The most valuable company went from $90B to nearly $5T. Who owns the difference?

In 1985 the most valuable company in America was IBM, worth about $91 billion. Today the most valuable is Nvidia, worth close to $5 trillion. That’s more than 50 times bigger, for the single company sitting at the top. The value at the top of the market exploded. But the question I keep coming back to isn’t how big it got. It’s who ended up owning it, and why the answer is so few people.

When two people start a business and one ends up with everything while the other, who did real work, ends up with nothing, that’s the story of the whole economy in miniature.

Zoom out to the top of the market and you see the same pattern at enormous scale. The companies at the top are worth more than any businesses in history, and ownership of them is concentrated in a startlingly small number of founders, early employees, and the funds that backed them. Most people who helped build the modern economy own none of it.

That’s worth sitting with. Not because concentration at the very top is a scandal in itself, but because the mechanism that produced it is the same one that plays out in every small company deciding who gets a piece.

How the top of the market changed

Line up the biggest American companies in the mid-1980s against the biggest today, and it’s not the same game with bigger numbers. It’s a different game.

Back then, the top of the list was IBM at about $91 billion, followed by Exxon at around $40 billion, then General Electric, General Motors, and Philip Morris. Industrial giants, oil, hardware. Companies built over generations, owned broadly through pension funds, retail investors, and decades of employees who’d accumulated stock a paycheck at a time. Put the whole top ten together and you were looking at somewhere in the range of $300 to $350 billion (the top ten came to about $229 billion in 1980 and roughly $323 billion by 1989, and 1985 sits between).

Today the top is Nvidia and Apple, each worth close to $5 trillion, trading the number-one spot back and forth, with Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon close behind. Software, chips, platforms. Companies that went from a garage or a dorm room to trillions of dollars inside a couple of decades, and are still substantially owned by the people who started them and the investors who got in early. That same top ten is now worth somewhere in the mid-$20-trillions.

	Top ten, 1985	Top ten, today
Largest company	IBM, ~$91 billion	Nvidia, ~$4.9 trillion
Combined value	~$300–350 billion	~$25 trillion
Dominant sector	Oil, industrials, hardware	Software, chips, platforms
Typical ownership	Broadly held, institutional	Founder-led, concentrated
Time to build	Generations	Years to a couple of decades

That’s roughly a 75-fold jump in the combined value at the top, and even adjusted for inflation it’s around a 25-fold jump. IBM’s $91 billion in 1985 is about $280 billion in today’s money; Nvidia alone is worth more than seventeen times that. Value at the top didn’t just grow. It moved toward the people who owned equity early, and away from almost everyone who didn’t.

And it piled up in fewer companies than ever. The ten largest companies now make up around 42% of the entire S&P 500’s value, a record concentration that tops even the dot-com peak, when the top ten were about 29%.

Why the ownership concentrated

There’s a version of this story that’s purely about technology, and it’s true as far as it goes. Software scales in a way an oil refinery never could. One engineer can build something a billion people use. Winner-take-most dynamics pull enormous value toward a handful of platforms.

But a quieter part of the story is about ownership structure, not technology.

Companies that win now tend to be built fast, by small teams, holding a lot of equity. When a business goes from an idea to a trillion dollars in twenty years, whoever owned shares at the start captures almost all of that upside. Everyone who joined later on a salary, or who never joined at all, captured a paycheck at best.

This is the mechanism I keep coming back to: jobs create income, but equity creates wealth. A salary, even a great one, is linear. Ownership compounds. When the biggest value creation in history runs through companies where ownership sits with a few founders and funds, the gap between owners and earners doesn’t hold steady. It widens.

Owning a piece of one of these companies turned out to be worth more than almost any salary could ever be. That’s the whole story of the last forty years in a sentence.

And employees are getting less of it, not more

Here’s what makes the concentration self-reinforcing: as equity became the single most valuable thing to hold, the share of it going to ordinary employees shrank.

Between 2022 and 2023, employee equity grants dropped by about 26% and never recovered. Even as the market rebounded and salaries climbed, equity packages stayed flat. Workers are getting a thinner slice of the most valuable currency in the economy than they were a few years ago.

So the trend runs in exactly the wrong direction. Ownership is where the wealth is, and ownership keeps getting more concentrated, not less.

A short history of who gets to own things

This isn’t really a story about billionaires

It’s tempting to read all this as something that happens in the stratosphere and doesn’t touch the rest of us. I don’t think that’s the right frame.

Concentration at the top of the S&P is made of millions of small ownership decisions, most of them invisible. Who gets equity. How much. Whether contribution is rewarded or ignored. Whether the person who built the thing owns a piece of it.

Most of those decisions get made carelessly, with a handshake and a round number, by people who’ve never thought hard about what they’re actually deciding. A first engineer becomes a line item instead of a co-founder. An early team collects wages while the upside pools in two or three cap-table rows. None of it looks like the S&P 500. All of it is the same pattern.

Which is the part I find hopeful, honestly. If concentration is built from small decisions, then broad ownership can be too. Every split that gets tied to contribution instead of guessed at up front is a small vote in the other direction.

Frequently asked questions

How much are the biggest US companies worth?

The single largest, Nvidia, is worth close to $5 trillion, with Apple neck-and-neck for the top spot. The five most valuable US companies together exceed $20 trillion, and the top ten are worth somewhere in the mid-$20-trillions. For contrast, in 1985 the largest company, IBM, was worth about $91 billion, and the entire top ten came to roughly $300 to $350 billion. That’s a jump of around 75x in nominal dollars, or about 25x after adjusting for inflation. Exact totals move daily with the market, but the scale of the shift is the point.

How concentrated is the stock market today?

Very, by historical standards. The ten largest companies now account for roughly 42% of the entire S&P 500’s total value, the highest concentration on record, surpassing the previous peak of about 29% during the dot-com bubble. A handful of founder-led tech companies now carry a huge share of the whole market.

Why did company value concentrate in tech?

Software and platform businesses scale in ways older industries couldn’t. A single product can reach billions of users at near-zero marginal cost, and winner-take-most dynamics push enormous value toward a few dominant platforms. Combined with founder-led ownership structures, that concentrated both the value and its ownership.

Why does this matter for a small business or startup?

Because the same pattern that concentrated value at the top plays out in every ownership decision, at every scale. When a company decides who gets equity and how much, it’s deciding whether ownership stays concentrated or spreads to the people who build. Those small decisions, multiplied across the economy, are what the big trend is made of. See why more people should own a piece of what they build.

Is employee equity increasing or decreasing?

Decreasing, as a share of ownership. Even as company values reached record highs, employee equity grants dropped about 26% between 2022 and 2023 and have stayed flat since, while salaries recovered. The most valuable asset in the economy is being shared less broadly than it was a few years ago.

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