For a brief moment today, Amazon was the most valuable publicly traded U.S. company

The other day, Microsoft had a brief run as the most valuable publicly traded company in the states, ending Apple's long reign on top. This happened because Apple's shares have declined 20% as talk grew about cuts in 2018 iPhone production. Earlier today, a new front runner briefly emerged when Amazon surged to the top of the leaderboard. At that point, Amazon was valued at $865 billion versus the $864.8 market capitalization belonging to Apple.

As we write this, Apple has returned to its position as most valuable, with Amazon second and Microsoft third. Earlier this year, before the tech correction started, both Apple and Amazon each reached a valuation of one trillion dollars. Apple hit the target on August 2nd and peaked at $1.10 trillion. A little more than a month later, it was Amazon that joined the trillion dollar club.

Apple had first surpassed Microsoft in valuation back in 2010 when PC shipments struggled due to the explosion in smartphone (including iPhone) usage. Amazon started catching investor's eyes in a big way during 2015 when the company invented the smart speaker category. Even more importantly, as a key part of the Echo smart speaker, Amazon was introducing its virtual personal assistant Alexa at the same time.

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