Apple leads the race to be the first $1 trillion company, but new data shows it's anyone's game

On Tuesday, Microsoft's market cap surpassed Google parent company Alphabet's for the first time in three years, as the two tech giants continue on in the unofficial race to a market capitalization of $1 trillion.

Neither Microsoft nor Alphabet experienced an uptick in share price to contribute to this change. On the contrary, both companies saw decreases driven by fears regarding Italy's political and debt crisis. Alphabet's share price just took a larger hit than Microsoft's, putting its new $742 billion market cap in fourth place, while Microsoft settled into third.

As this chart from Statista shows, the four companies closest to the $1 trillion mark have grown tremendously since May 2009. The other two companies in the race - and the only two with larger market caps - are Apple and Amazon: The former has been relatively volatile but has taken the lead since 2010, while the latter has grown quickly and continuously in the last decade, having been in dead last as recently as May 2017.

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Tuesday's events and the historical evidence depicted in this chart go to show that this could be anyone's race.

Jenny Cheng/Business Insider

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