Hacker News Reader

Comment by HaHa31 | Hacker News Reader

No. It is the first PUBLICALY TRADED company on the US STOCK MARKET to be valued at $1T. There have been many companies that have broken that point in inflation-adjusted and NON-inflation-adjusted valuations. Three big ones are the Dutch East India company, the most valuable company in history, Standard Oil, the most valuable US company ever, and Saudi Aramco, the current, most valuable company. I've seen to many articles claiming this today, so I rage wrote this on mobile.

See article for numbers: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...

View on HN

I have found the calculations for these historic companies to be dubious. They mostly calculate the worth of a company in relation to some historical GDP figure and apply that percentage on a modern GDP figure.

Think about it, how can the Dutch East Indies company be worth $7 trillion dollars when the Netherlands today has a GDP of only $900 Billion, which is after centuries of economic growth.

The Dutch East Indies company may have been comparably more powerful in relation to its time though.

The VOC basically owned the entirety of trade in SEA. It's not hard to imagine a valuation of 7 trillion when they had a monopoly of an entire continent's worth of trade (spices!) for two centuries.

Let's put it this way. According to Maddison,

https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...

The entire world's GDP in 1700 was $371 Billion (1990 International Dollars). That would mean the VOC's value then was ~10x the global GDP, which I find hard to believe.

Or if that doesn't convince you, consider the world population in 1700 was 700 million people. That would mean the Dutch Indies Company's value per person is $10,000!

10,000! is quite a large number, to be fair.

Kidding aside, I agree: I'm also quite dubious of this article's claim on the East India company being worth as much as was computed.

I'd say more interesting is the Dutch East India company sort of portrays what life would be like if companies became their own govts.

I'm not as familiar with the VOC as maybe I should be, but the British East India Company actually was the government of India from 1757 to 1858, when the British state took over. Until 1858, the territory of the EIC was administered by a Board of Directors who were responsible to shareholders, not to Parliament.

VOC also functioned as a govt of sorts, establishing colonies in Indonesia and SE Asia etc and having a private army that fought for territorial purposes.

Saudi Aramco is not even afloat yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com