Amazon's stock value briefly topped $1 trillion on Tuesday, a little over a month after Apple crossed the same milestone. By early afternoon, Amazon's stock was trading at $2,030 per share, up less than 1 percent, putting its market cap at $990 billion.
The tech and retail behemoth, founded as an online bookstore by CEO Jeff Bezos in 1994, has only been consistently profitable since 2015. But in 2018, Amazon first reported profit of almost $2 billion and then another quarter of more than $2 billion.
Amazon is now not only synonymous with online shopping , but is also opening physical stores, owns the Whole Foods grocery franchise and runs a massively lucrative cloud-services business.
Close to two-thirds of Americans say they've bought something on Amazon, according to a recent NPR/Marist poll. That's 92 percent of America's online shoppers. More than 40 percent said they buy something on Amazon once a month or more often. In fact, when people shop online, they're most likely to start on Amazon, the poll found.
The survey found that 67 percent of American online shoppers say they have "quite a lot" or "a great deal" of trust in Amazon to protect their privacy and personal information. The majority of them had little to no such confidence in online retailers in general.
Amazon has said that more than 100 million people around the world pay for its Prime subscription.
Bezos, whose fortune comes from his Amazon stake, has been declared the richest person in modern history, with a net worth topping $150 billion.
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