Markets

How Big Tech Revenue and Profit Breaks Down, by Company

Published

3 years ago

September 13, 2022

Truman Du

Featured Creator

Article/Editing:

Carmen Ang

In the media and public discourse, companies like Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft are often lumped together into the same “Big Tech” category. After all, they constitute the world’s largest companies by market capitalization.

And because of this, it’s easy to assume they’re in direct competition with each other, fiercely battling for a bigger piece of the “Big Tech” pie. But while there is certainly competition between the world’s tech giants, it’s a lot less drastic than you might imagine.

This is apparent when you look into their various revenue streams, and this series of graphics by Truman Du provides a revenue breakdown of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

How Big Tech Companies Generate Revenue

So how does each big tech firm make money? Let’s explore using data from each company’s June 2022 quarterly income statements.

Alphabet

breakdown of Alphabet's revenue streams and profit

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In Q2 2022, about 72% of Alphabet’s revenue came from search advertising. This makes sense considering Google and YouTube get a lot of eyeballs. Google dominates the search market—about 90% of all internet searches are done on Google platforms.

Amazon

breakdown of amazon's revenue streams and profit

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon’s biggest revenue driver is e-commerce. However, as the graphic above shows, the costs of e-commerce are so steep, that it actually reported a net loss in Q2 2022.

As it often is, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the company’s main profit-earner this quarter.

Apple

breakdown of Apple's revenue streams and profit

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Apple’s biggest revenue driver is consumer electronics sales, particularly from the iPhone which accounts for nearly half of overall revenue. iPhones are particularly popular in the U.S., where they make up around 50% of smartphone sales across the country.

Besides devices, services like Apple Music, Apple Pay, and Apple TV+ also generate revenue for the company. But in Q2 2022, Apple’s services branch accounted for only 24% of the company’s overall revenue.

Microsoft

breakdown of Microsoft's revenue streams and profit

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Microsoft has a fairly even split between its various revenue sources, but similarly to Amazon its biggest revenue driver is its cloud services platform, Azure.

After AWS, Azure is the second largest cloud server in the world, capturing 21% of the global cloud infrastructure market.

This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.

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Leadership

Ranked: America’s Smartest CEOs According to Linguistic Analysis

This infographic reveals the smartest CEOs in the U.S., ranked by how intelligently they communicate complex ideas.

Published

11 hours ago

April 17, 2025

Marcus Lu

America’s Smartest CEOs According to Linguistic Analysis

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Key Takeaways

Preply analyzed dialogue from over 100 American CEOs to score their intelligence
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang scored the highest in this ranking, followed by Lockheed Martin’s Jim Taiclet and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis

How smart are America’s top CEOs?

A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that individuals who use more complex sentence structures tend to perform better in uncertain decision-making scenarios—suggesting a link between linguistic sophistication and cognitive ability.

In this infographic, we rank the 15 smartest CEOs in the U.S., based on linguistic analysis conducted by Preply.

Data & Methodology

Preply’s ranking of America’s smartest CEOs is based on a linguistic analysis of executive speeches and interviews. They started with the CEOs of the 100 largest companies by market capitalization, and included an additional 26 executives (e.g. OpenAI’s Sam Altman). An average of 2.25 hours of speech was analyzed per executive.

The researchers assessed several cognitive and communication traits, including verbal ability, abstract and conceptual thinking, creativity, memory and recall, and logical reasoning.

Using these criteria, they scored each CEO on how effectively and intelligently they express complex ideas. The study aimed to capture not just intellect, but the clarity and depth of thought behind each leader’s words.

Rank	Name	Company	Score
1	Jensen Huang	NVIDIA	81.3
2	Jim Taiclet	Lockheed Martin	80.9
3	Demis Hassabis	DeepMind	80.8
4	Vincent Roche	Analog Devices	80.6
5	Matt Murphy	Marvell Technology Group	78.4
6	Reed Hastings	Netflix	77.3
7	Joseph Dominguez	Constellation Energy	76.7
8	Stephen Schwarzman	Blackstone Group	76.4
9	Robert Ford	Abbott Laboratories	76.1
10	Marc Andreessen	Andreessen Horowitz	75.5
11	Patrick Collison	Stripe	75.4
12	Sam Altman	OpenAI	75.2
12	Shantanu Narayen	Adobe	75.2
14	Robert Bradway	Amgen	74.4
15	Jamie Dimon	JPMorgan Chase	74.3

Five Facts About Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

Here are five interesting facts about Jensen Huang, the smartest CEO in America according to Preply.

Immigrant Roots: Born in Taiwan and raised in Thailand, Huang moved to the U.S. at age 9 and attended a Kentucky reform school by mistake. He went on to earn degrees from Oregon State and Stanford.
Startup at Denny’s: Nvidia was founded in 1993 during a breakfast meeting at a Denny’s in San Jose.
Intense Work Ethic: Huang works 14-hour days, manages 60+ direct reports, and prefers fast-paced, transparent group meetings.
Family in Tech: He’s related to Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD—making them rivals and relatives in the chip world.
Education Philanthropy: Huang has donated millions to Stanford and Oregon State to fund engineering and AI research.