Amazon.com became the first company to lose more than $1 trillion in market value in 2022. The decline followed a sharp fall in technology stocks, rising interest rates, inflation, and investor concern about slowing consumer demand.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore and began operations in 1995. It expanded into marketplaces, cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, logistics, streaming, and devices, eventually becoming one of the world's largest companies.
A market-value loss is calculated from the company's peak capitalization, not from cash leaving a bank account. Amazon's share price fell substantially during 2022, but the company remained a major global retailer and cloud provider.