Between 2005 and 2022, Amazon's annual revenue grew from $8.5 billion to over $500 billion while American parents named their babies Luna in rapidly increasing numbers, correlating at 0.9663 across eighteen years. The most e-commerce-optimistic reading is that Jeff Bezos's logistics empire has become so pervasive that Americans are naming their children after it by association—Luna being, after all, the moon, and Amazon being, after all, everywhere you look when you look up. A more grounded reading is that both numbers went up because the 2010s were a time of cultural and commercial expansion. The babies, for their part, did not choose their names or their delivery service.
Amazon's revenue growth from $8.5 billion in 2005 to over $500 billion by 2022 reflects the company's expansion from online bookstore to global logistics, cloud computing, and retail platform. The name Luna rose from outside the top 1,000 baby names in the early 2000s to number 10 by 2022, driven by pop culture influences including the Harry Potter character Luna Lovegood, the Chrissy Teigen-John Legend baby naming in 2016, and broader trends toward celestial and nature-inspired names. Both are upward-trending series across the same 18-year window, driven by entirely unrelated cultural and economic forces.
Eighteen years of mutual growth between any two expanding phenomena will produce a strong correlation. The name Luna and the everything store share a timeline, not a cause. The moon has no opinion on two-day shipping.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Amazon annual revenue” vs “Babies named Luna (US)” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
