What Amazon’s Fortune 500 rise teaches about experimenting beyond the core business

Fortune

by Ruth Umoh

February 23, 2026

AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary

Amazon’s rise to the top of the Fortune 500, surpassing Walmart for the first time in over a decade, highlights a critical lesson for businesses: success isn’t just about dominating your core industry. While Amazon and Walmart were once seen as retail rivals—e-commerce vs. stores, software vs. logistics—the key to Amazon’s ascent lies in its ability to expand beyond traditional retail economics. By building new profit engines like Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company created strategic freedom, enabling aggressive investment in innovation and absorbing failed experiments while maintaining growth. Amazon didn’t achieve this by merely optimizing its core business. Instead, it focused on creating adjacent revenue streams with different financial dynamics. AWS, initially developed to support internal operations, evolved into a high-margin cloud computing giant, generating a significant portion of the company’s operating profit. This approach allowed Amazon to fund its retail reinvention and diversify its growth strategies. Companies like Microsoft and Apple have followed similar paths—reshaping their economics through cloud services and extended hardware value via software and services. The lesson for leaders is clear: relying solely on core business optimization won’t sustain long-term success. The real challenge is building “adjacent profit engines” that fuel future growth and provide economic flexibility. These engines don’t just diversify revenue; they create the financial runway needed to experiment boldly and adapt to changing markets. For large companies, the risk lies in becoming trapped by a business model that limits innovation and bold moves. This story isn’t just about customer focus or fostering an innovative culture—it’s about structuring profit and growth strategically. The winners are those who recognize the importance of economic flexibility over scale alone. As leaders consider their next steps, they should ask: What new businesses am I building today that will give me room to innovate tomorrow?

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Originally published on Fortune on 2/23/2026