Paul Stenhouse: Microsoft becomes the second $4 trillion company, the further impact of tariffs on Apple

Microsoft becomes the second $4 trillion company   All fuelled by the increased revenue from the Cloud Computing business, which provides compute for AI services. This is a huge win for Microsoft – the company that was absolutely written off in the mid 2000s and was expected to go the way of Yahoo. Microsoft is still second place to Amazon Web Services in the Cloud category. Their CFO announced they'll spend $30 billion on its AI infrastructure investments in the next quarter.   Apple was the first US company to hit $1 trillion in 2018, first to hit $2 trillion in 2020, first to hit $3 trillion in 2022, so by that math, it should have hit $4 trillion in 2024, but Nvidia beat them. Nvidia only became a $1 trillion company in 2023 – two years ago!   For context, $4 trillion would be like giving all 5.3 million New Zealanders USD $750,000 (NZD $1.2 million).    Apple says Trump’s tariffs will cost it another $1 billion   That's on top of the $800 million the tech giant spent on tariffs during the June quarter. Quarterly revenue jumped 10% to $94 billion between April and June. Apple moved a chunk of iPhone production to India to avoid some of the China tariffs, but President Donald Trump is threatening 25% tariffs on Apple if it doesn't start producing more in the USA.      LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.