Amazon is now the biggest company on the planet — a milestone its founder once openly doubted the business would live to see.

"Amazon is not too big to fail," then-CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly told employees at a 2018 all-hands meeting. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years."

Bezos's remarks were not a forecast of imminent collapse. Rather, they encapsulated his core business philosophy: to delay the inevitable for as long as possible, an obsessive focus on customer satisfaction was essential. The observation about corporate lifespans reflects a well-documented pattern in business history — once-dominant enterprises like Sears, Kodak, and Blockbuster saw their market positions erode within a generation of their peaks. At the time of his warning, Amazon had just crossed a $1 trillion market capitalization for the first time and was battling fierce competition from Walmart, Target, and eBay.

Eight years later, Amazon sits atop the Fortune Global 500 for the first time, overtaking Walmart to become the world's largest company by revenue. The achievement follows another historic first: just last month, Amazon ended Walmart's 13-year reign at No. 1 on the Fortune 500, which ranks the largest U.S. companies.

Although the e-commerce giant had seen steady revenue growth for years, it had never officially broken its competitor's streak. In February, Amazon reported $716.9 billion in revenue for 2025, edging out Walmart by more than $3 billion. Its market capitalization has since surged to roughly $2.5 trillion — more than double the figure when Bezos issued his cautionary warning. That growth has been fueled not only by retail but by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division launched in 2006 that has become the company's primary profit engine, alongside a fast-growing advertising business. Bezos recently acknowledged the new ranking was not "a complete surprise."

"A lot of companies will tell you they're customer-obsessed, but they're really competitor-obsessed," Bezos told Editorial Director Kristin Stoller for the latest issue of Fortune magazine. "You can't be customer-obsessed unless you love inventing."

From Cadabra to Amazon

Like many startup origin stories, Amazon's beginnings were modest and scrappy.

In 1994, Bezos left a Wall Street career and relocated to Bellevue, Washington, to pursue a new venture: an online bookstore called Cadabra, shorthand for "abracadabra." Concerned that Cadabra sounded too much like "cadaver," Bezos swiftly rebranded the startup as Amazon — named after the Earth's largest river — a choice that reflected his ambition to build the biggest online bookstore in the world.

After months of working from the garage of a rented home, pitching angel investors, and weathering countless rejections, Bezos secured his first $1 million in seed capital. The store officially launched the following year.

"I had to take 60 meetings," Bezos recalled at the New York Times Dealbook Summit in 2024. "It was the hardest thing I've ever done."

Amazon turned 31 earlier this month, surpassing the 30-year horizon Bezos had cautioned about. Reaching this point, however, was far from straightforward. Even with financial backing, the company took years to turn a profit. Not until 2003 — nearly a decade after launch — did Amazon record its first full fiscal year of net positive income, at $35 million.

Amazon's Leadership Principles

To scale the company, Bezos embedded his now-famous leadership principles into Amazon's culture. These guidelines continue to shape decisions, hiring, and corporate strategy.

When Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as CEO in 2021, he preserved that framework. Jassy, who previously led AWS, took the helm as the company faced growing antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe over its market power across e-commerce, cloud computing, and logistics.

"We have a set of leadership principles, the 16 Leadership Principles, that we carefully have crafted and recrafted over the years," Jassy told Fortune in 2024. He noted that those philosophies also underpin Amazon's push to elevate the customer experience through artificial intelligence.

"We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore," Jassy said. "We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large."

Amazon's Equal Employment Opportunity Policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of any characteristics protected by law, including race, gender, or religion.

"Amazonians have many different backgrounds, ideas, and viewpoints," the policy states. "At Amazon, we value these differences. Our differences enable us to invent on behalf of our customers. We will ensure that all personnel actions, recruiting, hiring, training, and promotion opportunities are non-discriminatory."

Still, Amazon's culture has not been without controversy. The company has faced workplace and labor complaints, including allegations of racial discrimination and hostile warehouse conditions. More recently, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 roles across parts of its business since October, including layoffs within its artificial general intelligence unit, even as it ramps up investment in other areas.

Jassy has stated that the cuts — which followed the company's enactment of a strict return-to-office policy — were intended to reinvigorate Amazon's culture rather than address financial strain.

During a November earnings call, Jassy said the reductions were "not really financially driven, and it's not even really AI-driven, not right now at least," adding: "It's culture."

AI for the Customer Experience

Amazon is now pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI with the stated goal of enhancing the customer experience, having signed blockbuster deals with Meta and Anthropic. The spending places Amazon alongside Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet in a three-way race among the world's largest technology companies to build the infrastructure powering the generative AI boom. Amazon's original investment in Anthropic alone stands at $8 billion and is now valued at more than $74 billion.

Jassy told Fortune's Stoller that AI will transform "every customer experience that we know today and invent a whole host of new ones… The growth in AI has been so significant."

This year, Amazon plans to spend $200 billion on AI development. Bezos, for his part, sees a continually expanding business opportunity.

"What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.