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It is a stock thing. All of those companies have well performing stocks.

Microsoft stock is up 80% in the last 2 years.

edit: and they are ahead of google in market cap again. Been going back and forth for the last little while.

The acronym I've heard is GAFAM: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.

Judging by http://enwp.org/Largest_companies as of right now, the order should probably be AGMAF (Apple first) instead.

FAANG is usually used in the context of investments/stocks. These 5 have consistently been some of the highest growth tech stocks in the past couple of years.