Topline
Amazon hit a new record share price Thursday for the first time since July 2021, completing its dramatic recovery from its 2022 doldrums as investors seemingly can’t get enough of big technology stocks.
Key Facts
Amazon’s stock rose as much as 2% Thursday to a new intraday peak of nearly $190 per share.
The rally coincided with broader momentum for tech stocks, as the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.6%.
It also followed the morning release of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders in which Jassy boasted about the potential for his firm’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, to power “much of” the generative AI revolution.
Amazon now sits less than 2% away from achieving a $2 trillion market capitalization for the first time ever, a far cry from the sub $900 billion valuation it ended 2022 with after its share price crashed during Amazon’s first year of negative profits since 2014.
Key Background
Amazon shares’ 26% rally this year outpaces gains of all three major stock indexes. The AI transformation has caused the dramatic shift in investor sentiment for Amazon and its peers at the cutting edge, and analysts expect Amazon’s AI-heavy AWS division to drive much of the online retail giant’s growth. Amazon stock contracted by as much as 60% between mid-2021 and the end of 2022, a period directly coinciding with the beginning of Jassy’s tenure following the retirement of Amazon’s founding CEO Jeff Bezos.
Forbes Valuation
Bezos, who remains the executive chairman of Amazon’s board and the company’s largest individual shareholder, has made himself a pretty penny from Amazon stock’s rise, tacking on another $3.3 billion to his $207 billion fortune Thursday, according to our estimates. Bezos is the second-richest man in the world and the richest American, worth more than $90 billion than he was last April.
