ONE BIG THINGExtremely, scarily expensive: The mundane secret of how Apple, at $5 trillion, became the most valuable company on the planet

Around midday on July 28, Apple stock jumped around 3% to achieve, for the first time, a market cap of $5 trillion, hitting a number that only one enterprise, Nvidia, had ever reached.

In doing so, Apple became something it seldom was before: extremely, even scarily, expensive.

The recent liftoff makes Apple by far the priciest member of the Mag 7, of course excluding Tesla. Its price-to-earnings ratio reached 41.2 on the “$5 trillion day,” between 37% and 145% above the figures for Nvidia (30.2), Amazon (27.7), Meta (21.6), and Alphabet (16.8).

How did the company achieve this? Buybacks. Apple depends heavily on share buybacks to raise its EPS. In fiscal 2024 and 2025 (ended September 30), it spent $185 billion in repurchases, equal to 92% of its GAAP net earnings.