If You'd Put $1,000 Into Amazon Stock 20 Years Ago, Here's What You'd Have Today

Amazon store is seen at Promenade Street in Davos, Switzerland

(Image credit: Ömer Sercan Karku/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Amazon.com (AMZN) stock is underperforming the broader market by a wide margin so far this year, but it's been a remarkably remunerative bet for long-term shareholders.

Truly patient investors in Amazon stock have enjoyed astonishing returns through the decades.

Amazon, which joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in February 2024, suffered some profound sell-offs over the years. At one point during its history, from peak to trough, Amazon stock lost more than half its value, wiping out more than a trillion dollars in market value.

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That's just the price of admission to one of the best stocks of all time.

An analysis by Hendrik Bessembinder, finance professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, found that AMZN was one of the 30 best stocks in the world through three decades.

Between its initial public offering in 1997 and December 2020, Amazon stock created nearly $1.6 trillion in wealth for shareholders, according to Bessembinder's model, which includes cash flows in and out of the business and other adjustments.

Amazon started as a modest website for book buyers. Today, it's the nation's largest e-commerce company.

That's only part of the story behind its extraordinary wealth creation. The firm is a giant in cloud-based services and artificial intelligence (AI), and a leader in streaming media and digital advertising.

Amazon has a massive footprint in the analog world, too. It owns the Whole Foods grocery store chain and maintains sprawling logistics operations. The latter comprise a vast assemblage of distribution centers and fleets of commercial aircraft and trucks, among other capital-intensive assets.

The bottom line on Amazon stock?

Which brings us to what $1,000 invested in Amazon stock 20 years ago would be worth today.

As you can see in the chart, if you'd invested $1,000 in Amazon stock a couple of decades ago, it would today be worth about $93,000. That's good for an annualized total return of almost 26%.

By comparison, the same sum invested in the S&P 500 in the same time frame would theoretically be worth about $8,000 today. That comes to an annualized total return (price change plus dividends) of 10.9%.

If past is anything like prologue, Amazon will continue to outperform the broader market at a healthy clip. For its entire history as a publicly traded company, Amazon stock generated an annualized total return of more than 31%. The S&P 500's annualized total return comes to 10.8% in the same span.

Put another way, Amazon stock has more than tripled the performance of the broader market since it went public. The way things are going, bulls are probably feeling pretty confident about Amazon keeping its streak alive.

Wall Street sure thinks it can — at least in the next 12 months or so. Of the 66 analysts issuing opinions on Amazon surveyed by S&P Global Market Intelligence, 47 call it a Strong Buy, 16 say Buy, and three have it at Hold.

That works out to a rare consensus recommendation of Strong Buy, and with high conviction. Amazon makes the list of analysts' best Dow Jones stocks, as well as the Street's top S&P 500 stocks to buy now.

"Amazon.com is one of the few large-cap companies benefiting from the secular shift to e-commerce," notes Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein, who rates shares at Outperform (the equivalent of Buy). "The Whole Foods acquisition created another leg of growth. Finally, AMZN's Web Services segment is now the global leader in cloud computing and has significant value."

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Dan Burrows is Kiplinger's senior investing writer, having joined the publication full time in 2016.

A long-time financial journalist, Dan is a veteran of MarketWatch, CBS MoneyWatch, SmartMoney, InvestorPlace, DailyFinance and other tier 1 national publications. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Consumer Reports and his stories have appeared in the New York Daily News, the San Jose Mercury News and Investor's Business Daily, among many other outlets. As a senior writer at AOL's DailyFinance, Dan reported market news from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Once upon a time – before his days as a financial reporter and assistant financial editor at legendary fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily – Dan worked for Spy magazine, scribbled away at Time Inc. and contributed to Maxim magazine back when lad mags were a thing. He's also written for Esquire magazine's Dubious Achievements Awards.

In his current role at Kiplinger, Dan writes about markets and macroeconomics.

Dan holds a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Disclosure: Dan does not trade individual stocks or securities. He is eternally long the U.S equity market, primarily through tax-advantaged accounts.