CNN has a story today titled this:

At $500 billion, Apple is worth more than Poland

Sorry, this is just wrong.

$500 billion is Apple's market cap -- the entire value of all its parts as judged by the market.

True, that's bigger than the GDP of Poland, but it's a false equivalence, because the GDP is just one year's worth of national output for the country.

If you wanted to do an, ahem, apples to apples comparison, you'd have to look at the total value of all the assets in Poland and compare that to the market cap.

A better measure of Apple's "GDP" might be its annual sales, which came to $127 billion last year.

At least per Wikipedia, that does make Apple the same size Qatar.

People are so intent to make this comparison over and over again, but it's straight up nonsense.