AAPL: Apple Stock on Cusp of Cracking $4 Trillion in Market Value After 39% Annual Gain

The epitome of enormous growth, Apple is the corporate enigma. With just a handful of products, it is aiming to crack $4 trillion. Can it do it before year-end?

• Apple stock AAPL is on the verge of making history… again. After the iPhone maker became the first company to cross $3 trillion in market value, it is slowly cruising toward the next milestone — $4 trillion. Shares of Apple added 0.3% on Thursday (in a boring and uneventful session) and are now just $80 billion shy of the absolute hulk of a milestone. What’s driving the steady yet explosive growth?
• A new frontier opened up for Apple this year after it finally adopted artificial intelligence and jammed it into the new iPhone 16. “We believe Apple is heading into a multiyear AI-driven iPhone upgrade cycle that is still being underestimated by the Street,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note earlier this month. This week, he revised his price target for the shares to $325. Will Apple become the only member of the $4 trillion club this year?
• Apple’s shares closed Thursday’s session at a record of $259.02 with a market cap of $3.92 trillion. For the company to crack $4 trillion, the shares must rise to $264.62 a piece. This year alone, Apple has added 39% to its market cap, or $921 billion. Fun fact: Apple’s market value is now bigger than the bottom 213 companies in the S&P 500 combined while Apple itself takes up about 8% of the broad-based index’s $50 trillion worth.