billion, compared to Apple's $3.4 trillion. That sounds like a massive difference, but it's worth noting that Amazon has consistently grown its revenue faster than its peers over the past three years, despite having higher sales numbers. The e-commerce specialist should maintain that momentum for several reasons. First, it remains a leader in the cloud computing market.
The United States has become a global powerhouse for billion-dollar companies, helping its stock market to far outvalue the world's leading economies due to its deep capital markets and regulatory support.
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