Amazon became the first Internet business to join the trillion-dollar market-capitalization club in 2018.
Amazon crossed a $1 trillion market capitalization on September 4, 2018, about a month after Apple reached the same value. Its share price had risen sharply as investors valued the company’s growing retail operation, subscription services, and cloud-computing business.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The company expanded into a broad marketplace selling millions of products, while Amazon Web Services became a major provider of computing, storage, and database infrastructure for organizations worldwide.
The phrase “Internet business” distinguishes Amazon’s milestone from the broader category of public companies. Market capitalization measures the value assigned by stock investors, not the total value of goods sold through the website. Amazon’s valuation can also move substantially because its shares trade on the Nasdaq and respond to earnings, interest rates, and expectations about future growth.