It's been nearly 12 years since Michael Dell told an audience of technology executives — in a remark some of us never tire of repeating — that if he were in charge of Apple (AAPL) he would "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." (link).

Not only is Apple's market capitalization ($143.3 billion) more than five times Dell's ($27.3 billion), but as Roughly Drafted's Daniel Eran Dilger points out, it is now bigger than Dell's (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) combined.

(Market cap is a measure of a corporation's size and is determined by multiplying share price times the number of shares outstanding.)

This is one of those factoids made to order for WolframAlpha.

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Here's an interesting bit of stock market trivia from 9to5 Mac. If Apple (AAPL) shares open anywhere near the 186 mark they passed in after-the-bell trading yesterday, the company's market capitalization ($161 billion) will, for the first time, pass IBM's ($156 billion).

Who's the Big Brother now?