Market Milestones
Some dates every investor should know: the first company worth a trillion dollars, the day the Dow fell more than a fifth in a single session, the IPOs that rewrote the rules. This exhibit collects the landmark moments — the records and the ruptures — that define how the market got here.
8 artifacts · Market records and IPO details from exchange data and public filings. Each artifact links to its own sourced page.
Apple became the first U.S. public company worth $1 trillion in 2018, then the first worth $3 trillion a few years later — milestones that once seemed impossible for any company.
In 2024 NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable public company in the world, overtaking Apple and Microsoft — driven almost entirely by demand for its AI chips.
Berkshire Hathaway has never split its Class A shares. A single Class A share now costs more than a house — Warren Buffett kept it that way to attract long-term owners, not traders.
On Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day, still its worst one-day percentage drop ever. No single piece of news fully explains it.
In the 2010 "Flash Crash," the U.S. stock market lost roughly a trillion dollars of value in minutes — then recovered most of it before the day was over.
Facebook’s 2012 IPO raised about $16 billion — one of the largest in tech history — but the stock fell by roughly half within months before recovering and going on to multiply many times over.
Google’s 2004 IPO was unusual: it used a Dutch auction to let ordinary investors bid directly, deliberately bypassing Wall Street’s usual practice of allocating shares to insiders.
Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 a share, raising about $54 million. The company that Wall Street doubted for years is now worth well over a trillion dollars.