Amazon just drove past Walmart’s quarterly sales (Matthias Balk/Getty Images)

Big Business

Walmart finally fell behind Amazon in revenue

Despite being giant retailers, their overall businesses are very different.

2/20/25 8:29AM

Well, it finally happened: Amazon’s top-line numbers beat Walmart’s. Amazon brought in a record $187.8 billion in sales last quarter, surpassing the $180.6 billion Walmart reported today.

Walmart stock is selling off ferociously, down 8% premarket, on expectations of slowing growth even though overall, the company saw a strong holiday season.

The two giant retailers have been battling it out for ages. But while the e-commerce everything store that’s picked up some brick-and-mortar locations along the way is still a huge retail competitor with the brick-and-mortar everything store that built a substantial online marketplace, the comparison doesn’t go much deeper these days.

While their headline revenue figures are tight, Amazon’s revenue sources are much more varied. Walmart sells goods at its Walmart and Sam’s Club stores around the world. Memberships to Sam’s Club and subscriptions to Walmart+ provide a much smaller second source. (Walmart also has a small but growing advertising business that brought in $4.4 billion last year.)

Meanwhile, Amazon, in addition to revenue from online and physical stores, also makes money from a wide variety of subscription services; its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services; and advertising, among others.

Amazon’s online and physical store sales (Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods) have similar margins to Walmart, which has an e-commerce business in addition to its 10,500 stores.

Where Amazon really sets itself apart from Walmart is in its large, high-margin divisions, including AWS and its advertising business.

Amazon brought in $59 billion in profit last year, for a net profit margin of more than 9%. Meanwhile, Walmart brought in $19.4 billion in profit last year, for razor-thin margins of 2.9%.

That gulf in margins really shows up in the value of the companies.

Amazon, which a decade ago was worth less than Walmart, now has a market cap of three Walmarts.

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Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5