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Turning $1,000 into $1 million through stock investments is possible but requires extraordinary patience over several decades.
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Walmart reached the million-dollar milestone for early investors who purchased shares in August 1982 and held on for 43 years.
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Netflix delivered the fastest path to $1 million, turning $1,000 into seven figures in a 22-year growth spurt.
This is real. It is actually possible to make a million dollars in the stock market with just a $1,000 investment.
However, these big gains are never quick. The $1,000,000 payouts are also quite rare. Few investments can combine the multi-decade longevity and game-changing business success that’s required to meet that lofty goal.
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I found four interesting examples of early $1,000 investments blooming into million-dollar wealth over time. Others may exist, especially if you look at very long time periods. I’m not necessarily recommending all of these stocks, because their lucrative history doesn’t guarantee market-beating returns in the future.
On that note, none of these names will need much of an introduction. Here are four stocks that turned $1,000 into a cool million, with any dividends along the way reinvested in more of the same stock. I’ll show you the latest month you had to invest $1,000 in each stock in order to generate a $1,000,000 total return by the end of April, 2025.
Retail empire Walmart (NYSE: WMT) is a classic example of slow and steady winning the race. The first store opened its doors in 1962. The first billion-dollar annual sales were seen in the 1980s, amid a nationwide expansion of the store network. Last year’s total sales clocked in at $681 billion, generating $12.7 billion of free cash flows.
As you can see in the chart above, you’d have a million dollars in the bank if you started a $1,000 Walmart investment in the summer of 1982. There were some slow periods, like the mid-1990s and the first few years of the new millennium, but Walmart’s intermittent growth spurts got the job done. These days, the stock is soaring again on Walmart’s newfound success in e-commerce sales.
A $1,000 stake in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) stock would have taken about 35 years to make you a millionaire. The company launched the first commercially successful version of Windows later that year, with a clickable graphical user interface and multimedia support. The internet was quietly emerging from a pure research stage, though the first user-friendly Web browser was still two years away.
