Google parent Alphabet is now a $1 trillion company

Google’s parent company Alphabet ($GOOG) is now the fourth US company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion. It hit the number just before markets closed on Thursday, ending the day’s trading at $1,451.70 per share, up 0.87 percent.
 
Google CEO Sundar Pichai took over as CEO of Alphabet in December, after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquished control of Alphabet. It’s been a bumpy couple of years at the company that included allegations of sexual misconduct by executives and a 20,000-person Google Walkout employee protest.
 
Alphabet is slated to report fourth-quarter earnings on February 3rd, and Wall Street analysts are expecting it to report revenue of $46.9 billion, a year-over-year uptick of almost 20 percent.
 
Apple was the first US company to hit a $1 trillion cap in 2018, followed later that year by Amazon (which has since dropped below that figure), and Microsoft hit the $1 trillion mark in April 2019. The first company ever to hit a $1 trillion market cap (briefly) was PetroChina in 2007. And late last year, Saudi Aramco became the first $2 trillion company shortly after its debut on the Riyadh stock exchange in December.
 
Of course, a trillion-dollar valuation doesn’t tell the complete story of the overall economic health of a company, and isn’t used in any meaningful way by investors; it’s mostly a cool-looking vanity metric. The trillion-dollar companies were still among the most-profitable companies in the world last year according to Fortune, however, with Saudi Aramco at the top of the list, Apple second, and Alphabet 7th.
 
The next company expected to hit the $1 trillion market cap is Facebook, which, as of the closing bell Thursday, was at about $620 billion.

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