Amazon’s stock-market value first exceeded US$1 trillion in September 2018. The company passed that threshold during trading on September 4, 2018, roughly one month after Apple reached the same milestone.
Amazon began in 1994 as an online bookstore founded by Jeff Bezos, and it expanded into a broad technology and commerce group. Its businesses came to include online retail, third-party seller services, logistics, advertising, digital content, and Amazon Web Services, a major cloud-computing platform.
Market capitalization measures the value investors place on a company’s publicly traded equity. It is different from revenue: Amazon could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in sales while its market capitalization moved independently with expectations about future profits and growth. Alphabet and Microsoft also passed US$1 trillion, but Amazon’s 2018 crossing followed Apple’s.