Amazon Overtakes Walmart as America’s Largest Company by Revenue After 13-Year Reign

Amazon Overtakes Walmart as America's Largest Company by Revenue After 13-Year Reign

Amazon has dethroned Walmart as the largest U.S. company by revenue, claiming the top spot on the Fortune 500 for the first time after Walmart's 13-year run at No. 1. Based on fourth-quarter earnings reported February 19, Amazon recorded $716.9 billion in revenue for 2025, narrowly edging out Walmart's $713.2 billion for the year.

The shift marks a rare changing of the guard in corporate America. When Fortune publishes its next Fortune 500 list in June, Amazon will become only the fourth company ever to hold the No. 1 position, joining an exclusive club that includes Exxon, General Motors, and Walmart. Walmart had held the top spot for 21 of the last 24 years.

But finance chiefs watching this transition shouldn't mistake it for a simple story of disruption. Unlike the retail casualties Walmart left behind a generation ago—Sears, Kmart, and J.C. Penney—Walmart isn't in secular decline. Instead, Amazon's rise appears to have forced a corporate reinvention that's made Walmart more competitive, not less.

The numbers tell the story of adaptation rather than defeat. Walmart's online business grew 27% in the most recent quarter, and the company continues to dominate Amazon in grocery delivery, one of retail's most strategically important battlegrounds. Under former CEO Doug McMillon and current CEO Doug Furner, Walmart began a cultural and operational transformation in 2014 that prioritized innovation and, crucially, tolerance for failure—a shift designed specifically to compete with what Fortune describes as Amazon's "relentlessness."

That cultural evolution matters for CFOs beyond retail. The Amazon-Walmart rivalry has evolved past traditional e-commerce into a broader competition across AI, streaming, and other technology-intensive sectors. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Walmart's Furner are now competing in domains that require the kind of capital allocation flexibility and risk tolerance that many legacy companies struggle to develop.

The $3.7 billion revenue gap between the two giants—less than 1% of Amazon's total—suggests the competition will remain tight. For finance leaders, the more interesting question isn't who's No. 1, but what kind of organizational transformation is required to stay relevant when your primary competitor operates with a fundamentally different cost structure and business model.

Walmart's response to Amazon's threat offers a case study in corporate adaptation under pressure. Rather than retreating to its traditional strengths, the company invested heavily in capabilities—e-commerce infrastructure, technology talent, digital innovation—that directly challenged Amazon's advantages. The fact that Walmart remains within striking distance of Amazon's revenue total, while maintaining profitability in lower-margin grocery categories, suggests the strategy is working.

The broader implication for CFOs: being dethroned isn't the same as being defeated, especially when the competition forces you to build capabilities you'll need for the next decade anyway. Walmart may have lost the top spot, but it's arguably in a stronger competitive position than it was when Amazon first emerged as an existential threat.