What Pandemic? The Big 5 US Tech Companies Are Worth More than Ever

Not that long ago, when the COVID-19 quarantine was just starting, we reported that the big tech companies that had previously crossed over into being worth over $1 trillion (on paper, at least) were seeing a precipitous fall in their market value. It was looking bad for Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft at the time.

Now, a mere four months later, a new report from ForexSchoolOnline, shows there was never any need for you to worry. Those companies, plus Facebook (the other member of the top-five US tech companies, a.k.a. the Frightful Five, that control pretty much all of our digital lives) have bounced back nicely. The five together are worth a full $6.4 trillion as of this month. Apple alone is worth $1.68 trillion.

The chart above goes year by year and doesn't show the drop from the coronavirus, because why bother? The increase across the five companies from June 2019 to July 2020 is 53 percent; the dip was a blip. Apple and Amazon in particular had big increases. The lowest increase was Facebook, which still isn't worth $1 trillion (just a meager $690 billion).

All of that is impressive, but there are other more impressive and fun ways to measure how well a company is doing. Take Netflix, for instance. Usually we'd talk about its subscriber base, which is admittedly staggering, at 192.95 million paying subscribers as of Q2 2020. That's an increase of over 41 million since the same time last year.

But the folks at UK-based BuyShares, which compiled that info above, looked at a very different metric that shows how well Netflix is doing compared to all the other tech companies beyond the Frightful Five—examining the revenue per employee. (That's total revenue divided by number of employees, a simple to calculate metric if you've got the data.)

Netflix makes $2.34 million dollars per employee, $444,000 and change more per employee than Apple and well ahead of even Facebook and Alphabet. eBay is kind of surprisingly well represented in this list, at $812,030 earned per employee. And maybe the least surprising surprise of all is that Amazon is as the bottom of the top ten at only $351,531 US dollars per employee—probably because the company needs to have an army of staff to keep the warehouses and supermarkets running.

If Netflix shared even a pittance of that down to every single worker, those 8,600 employees (as of 2019) would be pretty rich, a nice position for a company that started with 30 people rending discs by mail back in 1997. But I'd bet it would prefer a valuation over a trillion bucks. (As of today, Netflix market cap is worth $213 billion.)

Let's throw in another fun Netflix graphic while we're at it. How big is the Netflix library of videos that's generating all that revenue per employee? Reviews.org has the details.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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