Amazon was founded in 1994 as an online bookstore and later became a trillion-dollar public company.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and the business initially sold books online. Amazon went public in 1997, then expanded into music, electronics, household goods, marketplace services, logistics, streaming, and cloud computing. Its shares first carried the company above a $1 trillion market capitalization in September 2018.
Amazon Web Services became especially important to the company’s financial profile. AWS provides computing, storage, databases, and other internet infrastructure to organizations around the world. Amazon also operates a large retail marketplace, but it does not own every product listed by third-party sellers.
Amazon’s market-cap growth is often described as a retail story, yet its valuation has also reflected advertising, subscriptions such as Prime, logistics capabilities, and cloud services. Amazon’s original name was Cadabra, but Bezos changed it after deciding that Amazon sounded broader and more ambitious.