8 of the top 10 wealth-creating stocks over 100 years are Big Tech. But these two outliers still created $2.6T

Godwin Oluponmile

Sat, July 4, 2026 at 4:00 AM PDT 6 min read

If you own an index fund, you own a sliver of nearly every public company in America, including the big winners and the big duds.

And there are a lot of duds.

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A new study spanning 100 years of the U.S. stock market found that nearly 60% of all stocks ever listed left investors worse off than if they had simply kept their money in Treasury bills (1). The market as a whole still generated about $91 trillion in wealth over that century, but almost all of it came from a tiny group of companies at the very top (2).

Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business has tracked the pattern for years (3). His latest update, covering 1926 through 2025, shows the names at the top have shifted from oil and industrial giants to Big Tech (2), with two longtime holdouts still ranking among the greatest wealth creators in market history.

How lopsided the stock market really is

Bessembinder doesn't rank companies solely by share-price gains. Instead, he looks at wealth creation — the dollars a company generates for shareholders above what Treasury bills would have earned over the same period, including dividends and share buybacks.

By that measure, the market is incredibly top-heavy. Just 46 companies account for half of the entire $91 trillion in wealth created, down from 89 companies in his earlier study through 2016.

The top 10 alone make up 29% of that total — nearly one-third of a century's worth of stock market wealth — despite representing just 10 of the 29,754 (4) common stocks listed on the U.S. public markets.

Nine years ago, the leaderboard looked very different. Through 2016, Exxon Mobil was No. 1, alongside industrial-era names General Electric, International Business Machines (IBM), Altria Group and General Motors (5).

Today, it looks much more like a tech conference attendee list: Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla now occupy eight of the top 10 spots (2). Apple alone has created 5.5% of all the wealth generated in U.S. stock market history. Nvidia, fueled by the artificial intelligence boom (6), accounts for another 5%, with most of that wealth created in just the past few years (7).