Amazon became the first company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization after starting as an online bookstore.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion threshold on September 4, 2018. Jeff Bezos founded the business as an online bookseller in 1994, and it began operations in 1995 before expanding into a vast marketplace for products and services.
The company’s growth came from more than retail. Amazon Web Services became a major cloud-computing provider, while advertising, logistics, subscriptions, streaming, and devices added other sources of revenue. Investors valued the company for its expected future expansion as well as its existing sales.
Amazon followed Apple, which had reached $1 trillion about a month earlier. The milestone did not mean Amazon possessed $1 trillion in cash; it represented the total market value assigned to its publicly traded shares.