Business: 11 Zeros for Amazon; Joins Apple as Trillion-Dollar company

Amazon.com followed Apple to become the second U.S. company to reach $1 trillion in stock-market value, reflecting the online retailer’s striking transformation from a profitless bookseller into a disruptive force of commerce.

A trillion dollars may be an arbitrary threshold, but it's still a remarkable statement of how quickly the 24-year-old company has grown, and the boundless confidence investors have in its future.

Just contrast Amazon with the brick and mortar sector, where 90% of American retail spending still takes place. In order to get to a $1 trillion market cap, you'd have to add up the valuations of the 14 largest big box retailers ranked by 2017 revenues, from Walmart (WMT) to Autonation(AN).

Investors are also way more excited about Amazon than other grocery, building supply, andgeneral retail stocks, which have an average price-to-earnings ratio of between about 20 and 40 for the previous year, according to New York University finance professor and valuation expert Aswath Damodaran. Amazon's price-to-earnings ratio is about 180.

So how did we get here?

For years, investors buoyed Amazon's stock without seeing the company generate significant profits, as it poured revenues back into the business: Building out its fulfillment center network, buying up companies, and developing new technologies.

But over the past year, Amazon has started turning up the dial on profits.

At the beginning of 2018, the company was worth just $580 billion. In the second quarter, the company's net income ballooned to $2.5 billion, compared to $197 million in second quarter of 2017.