Ranked: America’s Highest-Paid CEOs in 2025

How the Global Stock Market Boom Unfolded

Over the past 15 years, the balance of global equity market value has shifted substantially as some markets expanded much faster than others.

This visualization tracks equity market capitalization from 2011 to 2025, using World Federation of Exchanges figures published in SIFMA’s Capital Markets Fact Book.

Market capitalization measures the value of outstanding shares at prevailing prices; all figures are expressed in nominal U.S. dollars and are not adjusted for inflation.

The Changing Leaderboard of Equity Markets

The U.S. has pulled comfortably ahead, expanding from $15.6 trillion in 2011 to $68.9 trillion of market capitalization in 2025. Its share of the global total grew from less than a third to roughly 44%.

Below the leader, the order shifted. China’s equity market surpassed Japan’s in 2014 amid a surge in stock buying, while India overtook Japan in 2021. By 2025, China and the European Union were level at approximately $15.5 trillion each.

The table below lists the world’s largest equity markets in both 2011 and 2025.

The trend of a rising U.S. share of global equity markets reversed in 2025. While U.S. market capitalization continued to grow, its share of the global total fell from roughly 47% in 2024 to 44% in 2025 as markets elsewhere grew faster.

The U.S. nevertheless remains home to the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, the world’s two largest stock exchanges.

How Tech Giants Expanded America’s Lead

The rise of large technology companies helps explain the U.S. market’s growing weight. Businesses built around software, digital advertising, and cloud computing can serve customers worldwide, allowing their revenue to expand far beyond the U.S. economy.

More recently, artificial intelligence has added another source of investor enthusiasm. Advances in AI and subsequent investor interest have boosted valuations for a subset of technology firms. Expectations of future profits can lift share prices well before those profits arrive, with substantial effects on the broader market.

Specifically, the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks have accounted for most of the S&P 500’s total return in both 2024 and 2025. This group consists of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla.

The Gap Between Market Size and Economic Size

A stock market measures the value investors place on listed businesses rather than everything an economy produces. Private companies are absent, while listed multinationals can earn substantial revenue abroad.

China’s mid-2010s boom shows how financial conditions can reshape valuations. Heavy buying with borrowed money helped fuel the 2015 rally before prices reversed sharply that summer. Borrowing can amplify purchasing power on the way up and increase pressure to sell when prices fall.

The following table shows how the market capitalization of leading equity markets changed between 2011 and 2025.

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To explore the stocks that have powered U.S. market growth, check out The 10 Largest S&P 500 Stocks in 2025 on Voronoi.

How Much Profit Do the World’s Biggest Companies Keep?

The world’s biggest companies generate enormous revenues, but the share that ultimately becomes profit varies widely.

This graphic ranks the world’s 30 largest companies by how much profit they generate for every $100 in revenue, based on Fortune Global 500 data. Profits are after taxes, extraordinary credits or charges, accounting changes, and noncontrolling interests, but before preferred dividends.

Why Tech Keeps More of Every $100

Revenue measures how much money flows through a company, but not how much ultimately reaches the bottom line. Across the world’s largest companies, Big Tech stands apart in how much of that revenue becomes profit.

Profits rounded to the nearest 10 cents.

The gap is striking even among corporate giants. Microsoft generates $36.10 in profit for every $100 in revenue, compared with roughly $3 for Walmart and Costco. Enormous revenue does not necessarily translate into an equally large profit margin.

Much of the difference comes down to business models. Software and digital platforms can serve additional customers at relatively low incremental cost, while retailers, manufacturers, and energy companies must continually pay for inventory, labor, raw materials, logistics, or production.

AI Is Rewriting Big Tech’s Business Model

The margins shown above reflect today’s business models, but AI is making many of those models more capital-intensive. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Hyperscaler capital spending is on track to reach $785 billion in 2026 and rise to nearly $1 trillion in 2027.

Nvidia is a major beneficiary of this investment. As a dominant supplier of AI chips, it sits at the center of the infrastructure buildout, while its CUDA software ecosystem can make switching to rival chips more difficult for developers.

On the flipside, the scale of AI investment is raising capital costs across Big Tech. As infrastructure spending climbs, those costs could begin to reshape the margins that currently put many tech companies near the top of this ranking.

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To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the world’s largest companies outside the U.S.