The Trillion Dollar Club

At Comparisun, we’re here to help you find the best POS system, the best credit card processing company or the best payroll service, but we’re also known to take the time to launch studies into the wider business sector every month.

Microsoft recently became the latest company to join Wall Street’s exclusive ‘Trillion Dollar Club’, after reaching a market capitalization of a trillion dollars in late April.

They join both Apple and Amazon, who have both seen great growth in recent years (although Amazon has slightly dropped below the $1 trillion threshold again at the moment).

And while no individuals are yet to amass a fortune of a trillion dollars, Jeff Bezos is the first to hit the $100 billion mark and could be the world’s first trillionaire sooner than you’d think.

We’ve analysed historical valuations of some of the world’s richest companies and individuals in an attempt to predict when they’ll join the Trillion Dollar Club.

Which companies will be the first to join the Trillion Dollar Club?

Google look set to join their fellow tech giants Apple and Microsoft in hitting the $1 trillion mark within the next year (as will Amazon, who have hit the threshold in the past but have briefly dropped out again).

The numbers suggest that they’ll soon be followed by the last of the Big Four tech companies, Facebook, whose market cap currently sits at around $665bn, but has seen an average growth of 24% over the last five years, which, if continued, could see them join the club in 2022.

Next in line would be Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathway conglomerate and financial services provider Visa who could both hit $1 trillion valuations by 2023.

Predicting the world’s first trillionaires

Despite losing an estimated $38 billion as part of his recent divorce, Jeff Bezos is still by far the world’s richest person and his net worth has grown by 34% on average over the last five years, which could potentially see him become the world’s first trillionaire as early as 2026, at which point he’ll be aged 62.

While he might have to wait a couple of extra years, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg could gain trillionaire status at a younger age than Bezos, as his current rate growth would see him worth $1 trillion aged 51.

Of the 25 individuals we analysed, only eleven realistically have a chance of becoming a trillionaire during their lifetime, based on their recent rate of wealth growth.

Methodology

We analysed the market capitalization of the 25 highest valued companies on the New York Stock Exchange according to Macrotrends, as well as the net worth of the richest 25 people in the world, according to Forbes, in both cases taking the last five years of data (as of September 16th). 

For both, we then calculated the average yearly % growth over the last five years and applied this rate of growth for each future year to try and predict how the value will change.

Notes:

– For Google, Berkshire Hathaway and Royal Dutch Shell, who have each split their stocks into more than one group of shares, we took the one with the highest value as of September 16th.

– For Alibaba and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, market cap data was taken from YCharts.

– When looking at the world’s richest people, we excluded David Koch, who passed away after the Forbes list was published, as well as Françoise Bettencourt Meyers and Beate Heister & Karl Albrecht Jr. who each inherited their fortunes less than five years ago and therefore there was not enough data to calculate an average rate of growth.