I wasn't exactly sure where to put this, as after a few hours of sourcing data, applying formulas and being anal about how the charts look, I can't for the life of me figure out what I was attempting to respond to by doing this compilation.
But look! Charts! And tech valuations are involved!
The title art is spot gold Oct. 1 of each year sourced here. All other data come from here. Inflation figures to determine relative values are bog-standard BLS CPI.
My starting point was, "OK, I know these companies are valued so high because each dollar keeps getting worth less," but I wanted some actual numbers, and with gold being on a tear of late, that seemed like a good point of comparison.
1984 was chosen as the baseline because that was the year Apple started trading publicly, with most of the other companies IPOing thereafter. I only went back and added Intel (hence it being missing from the chart titles) because it happened to start trading the same year, and I already had the formulas. What a shitshow that's been.
Anyway, y'all know how to read line graphs, so I'm not going to go into detail. If you have any questions on methodology, please feel free to ask.
Absent inflation, only Apple. Microsoft and Nvidia would ever have been trillion-dollar companies.
And in terms of value against gold, Tech Stocks At All-Time Highs looks pretty damn anemic.
Did you just invent the Hot Air Index?
Meh, I just like banging numbers together and making graphics of the results if a topic catches my interest. If we set the baseline for inflation at 1965, no company has ever hit $500 billion (I chose '65 because that's the year the U.S. stopped using silver in coinage).
Also, this is a wildly inappropriate use case for logarithmic scaling, so why not give that a try?
Well done! These numbers have been thoroughly banged.
I suggest you apply for a job in . . . politics.