Amazon.com Inc.'s closing market value surpassed Microsoft for the first time on Wednesday and continued to climb Thursday.
Apple Inc.’s $819 billion market capitalization remains Wall Street’s largest, followed by Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google, at $736 billion.
Microsoft is fourth, followed by China's Tencent and Facebook, as the six biggest companies by market cap all come from the technology industry, CNBC reported.
Amazon shares closed Wednesday at $1,451.05, giving the company a market cap of $702.5 billion. Amazon shares near midday Thursday were at $1,452.87.
Microsoft was worth $699.2 billion as of the close of trading Wednesday as its shares rose 1.6 percent to $90.81. Near midday Thursday, Microsoft shares were at $90.80.
The value ranking of the tech titans was stable throughout 2017, although Amazon has been on the upswing since cracking the Top 10 in the fourth quarter of 2015.
“Its market cap has since more than doubled — an increase that turned its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, into the world’s richest person,” the New York Post reported.
“Bezos took the wealth crown earlier this year from his Seattle neighbor and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates,” the Post reported.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put Bezos’ net worth at $118 billion on Wednesday, having benefitted from a $2.2 billion gain during the day and a $19.3 billion increase year to date.Gates’ wealth was $90.3 billion, up $92 million for the day, but down $1.6 billion year to date.
The latest jump has pushed Bezos’s fortune definitively above the high reached by Microsoft Corp.’s Bill Gates in 1999. The Amazon founder passed Gates in October with a net worth of $93.8 billion and his fortune crossed $100 billion for the first time a month later when the holiday shopping season kicked off on Black Friday.
Gates would have a net worth of more than $150 billion if he’d held onto assets that he’s given away, largely to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He has given away almost 700 million Microsoft shares and $2.9 billion of cash and other assets since 1996, according to an analysis of his publicly disclosed giving, Bloomberg has reported.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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