The stock market is a weighing machine of companies' potential rather than their current circumstances. That is doubly true for Amazon.
Amazon.com Inc. on Tuesday briefly reached a stock market value of $1 trillion. It's a meaningless (and unoriginal) milestone but a notable symbol for a company that until recently hardly looked like a world-shaking giant. Amazon's market cap is six times what it was at this point in 2014, or a gain of $840 billion. It took Google 14 years to reach that stock market value, and Amazon has padded its total by that much in just the last four.
It's a stunning ascent up the ranks of the world's most valuable companies. But Amazon at $1 trillion rests in part on a vision of a company that doesn't exist. The mirage of a much more profitable, even more sprawling and powerful Amazon may be real eventually, but it isn't today.