Apple vs Alphabet Inc. (Google)

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 $700 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. Both decisions would prove transformative.

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 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." He was wrong. The iPhone became the most profitable consumer product in history, generating over $1 trillion in cumulative revenue and establishing Apple as the defining technology company of the 21st century.

On August 2, 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalisation. It then crossed $2 trillion in 2020, $3 trillion in 2022, and by mid-2026 had reached $4.36 trillion — a figure larger than the GDP of Germany. The Services segment, which includes the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music, now generates over $100 billion annually and commands margins that rival the most profitable software companies on earth.

After years of criticism for lagging behind in AI, Apple launched Apple Intelligence across its device ecosystem in 2025 and 2026, partnering with Google to integrate Gemini directly into Siri. The strategy — on-device AI with a privacy-first model, rather than massive cloud infrastructure buildout — proved controversial but financially vindicated. Q1 fiscal 2026 revenue hit a record $143.8 billion, up 16% year-over-year, with iPhone sales surging 23%. Apple had shifted 25% of iPhone production to India to reduce geopolitical risk, and analysts at Wedbush were calling the upcoming iPhone 18 cycle a generational buying opportunity.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. By 1996 they had built a search engine called BackRub — named after its method of analysing backlinks. It ran on Stanford's servers and consumed so much bandwidth that the university repeatedly asked them to take it down.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Google a cheque for $100,000 in August 1998 after a brief demo in a Stanford parking lot. There was one problem: Google Inc. didn't exist yet. Page and Brin had to incorporate the company before they could cash it.

In 1999, Page and Brin tried to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. Bell turned them down — the search was too good, it would send users away from Excite's portal too quickly. Bell later called it the worst decision of his career. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Google became worth more than $2 trillion.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google declared an internal "code red." The company that had invented the transformer architecture — the technology that made ChatGPT possible — had published its research openly and was now scrambling to compete with the system it had inadvertently enabled. Google rushed Bard to market. It made a factual error in its first public demo. The stock dropped $100 billion in a single day. Google's search share fell from 80% to under 70% as users migrated to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.

In September 2025, a U.S. federal court ruled that Google had illegally maintained its monopoly in search, ordering the company to end exclusive distribution contracts with Apple, device manufacturers, and browser makers. The Apple deal alone had been worth approximately $20 billion per year to keep Google as the default search engine on Safari. The court stopped short of forcing Google to sell Chrome or Android, but the ruling was the most consequential antitrust action against a technology company since the Microsoft case of 1998. Google announced it would appeal. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.