Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will step down as the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and will be replaced by Andy Jassy during the third quarter of 2021. The surprise announcement from the company came on Tuesday. Bezos will remain the executive chair.

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Jassy had long been seen as Bezos' natural replacement. The 52-year-old, who was in contention for the role with Jeff Wilke, is currently the chief executive of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). Wilke headed Amazon’s retail business until his retirement last year.

AWS, which provides cloud computing and storage for governments and companies including McDonald’s and Netflix, is one of the company’s fast-growing and most important businesses. According to The Guardian, this branch of the company accounted for 10 percent of sales in the last quarter and 52 percent of the company’s profits.

In September 2020, The Washington Post carried a profile on him after it was all but established that he would succeed Bezos following Wilke’s surprise announcement of early retirement.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 after attending Harvard Business School. Back then the company, which now employs over 8,75,000 people, had only a few hundred employees. The company’s current market valuation is said to be around $1.64 trillion.

In the early 2000s, Jassy worked as a technical assistant for Bezos before leading the company’s march outside of book sales.

“You want to be reinventing when you are healthy, you want to be reinventing all the time,” Jassy said in December at a company forum. “You have got to be manancial and relentless and tenacious about getting to the truth.... You have to know what’s working and what’s not working.”

In the same speech, Jassy underlined that just 83 of the Fortune 500 companies from 1970 are still on the list. Only half are on the list from 2000.

“It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time,” Jassy said, adding, to stay on the list, “you are going to have to reinvent yourself” and often more than once.

He further said the COVID-19 pandemic had boosted the shift to the cloud.

“When you look back on the history of the cloud it will turn out the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years,” Jassy said.

In September 2020, in a podcast for his alma mater Harvard Business School, Jassy looked back a bit and said he took his final exam on Friday in the May of 1997. The next Monday he was reporting for the job at Amazon.

“No, I didn’t know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be. It was super important to the Amazon people that we come that Monday.”

Jassy, a sports and music enthusiast, is married to Elana Rochelle Caplan and is the father of two children. He has spoken out on social issues occasionally, tweeting about the need for police accountability after Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, was slain in her home by white policemen during a botched raid, and in favour of LGBTQ rights.

Bezos, on the other hand, is now expected to focus on other key business areas for the company.

“When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else,” he said.

“As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions. I’ve never had more energy, and this isn’t about retiring. I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have,” he said.

(Edited by : Pranati Deva)