Apple got there first. Amazon was second.
For a brief moment on Tuesday (Sept. 4)—at 11:39am ET, to be specific—shares of Amazon climbed to $2,050.50, pushing its market capitalization above $1 trillion. That makes the e-commerce giant the second US company to attain a $1 trillion value, after Apple in August.
The $1 trillion marker is an impressive, if largely psychological milestone (people get excited about big round numbers). Within minutes of reaching it, Amazon’s stock price had fallen about $10, dragging the company’s market cap back down to the $990 billion range. Apple, on the other hand, sits comfortably at $1.1 trillion.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley predicted in November 2017 that Amazon would become a $1 trillion company by the end of 2018. At the time, they valued its e-commerce operations (Amazon.com) at $600 billion, its cloud-computing business (Amazon Web Services) at $270 billion, its membership program (Amazon Prime) at $70 billion, and its advertising efforts at $55 billion. (Those same analysts now value the company at $1.23 trillion.)
True to form, Amazon got there early.