Amazon hits the $1,000 share price mark for the first time in 20 years

In its 20-year history, for the first time, Amazon crossed the much-awaited valuation of $1,000 mark for its share price on Tuesday morning.

Shares of Amazon traded as high as $1,001.20 before closing at $996.70, up 92 cents on Tuesday, giving the company a market cap of more than $477 billion.

Amazon is now the fourth most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. The top five, Apple, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, have emerged as the dominant forces in technology. Amazon’s shares are up almost 33 percent for the year and up 368 percent over a five-year period.

Notably, the combined market cap of the top five S&P stocks is about $3 trillion which is more than 13 percent of S&P stocks’ capitalisation.

Other companies that are racing to the $1,000 mark are Alphabet which is currently at $994.32, and Intuitive Surgical which is trading at $912.80. The quartet of U.S. companies already trading above $1,000 a share is Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, homebuilder NVR, online booking service Priceline and Seaboard.

What started as an online bookstore in 1995 is now an e-commerce giant. Amazon is also into Amazon Web Services business, which is now the largest provider of cloud computing services in the world.