Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos will step down as the chief executive officer (CEO) of the e-commerce giant on Monday after serving for 30 years, passing over the baton to Andy Jassy.

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Bezos had already informed his employees about the decision through a letter in February. "We chose that date because it's sentimental for me, the day Amazon was incorporated in 1994, exactly 27 years ago," Bezos said in the meeting.

He will now take charge as the executive chairman of the company, while Jassy, currently the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the firm’s cloud division, will take over as the CEO.

“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become the CEO… Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence,” Bezos’ letter to his employees read.

Bezos' natural replacement

Jassy (52), who was in contention for the role with Jeff Wilke, was seen as Bezos' natural replacement for a long time.

Under him, AWS, which provides cloud computing and storage for governments and companies, including McDonald’s and Netflix, has become one of the company’s fast-growing and most important businesses.

Wilke, on the other hand, headed Amazon’s retail business until his retirement last year.

After it was all but established that Jassy would succeed Bezos following Wilke’s surprise announcement of early retirement, The Washington Post carried a profile on him in September 2020. It said Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 after attending Harvard Business School.

When Jassy joined the three-year-old Amazon, it had only a few hundred employees, compared to 8,75,000 staff now. The company’s current market valuation is said to be around $1.64 trillion.

Jassy’s early years at Amazon

In a podcast for his alma mater Harvard Business School in September 2020, Jassy said he took his final exam on a Friday in May 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.”

Within years in the early 2000s, Jassy moved up the ladder to work as a technical assistant to Bezos before leading the company’s march outside of book sales.

The AWS head

Jassy started AWS, which provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs, in 2006. According to its latest earnings report, AWS raked in $12.7 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of FY 2020-21. The service competes with Microsoft Corp’s Azure and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud.

At a company forum last December, he said the COVID-19 pandemic had boosted the shift to cloud.

Jassy underlined that just 83 of the Fortune 500 companies from 1970 are still on the list, while only half are there from 2000.

Personal background

Jassy, a sports and music enthusiast, is married to Elana Rochelle Caplan and is 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 killed in her home by White policemen during a botched raid. He is in favour of LGBTQ rights.

First Published:May 27, 2021 8:49 PM IST