The Mind-Boggling Ascent of Amazon and Jeff Bezos
“It’s one of the greatest wealth creators since 1926, and it’s reached that status in a very short period of time.”
When I first spoke with Professor Bessembinder in May, he had prepared a list of the 30 greatest wealth creators in the stock market through 2015.
Using Thomson Reuters data, I calculated that over the last 15 years through Tuesday, Amazon returned more than 8,200 percent, compared with 125 percent for Walmart, 2.2 percent for Sears,
and 302 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, dividends included.
A very small group — 4 percent of all publicly traded stocks — account for all of the stock market’s net gains from 1926 through 2016, he found.
And only 30 stocks — Amazon is now one of them — account for more than 30 percent of all of the market’s wealth creation in that 90-year period.
What’s more, Professor Bessembinder found that Amazon’s annualized return through
2016 was 37.4 percent, the highest of all the top 30 wealth creators.
Exxon, for example, which has created more than $1 trillion in wealth for shareholders since 1926, more than any other company,
ground out its gains at a slower pace: It has an annualized return of only 11.9 percent, Professor Bessembinder said.
Of course, while Amazon’s market power has been wonderful for its own investors, it has damaged
many of its competitors — diminishing the wealth of shareholders of those companies.
Bespoke Investment Group, a stock market research firm, has another way of comparing Amazon’s stock returns with those of its retail competitors.
If you had invested $1,000 in Amazon in July 2002 — and had held onto your shares — that money would be worth $83,000 today.