Alphabet became the fourth U.S. company to join the US$1 trillion market-cap club in January 2020.
Alphabet’s Class A shares briefly carried the parent company above US$1 trillion on January 16, 2020. It followed Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft into the group of U.S. companies whose publicly traded equity value had reached that level.
Alphabet was created in 2015 as the parent company of Google and a collection of other businesses and projects. Google’s advertising systems, including Search and YouTube, remained the principal sources of revenue, while cloud computing and hardware added further businesses.
The milestone is sometimes mistakenly attributed simply to Google. Google is Alphabet’s largest subsidiary, but Alphabet is the listed parent company whose shares determine the relevant market capitalization.