About this chart race
In 2010 the most valuable company on earth was an oil producer. ExxonMobil ended that year at $364bn, ahead of PetroChina at $301bn and Apple at $297bn, with the miner BHP fourth and Microsoft fifth. Nvidia was worth less than $9bn and did not come close to the top ten.
Apple took the lead in 2012 and held it for most of the next decade, passing $1 trillion in 2019 and $2 trillion in 2020. Two companies interrupted that run. Microsoft finished 2018 in first place. Then Saudi Aramco listed in December 2019 and immediately became the world's most valuable company at $1.88 trillion, staying ahead of Apple into 2020 and finishing second again in 2022.
The last three years belong to artificial intelligence. Nvidia ranked tenth on this list in 2020. It passed $1 trillion in 2023, $3 trillion in 2024, and took first place in 2025 at $4.64 trillion. TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia's chips, climbed from $488bn to $2.19 trillion over the same period, and Broadcom went from $178bn to just under $2 trillion. The 2010 leaders went the other way: PetroChina and BHP are both worth less now than they were in 2010, before allowing for inflation.
Figures are end-of-year market capitalisation in US dollars, from companiesmarketcap.com. Meta's series begins at its May 2012 flotation and Saudi Aramco's at its December 2019 listing, because neither was a public company before those dates. ICBC is the one exception to the source: its figures come from the Financial Times Global 500, which match the bank's own reported market value, and it appears only in the years it was inside the global top ten. Fifteen companies are tracked here, chosen because each has held a top-ten position at some point since 2010, and the chart shows the top ten of them in every year.
This animated ranking shows how market capitalization changed across 15 series between 2010 and 2026. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2026, Nvidia leads with 5,273 USD billion.
Included in this race
Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, TSMC, Saudi Aramco, Broadcom, Meta (Facebook), Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, ExxonMobil, PetroChina, ICBC, BHP.
Source
Data from companiesmarketcap.com (ICBC: Financial Times Global 500). Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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