Jeff Bezos gives up CEO post in Amazon and passes the torch to Andy Jassy

Jeff Bezos, the main man behind Amazon, is vacating his post as the company’s chief executive officer. The world’s richest person on earth is stepping down later this year and would be taking on a new role.

The announcement names the new Amazon CEO

Jeff Bezos said that as he leaves the CEO post, he will be transitioning as Amazon’s executive chair in the third quarter of 2021. He will be replaced by Amazon Web Services’ chief Andy Jassy.

The billionaire announced the change of his title on Feb. 2, and he did this by sending an email to his employees. The note was also published on Amazon’s own website on the same day.

“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO,” Jeff Bezos wrote. “In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives.”

He added, “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.”

A few hours after it was revealed that Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon’s chief, his company’s shares have increased a bit. The tech and online retailer firm hit on both earnings per share and revenues.

Who is Andy Jassy?

Jeff Bezos’ successor has been with Amazon for 24 years. He joined the company in 1997, just after he took his final exams at the Harvard Business School.

As per the Daily Mail, he was the one who built Amazon Web Services and turned it into the $40 billion internet-dominating business that it is today. The 52-year-old Andy Jassy was also the executive who canceled the controversial Parler app service from AWS’ platform.

Jassy grew AWS into a cloud platform that is now being used by millions and has already surpassed other players in the field, including Microsoft and Oracle. Today, under his leadership, Amazon Web Services owns nearly half the world’s public cloud infrastructure business.

“Jassy’s background in steering AWS shows just how top-of-mind those services are to Amazon’s business strategy,” The Guardian quoted chief transformation officer at Mindshare Worldwide, Tom Johnson, as saying regarding Jassy’s promotion. “It will be interesting to see how that affects their strategy and balancing that priority with a growing ad business and the commerce behemoth.”