Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will depart his post later this year, handing the helm over to the company's top cloud executive, Andy Jassy. Bezos will become Amazon's Executive Chairman of the Board.
The transition will take effect, the company said, in the second half of 2021.
Bezos, 57, created Amazon in 1994 and has since turned the one-time online bookstore into a global mega-retailer in various categories, from electronics to food to streaming. In January of last year, under Bezos' leadership, Amazon reached a $1 trillion market cap; it is now worth more than $1.6 trillion.
"Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it's consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it's hard to put attention on anything else," Bezos said in a letter to Amazon Staff on Tuesday.
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The news came as part of the fourth-quarter earnings report from Amazon. The company is handily beating the Wall Street analysts' forecasts for revenue and earnings and capping a banner year as the pandemic boosted its retail and cloud companies.
The business shares were virtually flat shortly after the market closed on Tuesday but added nearly 1 percent two hours after the closing bell. Over the past year, Amazon's stock has risen almost 69 percent.
The organization had kept its succession plans secret. However, onlookers suspected that Jeff Bezos' eventual successor would be either Jassy or Jeff Wilke, CEO of the worldwide market sector of Amazon. Wilke will retire in 2021, Amazon announced in August. In the third quarter, Jassy, 53, will become CEO.
Brian Olsavsky, the company's chief financial officer, said on a media call that the executive move was agreed upon in consultation with Amazon's board of directors. Jeff Bezos will remain very active and have his fingerprints on several different aspects of the company, he said. Olsavsky said that Jassy is a visionary leader who will bring his own set of skills, but Amazon expects a lot of stability with the change.
Bezos said he would remain active in big Amazon ventures and have more time to concentrate on the Bezos Earth Fund, the Washington Post, and the Amazon Day 1 Fund, his Blue Origin spaceship venture.
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Who is Jeff Bezos of Amazon
In January of 1964, Jeff Bezos' mother, Jackie, was a teenager when she had him. She recently married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, who adopted Jeff. Jeff did not know until he was ten that Miguel was not his real dad, but he says he was more worried about finding that he wanted to get glasses than he was about the news.
From an early age, Bezos displayed signs of genius. He ripped his crib apart with a screwdriver when he was a toddler because he wanted to sleep in a real bed.
For Bezos, his grandfather, Preston Gise, was an immense inspiration and helped ignite his intellectual pursuits' enthusiasm. In his statement in 2010, Bezos said Gise taught him "it's harder to be kind than clever."
Bezos, along with his partner, began the Dream Institute, a 10-day summer camp for children, after spending a miserable summer working at McDonald's as a teenager. A child was fined $600, and six students managed to sign up. The "Lord of the Rings" sequence made the list of readings required.
At Princeton University, Bezos later went to college and majored in computer science. He turned down work offers from Intel and Bell Labs upon graduation to join a startup called Fitel.
Bezos considered working with Halsey Minor, who would later discover CNET, to launch a company that would distribute news via fax after leaving Fitel. He got a position at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund, and after four years, he became a senior vice president.
Bezos decided to leave D.E. Shaw, although he had an incredible work. David E. Shaw, his manager at the company, tried to convince Bezos to stay. But Bezos was still determined to start his own company, feeling that he would instead try to fail at a startup than never try at all. And Amazon was born like that.
