I regularly read this assumption on the internet, and that the company worth 10 times the one of Apple after inflation is adjusted (worth around 7.4 trillion dollars).

I am quite skeptical about this, Europa had only 180 millions inhabitants at the height of the VOC, most of whom could probably not afford to buy luxury product from East Asia or stock market's share. Nowadays the market is just immensely wider and the average population is incommensurately wealthier. Even in term of employee, at it peak it has only 5~10% of Wall Mart's employees, current world largest company in term of employees.

I have read the wikipedia page so I understand that the company exerted very various activities, had thousand of ships and its' own army etc... My question is rather how can the society have such a value that even our modern company are far from reaching this value? Is this because of the adjusted inflation which is done badly?