Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google were the four leading global brands at the end of 2023, according to consulting firm Interbrand. They’re are also four of the world’s five most valuable companies.

The other is Nvidia, which for a time this week, surpassed Microsoft to become the largest company in the world by market cap.

But despite its $3.1 trillion valuation (it reached $3.3 trillion before a two-day slide), Nvidia doesn’t even crack the top 100 most iconic names on Interbrand’s most recent list, which is populated by such companies as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Disney and Netflix.

Nvidia’s historic rise in valuation — the stock has climbed almost ninefold since the end of 2022 — has been driven almost entirely by demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) that are at the heart of the boom in generative artificial intelligence and, more broadly, by the hype over AI. Nvidia has over 80% of the market for chips used to train and deploy AI software like ChatGPT. A handful of huge tech companies are the primary buyers of its chips.

The speed of Nvidia’s ascent and its relative lack of contact with consumers along the way combines to put the 31-year-old company’s brand recognition on Main Street far behind its allure on Wall Street. No. 100 on Interbrand’s list for 2023 is Japanese camera maker Canon, with Dutch brewer Heineken at No. 99.

“As a product company recently moving onto a global stage, Nvidia has not had time, nor has it dedicated resources, to change its role of brand and strengthen its brand to protect future revenue,” Greg Silverman, Interbrand’s global director of brand economics, said in an email. The risk for Nvidia, Silverman added, is that its “weak brand strength will limit how valuable it will be, despite its market cap heights.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.

Nvidia’s annual revenue growth has exceeded 200% in each of the past three quarters. For fiscal 2025, revenue is expected to almost double from a year earlier to over $120 billion, according to LSEG.

The company’s data center GPUs, which made up 85% of sales in the most recent quarter, are installed in massive facilities, and typically require a team of expensive data science and supercomputing experts to configure them to efficiently create AI software.

By contrast, Apple, ranked No. 1 by Interbrand, makes the vast majority of its money by selling iPhones and other devices to consumers across the globe. Microsoft, ranked second, is an enterprise sales giant, but is ubiquitously known for its Windows and Office software. Third-ranked Amazon strives to be consumers’ everything store, and No. 4 Google is, for many people, the front door to the internet.

Rounding out Interbrand’s top 10 are South Korean electronics giant Samsung, along with three car companies (Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW), Coca-Cola and Nike.

Further down the list, at No. 24, is Nvidia rival Intel, which is best known for making the processor at the heart of laptops and PCs and for its long-running “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Even Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company that builds servers, made the list at No. 91.

However, a competing survey shows that Nvidia’s brand value is catching up to that of its peers.

In a ranking of the 100 most valuable global brands published this month by Kantar BrandZ, Nvidia landed at No. 6, leaping 18 places from its prior survey. The brand’s overall valued jumped 178% in a year to an estimate of about $202 billion. Kantar surveys enterprise buyers to evaluate brands that primarily sell to other businesses to come up with a total estimate of brand value.

“Nvidia is pound for pound as relevant and meaningful to that B2B buyer that’s looking to make big, large purchases in-house for their company as Apple is to the consumer who’s buying an iPad or a Mac,” Marc Glovsky, senior brand strategist at Kantar, told CNBC.

And while Nvidia may not be a name known to your parents — or your kids — it does have resonance in a particular corner of the consumer world. Just ask your hard-core gaming buddy.

When Nvidia was founded in 1991, AI was a nascent field. The company’s primary focus was on designing chips that could draw digital triangles quickly, a basic capability that led to a huge expansion in 3D games.

For years, Nvidia, and its GeForce brand and green logo were well known to the type of people who tweaked their computers to run the most advanced games. Nvidia provides the chips for the Nintendo Switch console, which has shipped over 140 million units around the world.

Unlike Intel, Nvidia never put its name in front of consumers with flashy ad campaigns. And gaming is now just a nice side business for chipmaker. In the latest quarter, it accounted for $2.6 billion of revenue, or 10% of total sales, rising 18% year over year.

When it comes to Nvidia’s most important products, companies and institutions vying for its AI chips have to go through an extensive quoting and sales process, often through a computer-equipment company, like Dell or HPE. Those vendors sell complete systems, including memory, a central processor and other parts. Even experts who want to train AI models are more likely to rent Nvidia access through a cloud provider than build their own server clusters.

Still, Nvidia’s name recognition is rapidly increasing. Among retail investors, Nvidia has emerged as the most widely held stock, according to data collected and published last month by Vanda Research.

And while the name didn’t make Interbrand’s top 100 list for 2023, the firm’s data shows its brand awareness quadrupled in the past 12 months, which will help when it’s time for the next ranking, Silverman said.

Maybe by then people will know how to say its name, a topic that’d been the source of debate on obscure gaming forums. The company pronounces it en-VID-ia.

WATCH: The ‘Magnificent Seven’ should have another good earnings season

The entire value of the S&P 500 currently stands at $45.5 trillion, according to FactSet. Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed on Thursday that his company’s Optimus humanoid robots could eventually make the automaker worth more than half of that.

Musk, who characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic” at the 2024 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, said Tesla is embarking on not just a “new chapter” in its life, but is about to write an entirely “new book.” Optimus appears to be one of the main characters.

Tesla first revealed its plans to work on humanoid robots in 2021 at an AI Day event, trotting out a dancer in a unitard that looked like a sleek, androgynous robot.

In January, Tesla showed off Optimus robots folding laundry in a demo video that was immediately criticized by robotics engineers for being deceptive. The robots were not autonomous, but were rather being operated with humans at the controls.

At the shareholder event on Thursday, Musk didn’t divulge exactly what Optimus can do today. He suggested the robots some day will perform like R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. They could cook or clean for you, do factory work, or even teach your children, Musk suggested.

As for shareholder value, Musk said Optimus could be the catalyst for lifting Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion someday.

Speaking to a crowd consisting mostly of fawning fanboys in an auditorium at the Gigafactory, Musk promised Tesla would move into “limited production” of Optimus in 2025 and test out humanoid robots in its own factories next year.

The company, he predicted, will have “over 1,000, or a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla” in 2025.

This is all far-out stuff even for Musk, who is notorious for making ambitious promises to investors and customers that don’t pan out — from developing software that can turn an existing Tesla into a self-driving vehicle with an upload, to EV battery swapping stations.

Getting to a $25 trillion market cap would mean that Tesla would be worth about eight times Apple’s value today. The iPhone maker is currently the world’s biggest company by market cap, just ahead of Microsoft.

At Thursday’s close, Tesla was valued at about $580 billion, making it the 10th most valuable company in the S&P 500.

Musk didn’t provide a timeframe for reaching $25 trillion. He did say that autonomous vehicles could get the company to a market cap of $5 trillion to $7 trillion.

Musk said he agreed with numbers from long-time Tesla bull Cathie Wood, the CEO of ARK Invest. This week, ARK put a $2,600 price target on Tesla’s stock by 2029, betting on a commercial robotaxi business that the company has yet to enter.

Wood’s price target equals a market cap for Tesla of over $8 trillion.

Musk’s comments at the annual meeting followed the shareholder vote to reinstate the CEO’s $56 billion pay plan, five months after a Delaware court ordered the company to rescind the package. The crowd cheered when the proposal was read aloud, and when preliminary results were announced.

Taking the stage following the readout of the shareholder votes, Musk said, “I just want to start off by saying hot d—! I love you guys.”

Tesla shares have dropped 27% this year as the company reckons with a sales decline that’s tied in part to an aging lineup of electric vehicles and increased competition in China. The company has also implemented steep layoffs. Musk has encouraged investors to look past the current state of the business and more toward a future of autonomous driving, robots and artificial intelligence.

Among his boldest claims on Thursday was Musk’s declaration that Tesla had advanced so far in developing silicon that it’s surpassed Nvidia when it comes to inference, or the process that trained machine learning models use to draw conclusions from new data.

Nvidia shares have soared almost nine-fold since the end of 2022, driven by demand for its AI chips. The company is now worth about $3.2 trillion.

One concern swirling around Musk is his focus on Tesla given all of his other commitments. He owns and runs social media company X, is CEO of SpaceX, and founded The Boring Co. and Neuralink. He launched another startup, xAI, in March last year and the company recently raised $6 billion in venture funding.

Musk was asked by a shareholder at the meeting how important he is, personally, to the future of Tesla.

“I’m a helpful accelerant to that future,” he said, emphasizing his role in innovation.

He said that, when it comes to humanoid robots, other companies, including tech startups, are going after the market. Competitors include Boston Dynamics, Agility, Neura and Apptronik.

“What really matters is, can we be much faster than everyone else and our product be done a few years before theirs and be better,” Musk said.

WATCH: Tesla shareholders approve Musk’s $56 billion pay package

For years, Apple avoided using the acronym AI when talking about its products. Not anymore.

The boom in generative artificial intelligence, spawned in late 2022 by OpenAI, has been the biggest story in the tech industry of late, lifting chipmaker Nvidia to a $3 trillion market cap and causing a major shifting of priorities at Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which are all racing to add the technology into their core services.

Investors and customers now want to see what the iPhone maker has in store.

New AI features are coming at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which takes place on Monday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California. Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased “big plans,” a change of approach for a company that doesn’t like to talk about products before they’re released.

WWDC isn’t typically a major investor attraction. On the first day, the company announces annual updates to its iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and MacOS software in what’s usually a two-hour videotaped keynote launch event emceed by Cook. This year, the presentation will be screened at Apple’s headquarters. App developers then get a week of parties and virtual workshops where they learn about the new Apple software.

Apple fans get a preview of the software coming to iPhones. Developers can get to work updating their apps. New hardware products, if they appear at all, are not the showcase.

But this year, everyone will be listening for the most hyped acronym in tech.

With more than 1 billion iPhones in use, Wall Street wants to hear what AI features are going to make the iPhone more competitive against Android rivals and how the company can justify its investment in developing its own chips.

Investors have rewarded companies that show a clear AI strategy and vision. Nvidia, the primary maker of AI processors, has seen its stock price triple in the past year. Microsoft, which is aggressively incorporating OpenAI into its products, is up 28% over the past year. Apple is only up 9% over that same period, and has seen the other two companies surpass it in market cap.

“This is the most important event for Cook and Cupertino in over a decade,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, told CNBC. “The AI strategy is the missing piece in the growth puzzle for Apple and this event needs to be a showstopper and not a shrug-the-shoulders event.”

Taking the stage will be executives including software chief Craig Federighi, who will likely address the real-life uses of Apple’s AI, whether it should be run locally or in massive cloud clusters and what should be built into the operating system versus distributed in an app.

Privacy is also a key issue, and attendees will likely want to know how Apple can deploy the data-hungry technology without compromising user privacy, a centerpiece of the company’s marketing for over half a decade.

“At WWDC, we expect Apple to unveil its long-term vision around its implementation of generative AI throughout its diverse ecosystem of personal devices,” wrote Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, in a note this week. “We believe that the impact of generative AI to Apple’s business is one of the most profound in all of technology, and unlike much of the innovation in AI that’s impacting the developer or enterprise, Apple has a clear opportunity to reach billions of consumer devices with generative AI functionality.”

Last month, OpenAI revealed a voice mode for its AI software called ChatGPT-4o.

In a short demo, OpenAI researchers held an iPhone and spoke directly to the bot inside the ChatGPT app, which was able to do impressions, speak fluidly and even sing. The conversation was snappy, the bot gave advice and the voice sounded like a human. Further demos at the live event showed the bot singing, teaching trigonometry, translating and telling jokes.

Apple users and pundits immediately understood that OpenAI had demoed a preview of what Apple’s Siri could be in the future. Apple’s voice assistant debuted in 2011 and since has gained a reputation for not being useful. It’s rigid, only able to answer a small proportion of well-defined queries, partially because it’s based on older machine learning techniques.

Apple could team up with OpenAI to upgrade Siri next week. It’s been discussing licensing chatbot technology from other companies, too, including Google and Cohere, according to a report from The New York Times.

Apple declined to comment on an OpenAI partnership.

One possibility is that Apple’s new Siri won’t compete directly with fully featured chatbots, but will improve its current features, and toss off queries that can only be answered by a chatbot to a partner. It’s close to how Apple’s Spotlight search and Siri work now. Apple’s system tries to answer the question, but if it can’t, it turns to Google. That agreement is part of a deal worth $18 billion per year to Apple.

Apple might also shy away from a full-throated embrace of an OpenAI partnership or chatbot. One reason is that a malfunctioning chatbot could generate embarrassing headlines, and could undermine the company’s emphasis on user privacy and personal control of user data.

“Data security will be a key advantage for the company and we expect them to spend time talking about their privacy efforts during the WWDC as well,” Citi analyst Atif Malik said in a recent note.

OpenAI’s technology is based on web scraping, and ChatGPT user interactions are used to improve the model itself, a technique that could violate some of Apple’s privacy principles.

Large language models like OpenAI’s still have problems with inaccuracies or “hallucinations,” like when Google’s search AI said last month that President Barack Obama was the first Muslim president. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently found himself in the middle of a thorny societal debate about deepfakes and deception when he denied accusations from actress Scarlett Johansson that OpenAI’s voice mode had ripped off her voice. It’s the kind of conflict that Apple executives prefer to avoid.

Outside of Apple, AI has become reliant on big server farms using powerful Nvidia processors paired with terabytes of memory to crunch numbers.

Apple, by contrast, wants its AI features to run on iPhones, and iPads, and Macs, which operate on battery power. Cook has highlighted Apple’s own chips as superior for running AI models.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and we believe we have advantages that will differentiate us in this new era, including Apple’s unique combination of seamless hardware, software, and services integration, groundbreaking Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural engines, and our unwavering focus on privacy,” Cook told investors in May on an earnings call.

Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote in a note this month that, “We expect Apple’s presentation at WWDC keynote to be focused on the features and the on-device capabilities as well as the GenAI models being run on-device to enable those features.”

In April, Apple published research about AI models it calls “efficient language models” that would be able to run on a phone. Microsoft is also publishing research on the same concept. One of Apple’s “OpenELM” models has 1.1 billion parameters, or weights — far smaller than OpenAI’s 2020 GPT-3 model which has 175 billion parameters, and smaller even than the 70 billion parameters in one version of Meta’s Llama, which is one of the most widely used language models.

In the paper, Apple’s researchers benchmarked the model on a MacBook Pro laptop running Apple’s M2 Max chip, showing that these efficient models don’t necessarily need to connect to the cloud. That can improve response speed, and provide a layer of privacy, because sensitive questions could be answered on the device itself, rather than being sent back to Apple servers.

Some of the features built into Apple’s software could include providing users a summary of their missed text messages, image generation for new emojis, code completing in the company’s development software Xcode, or drafting email responses, according to Bloomberg.

Apple could also decide to load up its M2 Ultra chips in its data centers to process AI queries that need more horsepower, Bloomberg reported.

WWDC won’t strictly be about AI.

The company has more than 2.2 billion devices in use, and customers want improved software and new apps.

One potential upgrade could be Apple’s adoption of RCS, an improvement to the older system of text messaging known as SMS. Apple’s messages app diverts texts between iPhones to its own iMessage system, which displays conversations as blue bubbles. When an iPhone texts an Android phone, the bubble is green. Many features such as typing notifications aren’t available.

Google led development of RCS, adding encryption and other features to text messaging. Late last year Apple confirmed that it would add support for RCS alongside iMessage. The debut of iOS 18 would be the logical time to show its work.

The conference will also be the first anniversary of Apple’s reveal of the Vision Pro, its virtual and augmented reality headset, which was released in the U.S. in February. Apple could announce its expansion to more countries, including China and the U.K.

Apple said in its WWDC announcement that the Vision Pro would be in the spotlight. Vision Pro is currently on the first version of its operating system, and core features, such as its Persona videoconferencing simulation, are still in beta.

For users with a Vision Pro, Apple will offer some of its virtual sessions at the event in a 3D environment.

Microsoft‘s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google.

One area where Microsoft has a distinct advantage over others in the AI race is in its ownership of Windows, which gives the company a massive PC userbase.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will mark the year when AI will become the “first-class part of every PC.”

The company already offers its Copilot chatbot assistant in the Bing search engine and, for a fee, in Office productivity software. Now, PC users will get to hear more about how AI will be embedded in Windows and what they can do with it on new AI PCs.

Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Prior to Google’s event, OpenAI announced its new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor, and its Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s models..

For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold: keeping a prominent position in AI and bolstering PC sales, which have been in the doldrums for the past two years following an upgrade cycle during the pandemic.

In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote that he remains “bullish on the PC market recovery” due to commentary from customers and recent “upward revisions to notebook” original design manufacturer (ODM) builds.

Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments increased 0.9% in the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs was “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last month.

New AI tools from Microsoft could offer another reason for enterprise and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, whether they’re made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.

“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization it should, we believe, drive up usage of Windows, stickiness of Windows, customers to higher priced more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue to Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings.

While Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. That could include, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.

The key hardware addition to an AI PC is what’s called a neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are designed to specifically handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, they’ve been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.

Microsoft hasn’t said what AI PCs will be capable of yet without an internet connection. But Google’s PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn’t have a full computer processor, can summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend text message responses and more using its Gemini Nano AI.

Computers with Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with a dedicated NPU are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip with an NPU will be available in the middle of this year, while AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro is expected sometime during the quarter.

Intel says the chips allow for things like “real-time language translation, automation inferencing, and enhanced gaming environments.”

Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next round of Macs sometime this year.

Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips powered by Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “the Next Generation of Windows on Arm,” which will likely cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how that’s different from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.

Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13%, according to recent data from Canalys.

In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner designs and other benefits like cellular connections. But earlier versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they offered consumers. In 2018, for example, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip couldn’t run most Windows applications. 

Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has an FAQ page dedicated to computers running on ARM hardware. 

Microsoft will also be hosting sessions like “AI Everywhere” covering how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices that run in the cloud. 

An “Azure AI Studio” session will look at how developers can create their own Copilot chatbots, which may be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. Imagine, for example, a company creating a chatbot that can help employees select health benefits.

WATCH: Investing in the future of AI

Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett was still using a flip phone as late as 2020, four years after his investment behemoth started amassing a huge stake in the company that makes iPhones.

“I don’t understand the phone at all, but I do understand consumer behavior,” Buffett said last year at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.

He’s emerged in recent years as one of Apple’s top evangelists.

At the end of 2023, Berkshire owned about 6% of Apple, a stake worth $174 billion at the time, or about 40% of the conglomerate’s total value. That’s about four times bigger than Berkshire’s second-biggest public stock holding, Bank of America, and makes the company the No. 2 Apple shareholder, behind only Vanguard.

As Berkshire investors and fanboys of the 93-year-old Buffett flood Omaha this weekend for the 2024 annual meeting, Apple is likely to be a hot topic of discussion. The tech giant on Thursday reported a 10% year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, leading to a 4% drop in total revenue. But the stock had its best day since late 2022 on Friday due largely to a $110 billion stock buyback plan and increased margins that result from a growing services business.

The bet on Apple and CEO Tim Cook has paid off handsomely for Buffett, who said in 2022 that the cost of Berkshire’s Apple stake was only $31 billion. His firm is up almost 620% on its investment since the start of 2016.

Despite being a self-described Luddite, Buffett has long had a coherent non-techie thesis for loving Apple. He’s seen how devoted Apple users are to their devices, and has viewed the iPhone as an extraordinary product that could keep its customers spending inside the Apple ecosystem. He calls it a moat, one of his favorite words for describing his preferred businesses.

“Apple has a position with consumers that they’re paying $1,500 or whatever it may be for a phone, and these same people pay $35,000 for a second car,” Buffett said at last year’s meeting. “And if they had to give up their second car or give up their iPhone, they’d give up their second car!”

Data is in his favor. According to a study from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Apple benefits from 94% customer loyalty, meaning that nine out of 10 current U.S. iPhone owners choose another iPhone when buying a new device.

Buffett also has hailed Apple’s ability to return billions of dollars to shareholders annually through share buybacks and dividends, a capital allocation strategy for which the billionaire investor may have himself to thank. When the Apple CEO was asked in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post who he turns to for advice at pivotal moments, Cook offered up a story about his relationship with Buffett.

“When I was going through [the question of] what should we do on returning cash to shareholders, I thought who could really give us great advice here? Who wouldn’t have a bias?” Cook said. “So I called up Warren Buffett. I thought he’s the natural person.”

Apple has shown its appreciation for the Oracle of Omaha in other ways.

In 2019, the company published an original iPhone game called “Warren Buffett’s Paper Wizard” in which a paperboy bikes from Omaha to Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, California.

But with Apple’s business having declined in size in five of the past six quarters and with the company expecting just low single-digit growth in the current quarter, Buffett may face questions this weekend at the shareholder meeting about whether he still sees the same power in the moat, particularly with regulatory pressures building around tech’s mega-cap companies.

Buffett trimmed his stake in Apple late last year, though only by about 1%. Even after Friday’s rally, the stock is down 3.8% in 2024, while the S&P 500 is up 7.5%.

Berkshire’s initial foray into Apple in 2016 was not Buffett’s idea. Rather, the investment was led by Ted Weschler, one of his top deputies, and was seen as a passing of the torch to the next generation of Berkshire investment managers.

But the following year, Berkshire started purchasing even more Apple shares, and Buffett began talking it up. He said he liked the stock and the company’s “sticky” product, although he didn’t use it.

In 2018, he said Apple users are “very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally” to the product and the ecosystem.

“Apple has an extraordinary consumer franchise,” he said.

At last year’s annual meeting, when asked how Berkshire can defend having Apple make up so much of its public portfolio, Buffett said, “It just happens to be a better business than any we own.” He also hailed Cook, calling him one of the “best managers in the world.”

A number Apple likes to use to tout the health of its business, despite the declining revenue, is “2.2 billion.” That’s how many devices the company says are currently in use and points to the massive customer base available as Apple rolls out new subscription services.

“Once customers get into the ecosystem, they don’t leave. So it’s not a speculative tech play,” said Dan Eye, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group, which owns Apple shares. “It’s kind of more like an annuity and I think that’s what Warren Buffett really sees as well.”

In addition to the drop in revenue, Apple faces new challenges from regulations and weak overseas markets, as well as from Microsoft and Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence. For regulators, the concern surrounds the very moat that Buffett finds so attractive, and whether it gives the company monopolistic control in the smartphone market.

The U.S. government in March alleged that Apple designs its business to keep customers locked in. The Department of Justice’s lawsuit claimed that products like Apple Card, the Apple Arcade game subscription, iMessage and Apple Watch work best or only with an iPhone, creating illegal barriers to competition and making it harder for consumers to switch when it’s time for an upgrade.

However, the litigation is expected to take years, pushing any potential penalties to Apple and its products well into the future. In the meantime, there’s no sign that the iPhone is becoming less important as new devices like virtual reality goggles have found only niche audiences, while consumer AI products have failed to take off.

Buffett hasn’t voiced his view publicly on Apple’s regulatory hurdles, and this will be the first opportunity for investors to ask him about the issue since the DOJ’s lawsuit. But Buffett knows a little something about regulation — two markets where he’s most active are railroads and insurance.

In a note to clients earlier this month, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi didn’t go deep on regulatory concerns, but mentioned that he doesn’t believe the DOJ suit will “seriously threaten” the strength of Apple’s ecosystem. He also said that following Buffett’s lead on getting in and out of Apple is a solid strategy for making money.

“Despite his reputation as a long term buy and hold investor, Warren Buffett has been remarkably disciplined at adding to his Apple position when it is relatively cheap and trimming when it is relatively expensive,” Sacconaghi wrote. He encouraged investors to “be like Buffett.”

Odds are that Buffett was thrilled with Apple’s announcement this week regarding its expanded repurchase program. It’s a practice he’s long adored.

“When I buy Apple, I know that Apple is going to repurchase a lot of shares,” he said in 2018. 

And he likes to note how buybacks result in getting a bigger stake in the company without buying more shares.

“The math of repurchases grinds away slowly, but can be powerful over time,” Buffett said in 2021.

Apple also increased its dividend by 4%, and signaled that it would continue to lift it annually.

Buffett was effusive about the tech giant’s capital-return strategy at the conglomerate’s annual meeting last year, pointing out that it helped Berkshire own a bigger piece of the pie. Unlike insurance company Geico and homebuilder Clayton Homes, which his firm owns in their entirety, Berkshire can continue to increase its stake in Apple, a fact he reminded investors of at the meeting.

“The good thing about Apple is that we can go up,” Buffett said.

Despite blockbuster earnings from giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft, layoffs continue to ripple through the tech industry.

Layoffs.fyi, a platform monitoring job cuts in the tech sector, recorded more than 263,000 job losses in 2023 alone. As of April, there have been more than 75,000 job losses in the industry so far in 2024.

“So instead of rewarding the growth that we saw [tech companies] all pursue years ago, they’re now rewarding profit,” said Jeff Shulman, professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. “And so the layoffs have continued. People have become used to them. Regrettably and sadly, it seems that the layoffs are going to be the new normal.”

Even though mass tech layoffs continue, the labor market still seems strong. The U.S. economy added 303,000 jobs in March, well above the Dow Jones estimate for a rise of 200,000, with the unemployment rate edged lower to 3.8%.

According to Handshake, a popular free job posting site for college students and graduates, the tech layoffs have prompted new workers to seek other opportunities. The share of job applications from tech majors submitted to internet and software companies dropped by more than 30% between November 2021 and September 2023.

“Part of the reason why this is happening is because stability is such a major factor in students’ decisions around what types of jobs they apply to and what types of jobs they accept,” said Christine Cruzverga, chief education strategy officer at Handshake. “They’re looking at the headlines in the news and they’re paying attention to all of the layoffs that are happening in Big Tech, and that makes them feel unstable.”

Mass layoffs have eroded the shine of the tech industry, which is why workers are questioning whether getting a job in the tech industry should still be regarded as a “dream job.”

“For the people who are chasing … a tech dream job, I think keep your options open and be realistic,” said Eric Tolotti, senior partner engineer at Snowflake, who got laid off from Microsoft in 2023. “Don’t just focus on one company and feel like you have to get into that one company because it’s the dream.”

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Rubrik, a data-management software company backed by Microsoft, priced its IPO at $32 a share, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s above its expected range.

The 10-year-old company sold 23.5 million shares ahead of its New York Stock Exchange debut on Thursday, the person said, and will trade under the ticker symbol “RBRK.” Rubrik raised $752 million through the initial public offering, valuing the company at $5.6 billion.

Last week the company said in a filing that it was expecting to price the offering at $28 to $31 per share.

Rubrik is hitting the public market during a historically slow period for venture-backed tech IPOs, particularly when it comes to companies that sell to businesses. The IPO market has been largely shuttered since late 2021, as concerns about a worsening economy and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets.

Startups have stayed private for longer, recalibrating their finances and waiting for better conditions. Even with interest rates stabilizing and the broader tech market bouncing back over the past recent months, private tech companies have been slow to exit.

Instacart and software vendor Klaviyo went public in September, the first venture-backed tech deals in the U.S. since 2021. Reddit went public last month, a day after the Nasdaq debut of Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity chips.

Early on, Rubrik sold perpetual licenses and set up maintenance contracts for hardware that could take care of data storage functions such as backup and compression. In recent years, the company has shifted toward subscriptions for cloud-based cybersecurity software. Businesses can use the software to secure data in cloud applications and in public clouds and prevent data loss in the event of ransomware attacks.

Rubrik now gets 91% of its revenue from subscriptions, up from 59% two years ago. Revenue increased less than 5% in the fiscal year that ended on Jan. 31, but annual recurring revenue from subscriptions jumped 47%.

Almost 100 customers were contributing over $1 million in subscription ARR at the end of the fiscal year, the company said. Clients include Barclays, Carhartt and Home Depot.

“Our key top-line metric is subscription ARR,” Rubrik finance chief Kiran Choudary said in a videotaped presentation for the company’s IPO roadshow.

However, Rubrik’s losses are widening. The company reported a $354 million net loss in the latest fiscal year, compared with around $278 million during the prior year.

Microsoft invested in Rubrik in 2021 at a reported valuation of $4 billion. Venture firm Lightspeed, where CEO Bipul Sinha used to be a partner, will have over 25% of voting power following the IPO. Sinha will have 8% control.