Big Tech: revenue, profits, and headcount
This chart compares ten years of whole-company revenue, net income, and workforce growth at Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. The indexed view makes growth paths comparable across unlike units, while the absolute view restores company scale and the underlying dollars and employee counts.
What does it show?
Big Tech revenue and profits have generally grown faster than headcount, although the pattern differs substantially by company.
Methodology
Annual whole-company revenue, net income, and fiscal year-end workforce for Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta across the latest ten complete common fiscal years, 2016–2025. Revenue and net income use the latest-filed annual 10-K facts from the SEC companyfacts API. Headcount is extracted from each company's 10-K workforce disclosure discovered through the SEC submissions API. The indexed view divides every company-metric series by its own 2016 value and multiplies by 100; the absolute view reports dollars in billions and employees. Fiscal calendars differ, Amazon includes full- and part-time employees, Apple reports full-time-equivalent employees, and the other companies' workforce definitions can also differ. Net income is accounting profit, can be affected by one-time items, and is not operating cash flow.