Amazon was the first company after Apple to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization through a 2018 stock-price surge.
Amazon crossed $1 trillion on September 4, 2018, after its shares rose sharply during the year. The company’s valuation was supported by expectations for growth in online commerce, Amazon Web Services, subscriptions, and advertising. Apple had crossed the same threshold about a month earlier.
The event illustrates why market-cap rankings are different from rankings by revenue or profit. Amazon’s share price incorporated investors’ expectations about future expansion, so its market capitalization could be enormous even when its profit margin was comparatively narrow.
Amazon’s history also explains the scale of the change. Jeff Bezos started the business as an online bookseller, but it expanded into logistics, cloud infrastructure, streaming, devices, and digital services. That diversification helped turn Amazon into one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies.