Walmart's (WMT +0.92%) share price is up roughly 15% in 2026 so far, as enthusiasm around the company's growing e-commerce segment and investments in artificial intelligence help push the stock higher. On Tuesday, Feb. 3, its market capitalization hit $1 trillion, making it the first "brick and mortar" retailer to achieve this status.
I put "brick and mortar" in quotes because it's no coincidence that Walmart is joining an exclusive club that is dominated by tech giants. In recent years, Walmart's heavy investments in e-commerce and AI technologies have made it, effectively, a tech stock. Yet before it reinvented itself, Walmart encountered rough patches that made its stock trajectory rocky, albeit meteoric.
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From humble beginnings to trillion-dollar gains
Founder Sam Walton launched the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, after being unable to convince his former partners to agree to a cost-cutting strategy. His theory that lower prices would lead to much larger sales, and ultimately greater profits, resonated especially well in rural areas where few retailers bothered to operate. Six years later, Walmart expanded to Missouri and Oklahoma, and in 1969, it went public at a split-adjusted IPO price of $0.0027 per share.
NASDAQ: WMT
Key Data Points
In the 30 years after its October 1969 IPO, Walmart's share price surged 591,400% as its store locations grew exponentially. In 1974, it paid its first dividend, and has increased payouts every year since, a 52-year streak that makes it a rare Dividend King.
Yet this seemingly unstoppable juggernaut was caught flat-footed by the e-commerce revolution. According to one former team leader, its CEO in the late 1990s dismissed the idea of e-commerce, saying that Walmart's single top store would always generate more sales than the Internet.
From January 2000 to January 2013, the share price remained essentially flat, as the company's slowness to adapt created an opening for e-commerce giant Amazon. Since then, the share price has more than quintupled as the company ramped up its e-commerce platform and investments in AI technology.
So, how much would $100 in Walmart's IPO be worth now?
Walmart's stock IPO'd at $16.50 a share. That $100 would buy you 6.06 shares back then. When you factor in the 12 stock splits since the IPO, those 6.06 shares would have grown to roughly 37,236 shares today (rounding to the nearest whole share). Multiply those 37,236 shares by the current share price ($128), and your $100 investment is now worth approximately $4,766,208. That's without dividends reinvested.
As for dividends, Walmart pays $0.23 per share per quarter. Multiply that by the 37,236 shares, and you get $8,564.28 in dividends every quarter, or $34,257.12 a year in dividends. The rise is a testament to the power of letting a world-dominating brand compound for decades.
