Amazon (AMZN) broke a record on Wednesday as it became the second company after Apple to hit a $900 billion market cap.
One day after its annual Prime Day event, Amazon announced it had sold more than 100 million products during the 36-hour-long event. That’s despite some glitches that prevented customers from placing orders.
Following the announcement, Amazon’s stock price hit a record high of $1,858.88. This gave the company a $902 billion market cap. (The price retreated slightly afterward.) The online retail giant likely netted between $1.5 -$2 billion in revenue, estimated RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney.
Amazon has had noteworthy success this year, with its stock price climbing almost 57% YTD. Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, has also accrued a net worth over $150 billion. He is now the wealthiest person in the world.
Related: Jeff Bezos Now Worth $50B More Than Anyone Else
Bezos’ success within the e-commerce industry all started with the risk he took in 1994. That year, he quit a lucrative job on Wall Street to create an online bookstore, in hopes to capitalize on the Internet’s rapid growth.
“I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles–something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world—was very exciting to me,” Bezos said in a 2010 address at Princeton University, his alma mater.
For more news and strategy, visit our current affairs category.