> I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median It's not really related to compensation even if those companies pay we

> I thought FAANG was originally shorthand for companies that could pay far above median It's not really related to compensation even if those companies pay well. The short history is that FANG was coined by Jim Cramer (he has a TV show where he talks about stocks) around 7 or 8 years ago to mean Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google. He just thought those were good stocks to invest in at the time but the term caught on and started being used in different contexts, Apple was added as the second A to make FAANG and now it's roughly just a synonym for a big tech company depending on the context. This also explains why Netflix is represented in the acronym but much bigger companies like Microsoft aren't.