Don't forget to get to know all the Imposters cast members during the premiere February 7 at 10/9c. Related Content 7 Things We Learned from the First 12 Minutes of Imposters
Back when the company had its IPO in 1997, Amazon was pretty much just an online bookstore. The company sold its shares for just $18 to raise $54 million at a valuation of $438 million. Today, it takes Amazon about two days to raise that much cash (based on its 2016 free cash flow). If you had been able to buy $2,000 of Amazon's IPO and held on to it for the past 20 years, you'd be sitting on about $1,136,000 in Amazon stock today. That's a return of 56,821%, or an average of around 37% annually.
Perhaps it's fitting, then, that Amazon (amzn) has since joined the top 10. In fact, Amazon had the biggest jump among the top companies on the list. A year ago, Amazon was worth $175 billion and ranked 19 among the most valuable Fortune 500 companies. Amazon's shares have dropped recently.