The Year of the 'Magnificent Seven'

After a terrible 2022 for major tech companies and their shareholders, 2023 marked a return to form for the group of companies widely summarized as “Big Tech” or by some weird acronym. The fact that Tesla and Nvidia joined the ranks of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon meant that neither GAFAM nor GAMAM is working anymore, challenging commentators to come up with a new nickname for some of the world’s most closely watched companies. And since MANTAMA is too much of a mouthful, 2023 became the year of the “Magnificent Seven”.

As our chart shows, all of the “Magnificent Seven” outperformed the overall market by a wide margin, with Nvidia’s 240-percent stock price surge particularly eye-popping. The chipmaker profited immensely from the rise of AI and large language models, seeing its revenue surge 101 and 206 percent, respectively, in the past two fiscal quarters. Meta, which had been hit particularly hard in 2022 as investors soured on its Metaverse vision, also saw its share price nearly triple last year, bringing it close to its 2021 high.

The big gains of last year notwithstanding, 2022 hasn’t been fully brushed aside quite yet, as three of the seven have yet to fully recover their losses from the “tech reckoning”. Tesla, Amazon and Alphabet ended 2023 below their 2021 year-end valuation, with Tesla particularly far off its previous highs (minus 30 percent).