This week, a new No. 1 on the Fortune 500 was crowned: Amazon, Phil Wahba reported, will end Walmart’s 13-year reign and take the top spot on the next edition of the Fortune 500 list, which will publish in early June.
Amazon’s overtaking of the retail behemoth has been quite a feat to witness, Wahba wrote: “Astonishing, perhaps, but let’s face it, not surprising. Between 2018 and 2025, Amazon achieved a cumulative annual growth rate about three times that of Walmart. Amazon is not just an online retailer, but also a giant in cloud computing services via its lucrative AWS division, where the pie is growing much more quickly than retail is.”
Back in 2009, when Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was featured on the cover of Fortune, his industry-shifting e-commerce company was No. 130 on the Fortune 500; Walmart was No. 2, behind only Exxon Mobil.
That year, Fortune’s Jeffrey M. O’Brien reported that the company, until recently known mainly as “Earth’s biggest bookstore,” had expanded its ambitions considerably, “into everything from music and movies to toilet seats and treadmills.”
“Amazon has even broadened the definition of retail by providing a platform for third-party sales, offering fulfillment services, and selling ‘cloud’ computing services to the enterprise,” O’Brien wrote.
As for Bezos, who is pictured for the cover stor sitting cross-legged, Buddha-style, atop a gigantic pile of books and magazines, O’Brien paints a picture of him at the product launch of the then-latest Kindle as a quasi-religious figure: “Like another messenger of long ago, he carried a tablet. And he said unto the people: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m excited to introduce Kindle DX.’”
Since then, Bezos’s aura in the business world has not diminished, even if he has become a somewhat polarizing figure for his political and personal choices—not to mention his stewardship of the Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013, and which laid off about a third of its staff, over 300 employees, this month.
But whatever you might think of the company or the man, there’s no denying the achievement they have pulled off.
