Amazon has taken the No. 1 spot on The Fortune 500 in 2025, ending Walmart’s 13-year run at the top and pushing the retail giant to No. 2 for the first time since 2012. The shift follows a 12% jump in Amazon revenue that lifted the company past $700 billion and gave it the scale to overtake Walmart by annual sales.
That is why readers are searching for The Fortune now: the new ranking changes the top of American business in a way that has not happened in more than a decade. Amazon debuted on the list in 2002 at No. 492, and its rise since then has been tied to the long stretch of growth overseen by Brian Olsavsky, who joined the company that same year and became finance chief in June 2015.
Olsavsky did not step into a finished machine. He came up through Amazon’s Worldwide Operations finance team, then moved through finance roles for the North America retail business and the global consumer business before taking the CFO job. The company he helped steer has weathered the 2008 financial crisis, heavy investment cycles that rattled investors in the early 2010s and the leap from a founder-led business under Jeff Bezos to one led by Andy Jassy.
The ascent is more striking because it comes after a rough stretch. Amazon’s stock fell by roughly 50% in 2022 as inflation and the post-pandemic pullback hit markets, and AWS slowed in 2022–2023, feeding doubts about whether the company’s growth engine had lost some of its force. Even so, the broader business kept expanding across e-commerce, logistics, cloud services and advertising, giving Amazon enough momentum to move ahead of Walmart on the revenue list.
Recent numbers suggest the company is still building from that base. In Q1, Amazon reported $181.5 billion in revenue, up 15% year over year, while AWS grew 28% and the company said its custom chips business had surpassed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate. On an April 29 earnings call, Olsavsky said, “Our AI revenue is growing triple digits year-over-year,” a reminder that the next phase of the company’s growth is already under way.
The unanswered question is how long Amazon can keep the top spot. Walmart has been knocked down, but not out, and Amazon’s newest lead rests on a business mix that still has to keep delivering across consumer sales, cloud and AI if it wants to stay ahead in next year’s Fortune ranking.
For now, Olsavsky’s record is part of the story behind the headline: an 11-plus-year run as CFO at a company that has gone from No. 492 to No. 1, and from challenger to the biggest name on The Fortune 500.
