Amazon on Tuesday said its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, would step down as chief executive officer and become executive chairman after nearly 30 years at the company.
The transition will promote the company’s current cloud computing head, Andy Jassy, to the next chief executive of the company, as Bezos hands over the reins for the first time since he founded Amazon and oversaw its evolution from small online bookstore to ubiquitous retail juggernaut.
Jassy, 52, joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School. “I took my last final exam at HBS, the first Friday of May in 1997, and I started Amazon next Monday,” Jassy said in a Harvard Business School podcast in September. “No, I didn’t know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be.”
Jassy went on to found Amazon Web Services, according to the company’s website, a cloud hosting product that creates the infrastructure used by millions of companies, schools, and governments to run websites and apps.
In the years since, AWS has grown into a cloud platform used by millions that dominates legacy players like Oracle and Microsoft.
The company now owns almost half the world’s public cloud infrastructure market. It boasts a dominant 30% market share of the cloud computing market.
Competitors are eyeing Amazon’s top spot, however, with Microsoft and Google announcing growth in their cloud computing businesses in the fourth quarter.
His promotion underscored the importance of web services to Amazon’s future, said Tom Johnson, chief transformation officer at Mindshare Worldwide.
“Jassy’s background in steering AWS shows just how top-of-mind those services are to Amazon’s business strategy,” Johnson said. “It will be interesting to see how that affects their strategy and balancing that priority with a growing ad business and the commerce behemoth.”
Bezos said in a letter to staff on Tuesday that he had “full confidence” in Jassy. “Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have,” he said. “He will be an outstanding leader.”
Bezos added that he would stay engaged in Amazon initiatives. “But I will 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,” he wrote. “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.”
Jassy is known for understanding technical details, and has bestowed a rock-star aura to keynotes at AWS’s annual Las Vegas conference. He has occasionally spoken out on social issues, 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, and in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.
Amazon said it was not announcing an AWS replacement for Jassy yet.
