Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976, in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. Wozniak had designed the Apple I — a bare circuit board with no keyboard, case, or display — and Jobs saw the commercial potential. Wayne, who co-signed the founding documents, sold his 10% stake back for $800 just twelve days later. That stake would eventually be worth over $400 billion.

After a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley — a man Jobs himself had recruited from Pepsi with the now-famous line "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" — Jobs was stripped of his duties and left Apple in September 1985. He founded NeXT and later acquired Pixar for $10 million.

By 1997, Apple was burning through cash at a catastrophic rate and was reportedly 90 days from insolvency. In a move that stunned the industry, Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million — and brought Steve Jobs back. At Macworld that year, Bill Gates appeared on screen via satellite to announce Microsoft's $150 million investment in Apple. The crowd booed. But the cheque cleared.

On October 23, 2001, Jobs unveiled the iPod — "1,000 songs in your pocket." The music industry laughed. Then it panicked. The iPod, combined with the iTunes Store in 2003, destroyed the established music business model and gave Apple a direct relationship with hundreds of millions of consumers for the first time.

On January 9, 2007, Jobs announced that Apple was reinventing the phone. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly dismissed it: "There's no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." By 2023, the iPhone had generated over $1 trillion in cumulative revenue.

On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation. It has since crossed $3 trillion, a figure larger than the GDP of the United Kingdom.