This comes up a lot but it always misses one aspect of this. Microsoft has returned many many billions to shareholders and continues to do so with a quarterly d

This comes up a lot but it always misses one aspect of this. Microsoft has returned many many billions to shareholders and continues to do so with a quarterly dividend. When they started along this dividend path they made a large special dividend payment to shareholders. This makes these kinds of comparisons very difficult and of questionable meaning. One of the reasons companies like Apple don't want to pay out a dividend is that keeping the money in the bank drives up the stock price. A business with 1 dollar in sales is worth X. A business with 1 dollar in sales and 1 dollar in the bank is worth X + 1. This simple effect makes it easier for the stock to climb and options of executives to be more valuable. It does not necessarily make the business any better especially after a certain point when there's enough money to withstand downturns. This is why market caps are a not a good way to compare businesses. You can consider things like return on assets, net profit margins etc. and see if those feel like better measures of the quality of a business. After a certain market cap, I think it's more correct to look at a business as large or large enough rather than an important measure of something.