Think of it. Martha Stewart now is worth more than Oprah Winfrey. That is, until Oprah decides to go public. Then there is Bill Gates, who has so much money he is having trouble thinking of ways of giving it away. You can imagine the age of the kids who wrote the press release.
Market capitalization is how much a company's stock is worth.
You figure it out by multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the current stock price. So it turns out Bill Gates' one-day gain on the stock market could buy him almost all the shares outstanding in Alcan Aluminium, the second biggest aluminium producer in the world, or Barrick Gold, one of the largest gold producers in the world. There hasn't been such a big burst of riches on the Canadian side of the line. Reasons given for this range from a lack of imagination from the brokers who raise money and own the Toronto Stock Exchange, to higher Canadian taxes which allow the new rich of the USA to keep a lot more of their money. One piece of technology where Canada does well is telephones and all the gadgetry associated with making the Internet move faster.