Eleven companies now carry more market value than most national stock markets combined. This worksheet reverse-engineers their prices: what do you have to believe about future free cash flow to justify what the market is paying today?
Under these assumptions, the market is valuing this group as if it will produce - of free cash flow in 2036 - - in today’s dollars. That is - of the - earned by every publicly listed company on Earth this year, and - of the entire world’s projected listed-company profit pool in 2036.
Most valuation critiques attack individual companies. This section does the opposite: it presents the strongest honest case for each name - no strawmen - alongside what has to be true, what slice of the future economy each story implies, and the terminal free cash flow each price requires.
Taken one at a time, most of these stories hold together on their own. NVIDIA could work. So could Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, TSMC, Meta. The hard part is finding a future where all of them at once earn the profits implied by their current valuations.
Analysts grade each story on its own. Almost no one asks whether the collection of stories can coexist - these companies compete for the same enterprise budgets, the same ad dollars, the same compute contracts, and each other’s margins.
Each bull case above claims a slice of a real end market. This ledger sizes each market’s bull-case 2036 revenue, converts it into a maximum free-cash-flow pool at a stated margin, and compares that pool to the terminal cash flow the claimants’ prices require, allocated across each company’s business mix. The dashed tick on each bar marks the full pool; rust is the portion of the claims the pool cannot cover. All figures are nominal 2036 dollars, and every input is editable.
A lot of the revenue inside this complex is a cost somewhere else in the complex. NVIDIA’s revenue is hyperscaler capex; hyperscaler capex becomes NVIDIA revenue. Cloud revenue from the AI labs is partially funded by equity investments from those same hyperscalers. One company’s success shows up as another company’s expense. The system can create real value - it just can’t create infinite value by recycling spending inside the group. The revenue is real. What matters is whether the ultimate source of cash sits outside the ecosystem.
NVIDIA, TSMC, and Broadcom book revenue that is, to a striking degree, the capital expenditure of the other names on this page. NVIDIA’s data-center revenue is hyperscaler capex; TSMC fabricates the chips NVIDIA, Apple, and Broadcom design; Broadcom’s custom accelerators are built for Google and Meta. Their growth is a derivative of the buyers’ willingness to keep spending.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle fund that capex from advertising, software, and retail profits. The loop closes a second time through the AI labs: hyperscaler cloud revenue from OpenAI and Anthropic is partly funded by equity investments from those same hyperscalers and NVIDIA. Money that leaves as capex or investment and returns as revenue makes the group’s combined top line larger than its sales to the outside economy.
The point of this section is scale, not prediction. The figures state the requirement even after allowing for substantial growth. Every figure below is the 2036 requirement implied by current prices, at your assumptions, measured against the whole planet.
| Company | Mkt cap | Revenue | Net inc | Op. CF | CapEx | SBC | Net cash | Fwd NI | FCF ’26E | FCF ’27E | CapEx ’26E | CapEx ’27E | Norm capex % | Circular % |
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A normal DCF asks “given growth, what’s it worth?” This tool asks the inverse: given the price, what growth is required? The canonical model is consensus-anchored: 2026 and 2027 free cash flow are pinned to Wall Street estimates (which include the guided 2026–27 capex), and the solver finds the growth the years after must deliver. The classic smooth-path version - growth starting immediately from today’s TTM - is shown in The Result as a reference line; it answers a cleaner textbook question but contradicts known guidance. For each company we take free cash flow today, grow it at rate g for the high-growth runway, fade linearly to the terminal rate, capitalize the terminal year at WACC − gT, discount everything at WACC - and solve (by bisection) for the g that makes the present value equal today’s price.
Companies with negative free cash flow (Oracle and SpaceX on the reported basis) have no solvable implied growth rate - you can’t compound from a negative base, so their X-ray cards read n/m. Their bull-case cards still state a required terminal cash flow, solved directly from the price: 2026–27 stay pinned to consensus, then a straight-line ramp to the end year.
Reported FCF for the hyperscalers is currently reduced by the AI build-out - capex budgets have roughly doubled or tripled from pre-2023 intensity. Bulls argue this is growth capex that will normalize; bears argue it is the new cost of staying in business. The Normalized basis recomputes FCF as operating cash flow minus steady-state capex (each company’s editable “Norm capex %” of revenue), which is the most favorable commonly argued basis. The gap between the two bases shows how much of the requirement capex normalization alone closes.
A DCF values the operating business, so the cleaner comparison is enterprise value (market cap minus net cash). Apple, Alphabet, and TSMC hold meaningful net cash; Broadcom and Oracle carry meaningful net debt. The toggle lets you see both; multiples on the cards show P/E against market cap and FCF yields against EV.
Share-of-index figures compare full company market caps to the index total; the official S&P weights are float-adjusted, so published weights run slightly different. TSMC (Taiwan-listed) and SpaceX are not S&P 500 members and are excluded from the “share of S&P 500” numerator, but included in the global figure.