Amazon crosses $1 trillion market-cap

Amazon on Tuesday became the second company to touch the lofty market capitalization of $1 trillion, little more than a month after Apple became the first to reach the plateau. Amazon stock later retreated but remained close to the $1 trillion level.

Amazon’s share prices slightly receded after hitting the milestone, trading for $2036.95 at the time of writing.

The company’s share prices have been solidly rising ever since it announced its Q2 earnings in July. At the time, the company revealed that it slightly missed the sales figures Wall Street analysts had been hoping for, but more than exceeded their expectations for profits, with earnings of $5.07 per share on profits of $2.53 billion for the quarter.

A major contributor to the company’s massive profits has been its cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the second quarter, AWS booked $6.1 billion in sales (up 49%), and generated an operating income of $1.64 billion (up 79%).

Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, also saw his net worth increase $2.6 billion to $167.3 billion Tuesday.

Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, and made it the biggest Internet retailer in the world in revenue and market value in 24 years.

The company announced in April its Prime users, which benefit from free two-day shipping and online videos, surpassed 100 million.

Last month, Apple became the first $1 trillion publicly listed U.S. company, after a decadelong rise in its stock price fueled by its ubiquitous iPhone.

Those trillion-dollar valuations are bigger than the combined market capitalization of Exxon Mobil, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. Apple and Amazon each account for about 4 percent of the value of the entire S&P 500.