Apple, Microsoft, Google make $2,000 a second combined

Apple is so profitable, in fact, that it makes roughly half of the money in tech

Certain tech companies, though certainly not all of them, are making incredible amounts of money. I mean, Alphabet, formerly known as Google, passed Apple's market cap earlier this week to become the most valuable company in the world. This is not a secret.

There's a difference between knowing something is true and being confronted with the direct evidence, though. So, yeah, we all know that these companies are making more money in short amounts of time than we'll ever see in our lifetimes. When you actually see just how much money these companies are making every second, or every minute, well... it's enough to send many of us to the floor.

A feature from Penny Stocks Lab has those numbers. And they are staggering, to say the least.

After looking at that chart for exactly one minute, here are some key takeaways: Apple made over $70,000 worth of profit, or an average of $1,174 per second. Microsoft made over $41,500 or $693 per second. Google saw over $24,500, for an average of $409 per second. Those three companies combined make $136,560 a minute, or $2,276 every single second. 

Apple is so profitable, in fact, that it gets around 50 percent of all the money made. 

Slightly lower down on the profitability list was Facebook, which saw $2,880 in profit during that minute, or $48 per second, while Yahoo saw $2,580, or $43 per second. 

Other companies that you would think would make a healthy amount of money actually saw much less profit than you might expect, including Netflix and Box, which both had $240 in the first minute, or only $4 a second. And LinkedIn only had $60 in total profits, which obviously is only $1 a second. 

There are three companies included on the chart that are currently not profitable at all, though I'm sure there are plenty of others out there that could have also been included. 

The first is Yelp, which lost $15 in its first minute, despite making $480 in revenue. Pandora also lost $60, despite making $840. I've documented the problem with the Pandora in the past, and how its enormous royalty fees are holding it back from being in the black. 

But the worst, by far, was Twitter, which lost a staggering $1,200 in one minute on $1,260 in revenue. That means the company is spending double what its making. Revenue for the third quarter of 2015 totaled $569 million, an increase of 58% compared to $361 million in the same period in 2014, but its GAAP net loss was still $132 million for the third quarter of 2015 compared to $175 million in the same period in 2014. 

Where is all of that money going? Three areas are taking big chunks of money. In the first nine months of last year Twitter spent $511 million on "cost of revenue" which is what it spends to maintain its data centers. It spent $594 million on sales and marketing, and $596 million on research and development. 

Those numbers are from back in October, and don't factor in the changes made by Jack Dorsey since then, including firing eight percent of its staff. So perhaps when the company reveals its fourth quarter earnings next week the numbers will look better, though Penny Stock Labs isn't making that scenario seem very likely. 

Not only did this feature track individual companies, but also devices. Surprisingly enough, desktop revenue was higher than that of mobile, $8,220 to $6,720. 

Shoutout to The Next Web for first reporting about this feature. 

(Image source: greenbizspeaker.wordpress.com)