Sometime last week, a list came out that, in a normal news cycle, would have stopped people mid-scroll. After 13 years of Walmart sitting comfortably at the top of the Fortune 500 — the definitive ranking of America's biggest companies by revenue — Amazon knocked it off. Not by a little. Amazon posted $717 billion in revenue for 2025, edging past Walmart's $713 billion to claim a spot that, for the past seven decades, only four companies have ever held: General Motors, ExxonMobil, Walmart, and now Amazon.
It's a genuinely remarkable moment. Amazon debuted on the Fortune 500 list just over two decades ago at number 492. It is now number one. That is not a story about a company climbing a leaderboard — it's a story about a company rewriting what a large business can look like, how fast it can move, and crucially, who pays the price when it does.
Because here's the part that doesn't fit neatly on a trophy: Amazon reached the summit in the same year it ended the employment of 30,000 people. The largest workforce reduction in its history. And CEO Andy Jassy says, without much hesitation, that it was the right call.
That tension — extraordinary growth running alongside extraordinary job cuts — is the real story here.
