Amazon owns Amazon.com and became the first online retailer to surpass a $1 trillion market capitalization.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, and the website opened to customers in 1995. The company expanded into music, electronics, household goods, digital media, devices, and many other categories.
Its growth was also powered by Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud-computing infrastructure to businesses and governments. AWS became an important profit center alongside the retail operation, while Prime subscriptions strengthened customer loyalty.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion market-capitalization mark in September 2018, shortly after Apple. The milestone describes the stock-market value of the company, not the total value of merchandise sold through its platform.