Amazon Becomes World’s Second $1 Trillion Company
Amazon
On Tuesday, a rise in the share price of Amazon, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US, briefly took it above the trillion-dollar watermark for the first time.
Achieving the valuation marks the latest chapter in an astonishing story of growth for the company, founded by businessman
Less than 25 years later, Amazon has garnered a major presence in everything from retail, to groceries, to video streaming, helping it rack up revenues of $178bn (£139bn) last year.
Bezos has become the world’s richest man in the process, with a net worth estimated at more than $167bn on Tuesday, according to Forbes.
Amazon went public at $18 a share in 1997 – on Tuesday those shares hit $2,050, pushing the value of the whole company over $1tn.
But with rapid growth has come fierce criticism over its attitude to tax and workers’ rights.
The company that started life selling books and CDs online has morphed into a behemoth that now makes much of its money from hosting websites such as Airbnb, Netflix
Alongside cloud services, Amazon has been growing its own content business, developing TV shows and movies. Last year it bought Whole Foods, the grocery chain, for $13bn as Bezos moved to expand Amazon’s food offering. The company now appears to have targeted the healthcare market as its next big opportunity.
Amazon’s size – and Bezos’s fortune – have attracted the ire of Donald Trump. Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, and though he has kept the Post as a distinct company from Amazon, the newspaper’s criticism of Trump has sparked numerous attacks from the president.
“Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me,” Trump wrote on Twitter in July, the latest in a series of verbal assaults. Trump has accused Amazon of ripping off the US Postal Service (USPS) and has convened a taskforce to assess USPS’s finances.
Trump has also threatened a wider investigation into Amazon’s dominance in online retail. The company accounts for 49 cents out of every e-commerce dollar spent in
“Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?” Trump asked last year.
The company has also attracted criticism from the left. Amazon is currently assessing where to build a second headquarters in the US, dubbed HQ2. The massive complex is expected to add 50,000 local jobs, but the winning city also looks sure to burnish Amazon with generous tax breaks.
Amazon was offered $7bn to build its second headquarters in
Amazon had been vying with Apple to reach the landmark $1tn figure for months but lost out when stock markets responded favourably to Apple’s financial results last month.
Both companies now have a stock market value more than a third the size of the
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