“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO,” Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said in a Tuesday email to employees published by the company. “In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives,” Bezos said. “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have 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,” Bezos said.
2020 was probably Amazon’s most eventful year in its recent history, as e-commerce deliveries skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. This quarter, the company posted profits of US$21.3 billion, around double of the same quarter last year, even as the company spent record amounts of money on hiring as it attempted to cope with the surge in demand.
By the end of this quarter, the CEO role will have transitioned to Jassy, an Amazon veteran who is currently heading Amazon Web Services, the content delivery network and data centre business of the e-commerce giant. Jassy has headed AWS as CEO since 1997, spending almost 24 years in the role. A large portion of the internet’s websites and services run on AWS’s infrastructure, and the business is one of Amazon’s most successful verticals.
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