Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon CEO after 27 years

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, says he is stepping down as the CEO, leaving the company he founded 27 years ago. He will be handing over to Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services while he transitions to the role of executive chair in the third quarter of this year.

The ecommerce giant made the announcement alongside an impressive fourth-quarter 2020 earnings, its biggest-ever quarter of revenue and net income. Net sales increased 44% to $125.6 billion in the fourth quarter while Net income increased to $7.2 billion in the fourth quarter.

For the full year, Net sales increased 38% to $386.1 billion and Net income increased to $21.3 billion compared with net income of $11.6 billion in 2019.

According to Jeff in a statement, “Amazon is what it is because of invention. We do crazy things together and then make them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “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. When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention. Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition.”

In a memo to employees, Bezos said the transition will give him “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.”

Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and built Amazon’s cloud services business, which started out as a small addition to its ecommerce operations but has grown in recent years to become a major part of its profits and one of the leaders of the cloud computing industry.

Aged 57, Jeff Bezos is the richest men on the world with a net worth of $192.6 billion as at the time of this report (according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List)

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as an online bookstore in 2003 and took it public with an IPO three years after. In 1998, Bezos diversified into the online sale of music and video, and by the end of the year he had expanded the company’s products to include a variety of other consumer goods.

Now the company is the world’s largest online marketplace, AI assistant provider, live-streaming platform and cloud computing platform as measured by revenue and market capitalization