Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) recently reclaimed the mantle as the world’s largest company by market cap, at least for a short while. However, when looking five years out, I think three stocks will be worth more: Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG).
Apple is a great company, with one of the best compounding businesses on the planet. However, the stock currently trades at a very high valuation given its growth prospects, which likely limits its upside over the next five years.
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As such, let’s see why I think these three growth stocks will surpass it by the end of 2031.
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1. SpaceX
With a market cap of about $2 trillion, SpaceX is the smallest company on this list, and its stock will need to deliver some pretty strong returns to overtake Apple, which has a $5 trillion valuation. However, I think a likely merger with Tesla (market cap of $1.5 billion) in the next few years will quickly close the gap.
Barring a merger with Tesla, though, I think SpaceX has the opportunity to grow into a company larger than Apple by 2031, even as a stand-alone company. CEO Elon Musk recently projected that the company will reach $500 billion to $1 trillion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2027, led by its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure business. With the company achieving a one-year payback on its chip and networking investments and planning to add a massive 10 to 20 gigawatts of computing power next year, the path to reaching that number is actually quite clear.
Throw in Starship, Starlink, and its Cursor AI coding business, and SpaceX looks poised to see massive revenue growth over the next five years. It looks as if SpaceX could actually crush Musk’s $1 trillion 2030 revenue prediction, but even placing a 10-times price-to-sales (P/S) multiple on that would take SpaceX to being a $10 trillion company.
2. Nvidia
With a $5 trillion market cap, Nvidia would only have to outperform Apple over the next five years to be the larger company. Meanwhile, the chipmaker is growing much faster and is trading at less than half the valuation of Apple on a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) basis, at only 13 times fiscal 2028 (ending January 2028) analyst estimates.
Nvidia looks poised to remain one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI build-out. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) are still the main chips used to train AI models, while it continues to take a larger slice of spending through its networking, central processing units (CPUs), language processing units (LPUs) for inference, and open-weight Nemotron models.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is also set to ride SpaceX’s huge AI spending, as the space company ramps up its computing capacity. With SpaceX consolidating on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture and Nvidia getting roughly $40 billion per gigawatt of power, the company still has huge growth ahead.
3. Alphabet
With a market cap near $4 trillion, Alphabet has some catching up to do to overtake Apple in the next five years, but I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t. The company is the most complete AI player and has built-in advantages in distribution and monetization.
Alphabet’s biggest edge is that it has taken a wide lead in custom AI chips with its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This gives it several advantages, starting with its cloud computing unit, where, with its own chips, it gets a payback in about a year, half the time it takes when using Nvidia GPUs. Meanwhile, Anthropic is set to become a major TPU customer, adding another revenue stream for the company.
On top of that, its TPUs allow it to train its AI models and run inference more cheaply than competitors. With Google Search as the gateway to the internet and given Alphabet’s ownership of Chrome and Android, as well as a search revenue-sharing deal with Apple, the company also has a major distribution advantage that helps drive usage and growth. Its global ad network also allows it to better monetize the consumer market than upstarts.
As the most profitable company in the world entering this year, just ahead of Nvidia, and with strong growth ahead, Alphabet looks poised to be a bigger company than Apple by 2031.
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Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
