Which company is biggest?
So, what is the biggest company in the world? There are many answers to that simple question, and no easy way to make a blanket statement.
Sure, Apple and Exxon are duking it out for the top spot in terms of market cap, but Exxon wipes the floor with Cupertino in nearly every other contest. The one instance where Apple comes out on top is the cash balance, where Exxon actually has more debt than cash on hand. But then the oil giant has a lot of hardware to show for the cash trade-off. Most pundits would say that Exxon is the larger company by far in every comparison that matters, particularly when you're thinking about who does or does not drive the American economy.
Likewise, Walmart will get a lot of votes for its headcount alone. Nobody else even comes close to Sam's people in terms of helping America's lower social strata put food on the table, both by selling it to them and by handing out the paychecks they need in order to buy it. The company spent $12.6 billion on building and maintaining its stores and distribution infrastructure over the last 12 months, making even more job opportunities for welders and architects, among others. That's more than half of Google's sales over the same period, and nearly enough to replace the physical assets of both Microsoft and Apple.
A couple of trends should be clear by now. Banking and oil extraction—yellow and black gold, if you will—are of paramount importance to our current financial, social, and all-around economic systems. Sending Microsoft or Google into bankruptcy might disrupt your personal life in a more direct way than losing Goldman Sachs or Barclays, but technology treats systemic damage as a fault and routes around it. Someone else would quickly step up to fill the gap, and our children would think of Microsoft Office or Google Search as boring history lessons. But cutting the legs out from under another major bank would reignite the hysteria of 2008, destroying many more jobs in the process.
Market caps are fun to talk about around the water cooler. Rising stock prices are what power your retirement portfolio, after all. But that metric doesn't tell the whole story, and some of the largest market caps in the world say very little about the underlying company's real-world importance.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are huge in some ways, but not so important in the grand scheme of things. Our political leaders probably have more reason to listen to demands or suggestions from HP and IBM, because they represent far more voting Americans than our Big Three do, while arguably creating more economic value. But boring blue-chips just aren't sexy.
And so the huge market caps continue to dominate the water-cooler gossip circuit. You can show off by telling your friends and coworkers that the cap is not the be-all and end-all metric for sizing up a company, and that both Walmart and PetroChina absolutely destroy Apple in most head-to-head comparisons.
Then run for cover, lest you get beaten about the head and neck with an iPad wielded in anger.
