Apple's Market Cap Reaches $700 Billion Milestone

Another day, another story about Apple breaking records for its market value. But this time, it's really, really impressive. Today the Cupertino company's market capitalization shot over $700 billion for the first time before slipping a bit in after-hours trading. The current share price stands at $119.65 at the time of writing, which translates into around $837 if Apple's stock split from earlier in the year is taken out of the equation.

Only a few days ago, Apple reached a market capitalization of $663.2 billion, leading Bloomberg to point out that the iPhone maker was now worth more than the entire Russian stock market. That's an increase of roughly $40 billion within the span of only two weeks. The company has seen an almost 60 percent boost in the valuation of its stock over the last year alone, and the stock has jumped up by 24 percent in the weeks since the company's October 16 iPhone reveal event.

That's a big turn of events considering that so much of 2013 was filled with stories of investors fretting that Apple wasn't doing enough to introduce new categories and that new CEO Tim Cook perhaps wasn't the man that should have succeeded Steve Jobs. (In fact, Apple stock has now doubled in value since Cook took the helm.) Apple stock tumbled deeply after reaching a previous market cap of $658 billion in 2012, but the record-breaking sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have pushed it far past that.

And with the holidays just around the corner, Apple's market cap could rise further still. Apple Pay and the buzz surrounding the upcoming Apple Watch have also attracted the attention of investors, who should find their stockings stuffed with a lot of a green if Apple maintains its current pace.

The Wall Street Journal has compiled a list of 17 facts that put Apple's $700 billion market capitalization in perspective, and several of them reveal just how far the Cupertino company's come in just a few years. During the dot-com boom, for instance, Microsoft's value was a full 26 times larger than Apple; today, Tim Cook's company is 1.78 percent larger than its Redmond rival.

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