The “Trillion Dollar Club” just gained a new member, and it’s a name every American household knows: Walmart.
Today, Walmart’s market cap officially crossed the $1 trillion mark. It’s a massive milestone that reflects the retail company’s continued dominance of the market over the years. Since gaining dominance in brick-and-mortar retail in the 1990s and 2000s, Walmart spent much of the 2010s working out how to approach e-commerce. Today, in the middle of the 2020s, Walmart continues to be the largest retailer in the world, and it has made incredible progress expanding its online footprint, with digital sales growing three times faster than Amazon.
But while consumers are busy enjoying the benefits of this competition through lower prices, faster shipping and more choices, the antitrust case against Amazon initiated by Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan grows more outdated by the day.
Just last year, during an economics hearing in March 2025, the FTC was asked a fundamental question: Is Walmart a competitor of Amazon? The response from the agency wasn’t a clear “yes.” Instead, FTC representatives were unable to confirm if the world’s largest was even a competitor to Amazon in their antitrust framework.
This antitrust case against Amazon is built on Khan’s premise that Amazon is an untouchable monopoly with no real alternatives. Yet, to justify this extreme assertion, the agency couldn’t even acknowledge the existence of an even larger retailer that also happens to be the world’s largest private employer. Grounded in progressive talking points rather than real market analysis, the FTC’s case against Amazon is premised on the idea that Amazon has little competition in the retail market. In the face of Walmart’s continued success, such a premise is preposterous.
Walmart’s ascent to a $1 trillion valuation definitively debunks the FTC’s core narrative. By clinging to narrow, outdated definitions of “online marketplaces” while ignoring the reality of omnichannel retail, which is how real people actually shop today, the lawsuit ignores the very competition it claims to protect.
President Trump’s FTC should look at this news as just another reason to throw out Biden’s progressive, Neo-Brandeisian approach to antitrust. There is no denying that the retail industry in 2026 is fiercely competitive.
Congratulations to Walmart on joining the $1 trillion club. Regulators should give up on trying to claim Amazon is some sort of retail monopoly and turn their attention to more important matters, like combating fraud and organized retail crime.
Image via Unsplash.