Jeff Bezos Stepping Down From Amazon

On Tuesday, Feb. 2, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, announced that he is stepping down as CEO. He is stepping down for personal reasons. He is planning to step down the summer of this year. Bezos is going to hand over the company to Andy Jassy. 

Jassy is the chief executive of Amazon’s cloud and computing division. The had off is planned to be effective, immediately, in the third quarter, which is July.

Jassy has been a trusted lieutenant to Bezos throughout their time together, since 1997, when Jassy joined the company in its early years. In the early 2000s Jassy started to shadow Bezos to meetings and later became a big proponent of the company.

Matt McIlwain, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, an early investor in Amazon, said that Jassy was a perfect fit to become the next CEO as he was in the company and had been around since the start.

McIlwain was also quite surprised about Bezos stepping down, as he had been so invested in the company within the last year that he did not think Bezos was ready to leave. Nevertheless, he still supports Bezos and Jassy.

Bezos has spent building this company, the store, and his business for more than two decades. He built up this $1.2 trillion company starting it as a store, then expanding it into cloud computing, entertainment and artificial intelligence for people all over the world.

Due to Amazon’s success, Bezos became the richest person on earth for a time. His personal wealth has soared to $188 billion, which was surpassed by the one and only Elon Musk.

Though in the past few years, Bezos had started to step away from day-to-day tasks of running Amazon and passing those responsibilities to two other main deputies, one being Jassy, to focus on the company’s future and personal projects.

Those include buying The Washington Post in 2013 and putting in $1 billion a year into his space travel company, Blue Origin.

Due to COVID-19 Bezos had been pulled back in Amazon’s daily operations to stabilize the company, which has been successful and more. The company has grown so much because people have been relying on Amazon for their packages and groceries.

While many think Bezos is going to disappear forever, that is in the case according to Amazon’s finance chief, Brain Olsavsky. Olsavsky says that with this transition in the company, it is just restricting who is doing what.

It seems that this new change in the company is going to be interesting, yet good one for everyone.