Amazon rushes over $1T and then recedes
Amazon just became the second member of the trillion-dollar club.
The e-commerce juggernaut hit the 13digit milestone Tuesday morning when its stock briefly surged to $2050.50, passing the $2,050.27 mark to win a $1 trillion market capitalization.
The Web-retailing giant — founded in 1994 when Jeff Bezos started selling books out of his garage — crossed the stratospheric threshold just over a month after Apple became the first company to do so on Aug. 2.
The Seattle-based company couldn’t maintain the momentum until the closing bell, though — its shares finishing the day up 1.3 percent, to $2,039.51. That closing price left Amazon with a market cap of just under $995 billion.
It took Apple 35 years as a public company to reach $1 trillion, and Amazon just 21 years.
The tech hotshots most likely to get their $1 trillion-club tickets punched are Microsoft and Alphabet, parent of Google, which are both roughly $150 billion shy of the mark.
Facebook, meanwhile, sits just under $500 billion, as Wall Street continues to fret that privacy concerns will dog its growth and profitability.
Amazon’s stock has more than doubled over the past year, having hit $1,000 only last October — leaving Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth of more than $165 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Over the past decade, it has surged more than 3,000 percent as it has expanded from selling books to becoming a major player in tech and entertainment with its Echo devices and Oscar-nominated films.
Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, is the backbone on which some of the world’s most popular sites, such as Netflix and Airbnb, are built.