Apple has become the first American company valued at over 1 trillion Dollars (that's $1,000 billion), a figure rivaled only by some state-owned Chinese banks that hold over a trillion Dollars in AUM (assets under management). Founded in 1976 in a garage with a few hundred Dollars in seed-capital, the trillion-Dollar Apple is now one of the world's leading tech companies dominating consumer electronics, computing, big-data, and content publishing, worldwide. Apple shares rose 2.09 percent Thursday, to close at $207.39, which raised the company's market value to $1.002 trillion. The first company worldwide to cross the trillion-Dollar mark was PetroChina, in 2007. The Chinese state-owned oil firm stayed above $1T for a brief period of time, before the 2008 Financial Crisis torched the world economy.