Apple Added About $1.5 Trillion in Market Value in a Year. Here's What $10,000 Invested a Decade Ago Is Worth Now.

A $10,000 investment in Apple in August 2016 is worth about $126,000 today with dividends reinvested.

Earnings per share grew about fourfold over the decade, helped by a buyback that retired about a third of the shares.

The valuation multiple nearly tripled, from about 13 times earnings to about 36 times.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is worth about $4.54 trillion, up 51% over the past year -- a gain of more than $1.5 trillion.

For scale, the whole company was worth about $580 billion a decade ago. In other words, the value Apple added in the past 12 months is more than two and a half times the value of the entire business in August 2016.

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Numbers like that make the long view worth taking. So, what did the past decade actually pay an investor who bought and held -- and how much of the gain came from the business itself, versus the market simply paying more for the same earnings?

The split matters, because one of those two drivers can repeat. The other probably can't.