Alphabet becomes the fourth trillion dollar company

Investors were not scared by Alphabet's CEO and President stepping down at the end of 2019, as the company's market value has hit $1 trillion, according to a report by CNBC.

Alphabet is the fourth American company to hit the $1 trillion mark, following Apple, then Microsoft, and then Amazon. Amazon's current market cap stands at only around $931 billion, Apple is worth $1.38 trillion, and Microsoft checks in today at a cool $1.27 trillion. With a value of $632 billion, Facebook is largely seen as the next competitor to cross the $1 trillion line.

Five years ago, when Alphabet was created as an umbrella to cover Google and all of its projects, the market cap stood at less than half of what it does today. Chasing the big U.S. tech companies on the list of most valuable corporations are the Chinese Alibaba Group and Tencent. Consider the change from ten years ago when Apple and Microsoft shared the top corporation list with mostly oil companies. Exxon Mobil is worth even less today than it was then.

While we may think of Alphabet and Google for a number of cool innovations, especially the Android platform, the company still makes most of its money on search-based advertising, by far. This also means that the fortunes of the company are still tied to the advertising market. As the advertising market has been on an upswing recently, Google has prospered, but we may see Alphabet skip across this line in both directions before it settles.

Sundar Pichai is the new CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet