Here's how Amazon just passed Exxon to become the fourth-most valuable company

Amazon passed Exxon this morning to become the fourth-most valuable company (and tech company) in the U.S., behind Apple, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft. As of this writing, Amazon is worth about $362 billion, versus $357 billion for Exxon, according to Yahoo Finance.

Amazon has been a riddle for many investors since its inception - the company has never booked huge profits, instead preferring to plow most of its increases in revenue back into the company to build business lines. But in the last year, one of those new-ish businesses, Amazon Web Services, has been generating so much profit that Amazon has been throwing considerably more down to the bottom line. This chart from Statista shows that Amazon's profit for the last three quarters has been higher than any time since 2009.

Statista

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Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.