Tech companies getting richer

The tech industry is rich, but it can be challenging to get just how much money it's minting.

Four of the industry's giants -- Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet -- reported unexpectedly large profits last week. A fifth, Apple, releases earnings Tuesday. These companies are the largest on Earth, at least in terms of their market value.

The large profits come even as the tech industry, notably Facebook, faces questions about the extent to which companies depend on collecting personal data on users to fuel advertising revenue.

Raw financial figures only tell so much, though.

The five largest tech companies are collectively worth more than the entire economy of the United Kingdom. Investors value these companies at $3.5 trillion; the gross domestic product of the U.K. was $2.6 trillion in 2017, according to the International Monetary Fund. Only four national economies are larger than the combined tech giants: those of the U.S., China, Japan and Germany.

The same five tech companies are worth more than the next 11 most valuable U.S. corporations, a list that includes JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson and Walmart.

Apple makes roughly as much money every day as 2,500 average U.S. households can expect to see in a year. That's $151 million, a figure calculated from the company's expected profit in the January-March quarter and the median household income of $57,230, as reported by the Census Bureau.

For a more prosaic comparison, Apple makes almost three times what ExxonMobil does; the oil giant had an average daily profit of $54 million last year.

And with a single move, Amazon could create $2 billion out of thin air. The company just said it will raise the annual price of its Prime membership program to $119 from $99. Given that there are now more than 100 million Prime members, that's a good chunk of change for sliding a few digits around.