The company overtook Walmart for the first time globally and in the U.S., as Jeff Bezos’s long-standing warning about corporate decline gave way to a customer-focused and AI-driven expansion.
Amazon has climbed to the top of the Fortune Global 500 for the first time, overtaking Walmart as the world’s largest company by revenue after reporting $716.9 billion in revenue for 2025, more than $3 billion ahead of Walmart. The milestone came a month after Amazon also ended Walmart’s 13-year run at No. 1 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. companies. Its market capitalization is now roughly $2.5 trillion, more than double the level around 2018, when then-CEO Jeff Bezos told employees that “Amazon is not too big to fail” and predicted the company would one day go bankrupt, using the remark to argue that long-term survival depends on relentless customer focus. The article frames Amazon’s rise against Bezos’s early skepticism about corporate longevity. In 2018, shortly after Amazon first crossed a $1 trillion market cap, Bezos said large companies often last “30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years” and argued the way to delay decline was to stay obsessed with customers rather than competitors. He recently said Amazon’s new standing was not “a complete surprise,” and reiterated to Fortune that customer obsession requires constant invention. The company’s origins were modest. Bezos left Wall Street in 1994 for Bellevue, Wash., to build an online bookstore first called Cadabra before renaming it Amazon. After working from a rented home’s garage and pitching investors, he raised his first $1 million in seed funding. The business launched a year later. Bezos said at the New York Times Dealbook Summit in 2024 that raising that capital required 60 meetings and was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Amazon, which turned 31 earlier this month, did not post its first full fiscal year of net positive income until 2003, when it earned $35 million. The piece also points to continuity in Amazon’s management philosophy under CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded Bezos in 2021 and has kept the company’s 16 Leadership Principles in place. Jassy said in 2024 that those principles support Amazon’s effort to improve customer experience with AI (artificial intelligence). At the same time, Amazon’s culture has faced criticism over workplace and labor complaints, including allegations of racial discrimination and hostile warehouse conditions. The company has cut roughly 30,000 roles in parts of its business since October, including layoffs in its artificial general intelligence unit, while continuing to invest heavily elsewhere. Jassy said during a November earnings call that the cuts were “not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” adding: “It’s culture.” Amazon is now committing tens of billions of dollars to AI, including deals with Meta and Anthropic. Its original investment in Anthropic stands at $8 billion and is valued at more than $74 billion today. The company plans to spend $200 billion on AI development this year. Jassy said AI will transform “every customer experience that we know today and invent a whole host of new ones,” while Bezos said Amazon’s chips business, or silicon business, is “lining up to be our next pillar.”