Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, transitioning to executive chair role

SEATTLE – Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will step down as chief executive of the e-commerce giant, turning over the reins to the company’s longtime cloud-computing boss Andy Jassy.

Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, will transition to the role of executive chair in the third quarter, the company said as it announced fourth-quarter earnings.

“If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive,” Bezos said in an earnings announcement Tuesday.

The looming transition marks the most radical shake-up in Amazon’s corporate ranks in its nearly 30-year history. Under Bezos’s stewardship, Amazon evolved from an upstart online bookseller into one of the world’s most popular internet marketplaces able to quickly deliver a vast catalog of products and services. It also developed a massive, profit-driving cloud computing business that now powers websites around the world.

The company’s meteoric growth delivered massive riches to shareholders and made Bezos – depending on the day – the richest man on the planet. For all the praise on Wall Street, however, Bezos and his brass-knuckled tactics also carried great cost. Regulators increasingly viewed Amazon as a threat to competition, and the company’s own workers at times told grim tales about their mistreatment as they sought to carry out Bezos’s mission as the consumer-first “everything store.”

Bezos, who turned 57 last month and is one of the world’s wealthiest people, set up the transition to Jassy last summer, when the company announced that one of its likely successors, Jeff Wilke, would soon retire. That paved the way for Jassy to take the CEO job.

To Tom Alberg, a venture capitalist and longtime Amazon director who stepped down from the board two years ago, Jassy was the obvious choice.

“Andy has lived his whole life in that culture, and that culture is so strong,” Alberg said.

Jassy’s Amazon career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market, cloud computing, a business the company has come to dominate just as aggressively as it leads in the world of e-commerce. And the fact that Jassy will succeed Bezos offers insight into Amazon: that the company still values high-risk, high-reward bets and is less defined by online shopping.

Jassy joined the company in 1997 after graduating from Harvard University’s business school. At the time, Amazon had a few hundred employees and had just gone public. The executive pioneered the company’s entry into music sales, Amazon’s first push outside of books. In the early 2000s, Jassy shadowed Bezos as his technical assistant, something of a chief-of-staff role. And he helped launch AWS, which upended the software industry with its ability to rent space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations on Amazon’s vast array of servers.

Bezos’s own interests have changed over the years as he personally pushed into new industries. That included launching his own space-travel company, Blue Origin, and funding new philanthropic efforts. He said in a note to employees Tuesday that he would focus on these other gambits, including the Post, which he purchased in 2013.

“When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else,” he said.

Amazon’s finance chief Brian Olsavsky said Bezos will remain “very involved” even after he moves into his new role.

“We expect a lot of continuity with this transition,” Olsavsky said in a call with journalists Tuesday afternoon. Bezos, he added, “is going to have his imprint on new product developments and also key leverage [in] areas of innovation.”

Olsavsky declined to say when Bezos first approached the board about the transition to a new role, except to say that it had been planned and was done in consultation with Amazon’s directors. Five years ago, Amazon changed its management structure, naming Jassy and Wilke division CEOs, and Olsavsky said this transition was similar.

“We see the same thing happening here,” Olsavsky said. “Jeff is going to remain with Amazon in a very important role as executive chair.”

Bezos remains Amazon’s largest individual shareholder.

“Jeff is really not going anywhere,” Olsavsky said. “This is more of a restructuring of who’s doing what.”

As Amazon has grown, Bezos has increasingly become its focus, in part because the company’s soaring stock value has put his personal wealth into the stratosphere. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos is the second wealthiest person, with $188 billion, $2 billion behind Tesla founder Elon Musk.Bezos’ wealth declined in April 2019 when he divorced MacKenzie Scott, after his relationship with former news anchor Lauren Sanchez became public. The record divorce settlement gave Scott 25% of Bezos’ Amazon holdings, though Bezos retained sole voting power over the shares the two once jointly controlled, which at the time amounted to 16% of Amazon’s shares.

Like most large corporations, Amazon has been preparing its CEO succession plan for years. Still, a former Amazon director who participated in that planning over the years was surprised by the timing of Bezos’ move, in part because he’s always managed to juggle his different interests.

“I was just not expecting Jeff to step aside right now,” said Alberg, the former director. “He’s always been able to do a lot of things simultaneously.”

Amazon botched an attempt at bringing in an outsider as president and chief operating officer in 1999, when it hired Joe Galli from Black & Decker. Galli lasted a year, and Bezos decided to focus instead on building a strong bench of internal candidates for top jobs and ultimately to takeover for him, Alberg said.

“He wanted it to be somebody he knew well and the company knew well,” Alberg said.

Bezos’ next endeavors may turn out to be as significant as the second act of his Seattle-area neighbor Bill Gates, Alberg said. The Microsoft co-founder has gone on to burnish his image as one of the world’s leading philanthropists in the time after he began moving away from Microsoft in 2000, when he gave up the chief executive post he had long held. Bezos’s focus on space travel and climate change could have the same lasting impact, Alberg said.

“I think he’ll be like Gates,” Alberg said. “Twenty years from now, he’ll be remembered for one or more of those things as well.”