Amazon was founded in 1994 as an online bookstore before becoming a major global company by market capitalization.
Jeff Bezos established Amazon in 1994, and the company began selling books online in 1995. It later expanded into electronics, household goods, digital content, logistics, advertising, and cloud computing.
Amazon Web Services became especially important to the company’s profits and valuation. Its retail scale and cloud business helped transform Amazon from a niche internet retailer into one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.
Amazon’s market capitalization is not the same as its total sales. Revenue measures money generated from business activity, while market cap reflects what investors collectively value the company’s equity at on the stock market.