Amazon was the first company to lose more than $1 trillion in market value during a single stock-market sell-off.
Amazon reached this unwanted milestone in November 2022, when falling technology shares and concerns about higher interest rates pushed its market capitalization sharply below its pandemic-era peak. The decline represented the difference between the company’s previous peak value and its later valuation, not a one-day cash loss of $1 trillion.
Amazon’s shares had benefited greatly from the growth of online shopping and cloud computing during the COVID-19 pandemic. As economies reopened, investors reassessed the pace of e-commerce growth, while inflation, rising borrowing costs, and weaker technology valuations pressured the stock.
Amazon operates two major engines: its retail marketplace and Amazon Web Services. AWS remained strategically important even as the company’s overall market value fell. Market-cap losses describe changes in investors’ valuation of equity and do not mean that the company paid out that amount.