Amazon was the first online retailer to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization, doing so in September 2018.
Amazon crossed the threshold during trading on September 4, 2018. Its rise reflected the expansion of its e-commerce marketplace, Amazon Web Services, digital advertising, and subscription products such as Prime. The company had already become one of the world’s most valuable public corporations before reaching the landmark.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore and began operations in 1995. Its transformation into a broad technology and retail company is a major reason its market value grew far beyond the economics of book sales.
The milestone followed Apple’s crossing of $1 trillion in August 2018. Amazon’s achievement is sometimes described as a technology milestone rather than a retail one because its cloud-computing division became a major source of profit and growth.