Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO in the third quarter of 2021. He will take over as the Executive Chairman and focus on new products and early initiatives. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services will become the new CEO. Jeff Bezos has full confidence in Andy and said that he would be an outstanding leader.
The reason for Bezos to step down from the post of CEO is that it is a deep and time consuming responsibility, and it becomes difficult for him to pay attention to anything else. However, Bezos would still be involved in important initiatives at Amazon. He will get to spend more time on philanthropy and also the Bezos Earth Fund and his Day One Fund. He also has plans to spend more time with Washington Post which he purchased in 2013, and his rocket company, Blue Origin once he steps down.
Andy joined Amazon in 1997 and became a close confidant of Bezos. He is 53 years old and is described by his colleagues as a genuinely nice person who sets high expectations for his people and expects them to rise to the challenge. He led Amazon’s cloud-computing business since 2003 and helped build AWS into a massive unit that generates over $40 billion in annual revenue. According to insiders, Bezos has unbounded trust in Andy who was promoted from AWS’s Senior Vice President to CEO in 2016.
