Amazon became the second U.S. public company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, after Apple, in 2018.
Amazon crossed the milestone on September 4, 2018. Investors had rewarded its expansion from online books into a broad retail marketplace, cloud computing through Amazon Web Services, digital media, devices, and logistics.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, and the company began operating from a garage in the Seattle area. It went public in 1997, when its business was still much narrower than the global platform it later became.
A market-cap milestone does not mean that a company has $1 trillion in cash. It means the trading value of all its outstanding shares reached that level. Amazon’s market capitalization has since moved with retail margins, cloud demand, advertising growth, wages, and broader technology-market conditions.