Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO on Monday, exactly 27 years since he started the e-commerce giant in a garage in West Bellevue, Wash. Bezos is handing day-to-day duties to his longtime deputy Andy Jassy but will continue to hold considerable sway as the company’s executive chairman.
Bezos in a letter to employees at Amazon in February 2021 said that he will transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board. While Bezos will continue to focus on new products and early initiatives, Jassy will take care of all things at Amazon. Here’s what you should know about Andy Jassy, the new CEO at one of the world’s largest cloud computing businesses.
Under Bezos, Amazon transformed itself from an online bookseller startup into the world’s largest online retailer. Bezos led the company safely through the dot-com bubble bursting in the early 2000s then launched a period of ruthless expansion, pushing its influence far beyond Internet commerce.
Amazon now commands sizable businesses in grocery stores, cloud computing, smart devices, filmmaking and even fashion brands.
“Jeff is really not going anywhere,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer, told reporters in February. “It’s more of a restructuring of who’s doing what.”
Jassy, who joined Amazon in 1997, had been the chief executive of Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing juggernaut that is Amazon’s most profitable division and helps power large swaths of the Internet, including Netflix, Facebook and Twitter.
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