Microsoft neck and neck with Apple in fight to be world’s most valuable company

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Microsoft briefly usurped Apple to become the world’s biggest company by market value on Thursday, as the boom in artificial intelligence brought a new twist to the decades-long rivalry between the two Big Tech groups.

The software company’s shares climbed around 1 per cent in early trading on Thursday to take its market value to $2.87tn, just ahead of the iPhone maker, whose shares fell by almost 1 per cent.

By midday in New York, Apple had retaken the top spot as the broader market turned lower. At the close of trading in New York, Apple remained ahead at $2.89tn compared to Microsoft’s $2.86tn.

Investors’ excitement about the new wave of generative AI has fuelled a rally in the shares of Microsoft, which is the biggest backer of OpenAI, the maker of the popular AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT.

Apple has largely been left out of the AI fervour that has propelled Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s largest backer and cloud hosting provider as well as a pioneer in deploying AI chatbots across its search and workplace products.

At the same time, concerns about weaker iPhone sales — particularly in China — have weighed on Apple’s stock in the first few days of 2024, prompting a series of Wall Street analyst downgrades.

Apple and Microsoft have been rivals since the 1980s, when the company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak accused Bill Gates’ Windows maker of stealing the “look and feel” of its Macintosh computer software. Apple lost a high-profile copyright lawsuit targeting Windows in the early 1990s, clearing the way for Microsoft to dominate the PC market for decades.

But driven by the success of the iPhone, Apple’s market value finally overtook Microsoft in 2010, a position it retained for several years as Windows struggled with the transition to mobile computing.

Microsoft briefly rallied above Apple during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020…