Amazon Overtakes Walmart as World’s Largest Company by Revenue

Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart to claim the top position on the Fortune Global 500 rankings, marking a historic shift in global retail and corporate dominance. The milestone comes after the e-commerce titan posted $716.9 billion in annual revenue for 2025, edging past Walmart by more than $3 billion and ending the brick-and-mortar giant’s 13-year reign at the summit of corporate lists.

The financial landmark comes as Amazon’s market capitalization stands near $2.5 trillion—more than double its valuation in 2018. That year, founder Jeff Bezos famously cautioned employees during an all-hands meeting that even corporate giants eventually face collapse, pointing out that large enterprises rarely survive past a 30-year horizon without bowing to bankruptcy or obsolescence unless they maintain an unyielding focus on customer satisfaction over rival actions.

Now 31 years after its founding, Amazon has surpassed Bezos’s 30-year benchmark. The enterprise began in 1994 when Bezos abandoned a career on Wall Street to launch an online bookstore out of a Bellevue, Washington garage. Originally named Cadabra before being rebranded after the South American river to reflect grander ambitions, the venture secured its initial $1 million in seed financing only after 60 individual investor presentations. It took nearly a decade for the platform to record its first full profitable fiscal year, achieving $35 million in net income in 2003.

Under Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy, who assumed leadership from Bezos in 2021, the company continues to rely on its institutional framework of 16 core leadership principles to direct expansion, workforce strategy, and technology integration. However, that growth path has included significant structural shifts. Amazon has eliminated roughly 30,000 corporate positions across several divisions since October, affecting teams within its artificial general intelligence group. Jassy characterized the workforce reductions and simultaneous return-to-office mandates as cultural realignments aimed at flattening corporate hierarchy rather than responses to financial weakness.

Even while scaling back certain administrative layers, Amazon is directing unprecedented capital toward next-generation technologies. The company is set to deploy $200 billion into Artificial Intelligence development this year. This outlay includes major partnerships and strategic investments, highlighted by an initial $8 billion stake in AI developer Anthropic, an entity whose valuation has since climbed past $74 billion.

Looking ahead, Amazon is betting heavily on vertical integration to sustain its market position. Beyond software applications, Bezos recently identified custom hardware design—specifically the company’s proprietary silicon and microchip development division—as Amazon’s next critical pillar of long-term commercial growth.