Noting that Apple just passed the THREE TRILLION Market Cap this past week - I remember all the hoopla when It passed the ONE TRILLION Market Cap threshold - but I hadn’t realised that it was as recent as 2018 - just slightly less than 5 years ago. Seems like just ‘yesterday’.

Tripling Market cap in three years is impressive enough. Doing that when you are the largest Market Cap in the world …

On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple (AAPL) made history by becoming the world’s first publicly traded company to achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion.

Somehow I also didn’t know that ‘the return’ was as close to Cook’s starting date as this;

• September 1997 - Steve Jobs returns to Apple
• March, 1998 - Tim Cook joins Apple as senior vice president for worldwide operations

But I do remember some older history, because I am old enough now and close enough then to recall ‘the noise’ at the time.

October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

(Who’s Michael Dell again?)

March 1997 : 🔗 Ellison still wants Apple

This a headline after Steve’s close friend Larry J Ellison suggested to Steve that he just buys Apple outright - award Steve 25% of the stock - and ‘get Apple back to its rightful position.

Steve talked him out of it.

I am going to guess (we will never know) that had Larry bought Apple - it would not have become the company it is today.

Date wise, this time also marked the end of LJE’s baby sitter’s (literally) rise through the ranks of Oracle - his last position running the division responsible for putting Oracle on the Mac (pause for a moment while you contemplate that idea). Marc Benioff then went on to start Salesforce. I wonder if he would have rejoined Apple had Larry bought the company?