Following Walmart’s (WMT) fourth-quarter earnings report, Amazon (AMZN) officially surpassed the Bentonville retail giant as the world’s largest company by revenue. Walmart (WMT) had topped the Fortune 500 list for 13 straight years.
Amazon (AMZN) reported $716.9B in revenue for fiscal year 2025, narrowly beating Walmart’s $713.2B for the 12 months ending January 31, 2026. Of course, Amazon (AMZN) has been on the hunt for the top spot ever since the AWS business began to accelerate and third-party seller service revenue continued to grow. For perspective, in 2010 Amazon’s (AMZN) revenue was just $34.2B vs. Walmart’s (WMT) $422B.
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Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5, 1994, in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, after leaving Wall Street to pursue an idea to sell books online. He and his then-wife MacKenzie wrote the business plan during a cross-country drive from New York to Seattle, chosen for its tech talent and proximity to book distributors. Originally named “Cadabra,” the company was soon renamed Amazon (AMZN) because the original sounded like “cadaver.” Amazon launched its website in July 1995, quickly selling books across all 50 states and dozens of countries.