Amazon reached a $1 trillion market capitalization in 2018 after becoming the second company ever to do so.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion threshold on September 4, 2018, about one month after Apple became the first company to reach it. The milestone reflected the scale of Amazon's online retail operations and the rapid growth of Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing division.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The company expanded into electronics, household goods, digital media, logistics, advertising, devices, and cloud infrastructure. That broad business model helped transform Amazon from a specialist retailer into a major technology and services company.
Amazon's trillion-dollar moment is sometimes confused with its later market-cap records or with the value of its annual sales. Revenue measures money earned from operations, while market capitalization measures the market value of equity. Those figures answer different questions.