Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company’s 2018 Shareholder Meeting. (GeekWire Photo / Nat Levy)

Update, April 30: Microsoft today became the second U.S. company in history after Apple to close with a market capitalization above $1 trillion, with shares trading at $130.60, up 30 percent this year.

Original story: Microsoft’s strong performance in the most recent quarter pushed the tech giant into rarefied air: The trillion-dollar market capitalization club.

Microsoft is tangling with fellow tech giants Amazon and Apple for the title of the nation’s most-valuable and surged into the lead when it reported its quarterly financials Wednesday. Microsoft’s stock rose as much as 4.5 percent in after-hours trading, pushing the company’s market cap over the $1 trillion mark. Later in the afternoon, Microsoft’s value fell just below that landmark level.

Amazon and Apple have both been there before and have a chance to again hit $1 trillion in market cap when they report their quarterly financials in the coming days. Amazon is set to report tomorrow, and Apple is coming up on Monday.

The fluctuations between a $998 billion company and a $1 trillion company don’t mean much in the long run, but the market cap milestone is another financial feather in the cap of Microsoft and the years-long turnaround under CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft has reimagined itself as a cloud-powered company that seeks to bring its services to as many users as possible, even if that means partnering with competitors.

Powering the rise in market cap is Microsoft’s surging stock. It has shot up 34 percent so far this year.

Microsoft executives got their quarterly kudos for the strong results on a call with investors Wednesday. But don’t expect the leaders to throw a big celebration for the company hitting a $1 trillion market cap.

“This is a metric that nobody on the senior leadership team is tracking,” Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela said at an event last year of the company’s market cap and how it compares to others.

He continued: “Nobody is sitting around high-fiving when the stock hits some new high,” Capossela said. “We are like ‘wow, the bar just went up dramatically.’ So it’s a very humble tone; there’s not a lot of, ‘woo, we’re killing it.’”

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