With a market cap of $702.5 billion, Amazon has become the third most valuable company in the world, racing past Microsoft, which has a market cap of $699.2 billion.

According to a report in The New York Post, Amazon stock surged 2.6 per cent on Wednesday, taking the company's market cap ahead of Microsoft for the first time.

Apple tops the list with $849.2 billion market cap, followed by Google's parent company Alphabet at $745.1 billion.

With $521.5 billion market cap, Facebook is at the fifth spot.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now the world's richest man, not just at present, but of all time.

Both Bloomberg and Forbes have put Bezos on top of their billionaire lists. Bloomberg said Bezos' net worth reached $106 billion while Forbes put it at $105 billion, Xinhua news agency reported.

The previous record was held by Microsoft founder Bill Gates with $100 billion in 1999.

The majority of Bezos' net worth comes from the 78.9 million shares of Amazon stock he owns.

Amazon briefly overtook Microsoft in intraday trading on Feb. 7, but then its stock fell 3% before closing to keep the online retailer in fourth place.

While Amazon grew with dominating the ecommerce space, it is now aggressively competing with Microsoft in cloud infrastructure. According to a CNBC report, Amazon has a big early lead in this space, which is generating plenty of excitement on Wall Street.

Having started as an online bookstore, amazon has since diversified into not just a full-fledged ecommerce website, but also now has a presence in video streaming, software services, kindles, consumer electronics such as smart speakers, tablets, Fire TV stick and also its own private label Amazon Basics. It also has a warehousing network, and has also forayed into grocery, having recently opened a one-of-its kind futuristic retail store.