• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 23, 2020

Alphabet, Google’s parent, became the latest company to reach $1 trillion in market capitalization, which refers to the total value of a firm's shares of stock purchased by shareholders. The company stepped into the club alongside Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. 

HowMuch.net did a bit of number crunching and found that Apple -- one of the first companies worldwide to reach a $1 trillion market cap -- leads in terms of profits, making $435,000 per employee. The company has about 104,000 workers, according to the respective breakdown by HowMuch.net of the four that reached $1 trillion in market capitalization.

Google comes in at No. 2 with $269,000 per employee on $30.7 billion in profit and 114,000 employees.

Amazon’s market cap sits at $925 billion, with profits of $10.1 billion. Amazon’s profit per employee sits at about $15,557 due to its large, international workforce, according to HowMuch.net, which also claims it has the most expensive stock price of the four companies at $1,864.72 per share as of January 21, 2020.

HowMuch.net lists Apple’s market cap at $1.397, Microsoft at $1.275, Alphabet at $1.021 and Amazon at $0.925.

The data on the market cap and employees for each company comes from Yahoo Finance as of January 21, 2020. Information about the company’s profits and revenue comes from the Fortune 500 list as of 2019.

Each visual representation of the metrics on HowMuch.net’s blog is represented by a circle with the corresponding number listed inside. To get a high-level overview of how the companies compare to each other, the larger circles represent higher numbers and the smaller circles represent lower numbers.

On Thursday, Amazon also announced it would donate $1 million to Washington STEM to support their work in making it more accessible, and $1 million to Pacific Science Center to develop a new computer science curriculum and expand outreach to 200,000 students in low-income communities.