Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, embarks on a new stage in his career after having created one of the most thriving companies on the planet: Amazon Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN). Upon announcing on February this year, Bezos, 57, leaves former Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy in the hot seat as of Monday.
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Jeff Bezos has stepped down as Amazon’s CEO
Bezos will launch into other projects, the first one a trip to space on July 20. Still, the tech millionaire is said to continue as CEO of his board of directors, after 27 years at the helm. At present, Amazon is worth more than $1.7 trillion in the stock market and reported $386 billion in 2020.
Who is Andy Jassy?
Jeff Bezos’ replacement to deal with the day-to-day of the company is a familiar figure. Andy Jassy was the head of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) division, by far the fastest growing business for the company. It is one of the largest cloud service providers, used in several applications like Dropbox, Foursquare, and HootSuite, in a segment that today represents almost 60% of Amazon’s profits.
Over the past few years, Bezos had begun to progressively delegate several responsibilities to Jassy, his wingman ever since Amazon was a startup in the 90s.
They met in 1997 and, three years later, Jassy became Bezos’s “shadow,” attending all of his boss’ meetings and business trips. In 1997, Jassy began working at Amazon with several of his college colleagues and served as a marketing specialist.
In 2003, he founded Amazon Web Services where he remained as vice president until April 2016, when he was promoted to CEO. Accounting for 67% of the company’s entire operating profit last year, AWS generated $45 billion. It also encompasses 32% of the market share and surpasses Microsoft's Azure cloud services and Google.
A critical time for Amazon
Bezos’s departure as CEO comes at a critical time for Amazon, when the pandemic created a massive demand for their services, causing an increase in profits and hiring. The explosive growth of the company has put it in the spotlight of regulators ever since 2020, as they are keeping tabs on Amazon's powerful wallet and size.
In June, Senator Elizabeth Warren urged the Federal Trade Commission to launch a detailed review of the company’s offer to buy MGM, as the purchase could have the tinges of unfair competition within the juicy streaming business.
Amazon is part of the Entrepreneur Index, which tracks 60 of the largest publicly traded companies managed by their founders or their founders’ families.
