Interesting chart on the Visual Capitalist of milestones for US companies, prompted by Apple's recent trillion USD market valuation, "through a period of over 200 years of U.S. market history. It was inspired by this interesting post by Global Financial Data, which is worth reading in its own right."
Interesting indeed, for example, there I learnt that before 1900, the London & Northwestern Railway was the largest railroad and the largest company in the world (before that the Bank of England held the honour).
The Visual Capitalist post also mentions that Apple is not in fact the first company globally to ever hit the one trillion USD landmark: the "feat was achieved momentarily by PetroChina in 2007, after a successful debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange that same year." Momentarily because after the one-day tripling of stock value it subsequently collapsed by nearly 80%.
What I find more interesting is the drop by more than a third in the number of companies: from 7912 in 1995 down to 5186 this year. In fact the total number of companies peaked at 9,850 in 1999; so a drop of very nearly 50% in the first 18 years of this century.
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