In 1997, Apple was on verge of bankruptcy with a $1 billion loss. Now the iPhone giant makes $1 billion every 3 days

Leadership matters! A leader can make or break a company. In the late 90s, Apple was going through a difficult time and the company was bleeding cash. In 1997, Apple teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

The situation got so dire that the company was featured on the June 1997 cover of WIRED Magazine with Apple’s “six colors” logo, covered in barbed wire, and a one-word appeal to users: “Pray.”

Fast forward almost three decades later, the now-famous cover is back in the spotlight. Today, Twitter user Jon Erlichman shared a post about how Apple went from the verge of bankruptcy with a $1 billion loss to now making $1 billion every day.

“In 1997, Apple lost $1 billion. Today, it makes $1 billion every 3 days,” Erlichman tweeted.

The tweet even got the attention of Twitter CEO Elon Musk. “Leadership can make all the difference in the world,” Musk responded.

Leadership can make all the difference in the world

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2023

As you may recall, we covered Apple a year ago after the iPhone maker became the first US company to reach $3 trillion in market cap. In under just four years, Apple tripled its valuation.

To put this into perspective, Apple’s $3 trillion market cap is 75 percent of 2020 federal government revenue and about 15 percent of the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2020.

Three years ago, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to hit a market valuation of $1 trillion — an achievement that the tech giant reached on August 2, 2018. On August 19, 2021, Apple became the first publicly-traded company to hit a $2 trillion market valuation.

Meanwhile, Apple rose 2.5% on Monday to later close at $182.01, just shy of the $3 trillion mark. Although the historic milestone is mostly symbolic, it shows investors remain confident in the company’s direction and future growth.

Founded on April 1, 1976, by Steven Paul Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Gerald Wayne, the Cupertino, California-based Apple is an American multinational technology corporation that designs, manufactures, and markets mobile communication and media devices, personal computers, portable digital music players, and sells a variety of related software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications.

Apple is the world’s largest information technology company by revenue and the world’s second-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung. Apple was named the most admired company in the United States in 2008 and in the world from 2008 to 2012 by Fortune magazine.