Apple Briefly Becomes The Most Valuable Company on the Planet

I'm very happy to hear that Apple has reached — albeit for a very short period of the time at the moment —the top-most company in the World.

Yesterday, on MacRumors by Jordan Golson on 8/9/11

Apple, Inc. was, several times today, the most valuable public company in the world as measured by market capitalization. Apple's market cap briefly passed ExxonMobil today, just after 1PM, reaching $341.55 billion in valuation.

ExxonMobil was valued at $341.42 billion. Both stocks fluctuated throughout the day, but ExxonMobil closed the day at a higher valuation.

And today, on Bloomberg

(2011-08-10) — Apple and Exxon Mobil will vie for the title of world’s most valuable company again today, letting investors decide whether high-tech growth prospects are a match for the oil industry’s gushing profits.

Apple passed Exxon for the first time yesterday, when its shares rose as much as 6.1 percent to $374.61 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, giving it a capitalization of $347.3 billion. After trading places with Apple several times, Exxon secured the top spot late in the session.

The showdown with Exxon follows Apple’s 14-year transformation from a personal-computer also-ran into a seller of everything from smartphones to digital music. Apple has already eclipsed Microsoft, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Intel, whose dominance of the technology industry in the 1990s helped nudge Apple to the fringes of the PC market.
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As a long time Apple customer (way back to the very first Macintosh computers) and investor (bought share while they were trading at $13 and haven't sold yet) and also a big admirer of Steve Jobs, few news items could make me happier than that.