Jeff Bezos to Step Down as Amazon CEO

Bezos Stepping Down as Amazon CEO

Amazon (AMZN) said today that Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, and CEO, would be stepping down from his role in the third quarter of 2021.

Bezos will be transitioning to the executive chair of the company.

Andy Jassy (pictured above), who currently leads Amazon Web Services (AWS), is set to take over as CEO of the company, Amazon said in a statement. Jassy has been with the company for nearly 24 years, according to his LinkedIn.

“In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have,” Bezos wrote in a letter to employees published online.

“He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.”

“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,” he added.

“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.”

Charlie O’Shea, lead retail analyst at Moody’s Investors Services, said Bezos’ departure and replacement with Jassy would be an “absolutely seamless transition.”

“One of the things we’ve learned about Amazon is, there’s an incredibly deep bench there. They’ve turned over CFOs without missing a beat,” O’Shea told Yahoo Finance Live.

“It’s not like Jeff Bezos is going to go sailing off into the sunset here. He’s going to be still very much involved in the overall strategy of the company, he’s the largest shareholder. There’s a whole lot of things that will keep him wedded to this company.”

“Andy has done a terrific job of AWS, I mean the numbers bear that out,” O’Shea added.

“AWS continues to be the profit engine of the company and supports the retail business as a continuing investment.”

In the fourth quarter, AWS grew revenue 28% to $12.74 billion. That year-over-year growth rate held roughly steady versus the third quarter but slowed over 2019, as the segment matured further as the U.S. market share leader in cloud web hosting. And AWS operating income grew even more strongly, jumping 37% to nearly $3.6 billion.

The announcement of Bezos’ departure came in tandem with Amazon’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings results, which handily topped expectations.

The e-commerce giant reported earnings of $14.09 per share on record revenue of $125.56 billion, compared to consensus estimates for $7.34 per share on revenue of $119.70 billion, according to Bloomberg data.

An Uncomfortable Reality

Bloomberg's Brad Stone wrote, Bezos’s decision to step down also reflects an uncomfortable reality for one of the wealthiest people in the world: The walls of his highly compartmentalized empire have been crumbling for some time. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be Jeff Bezos (at least by Bezos’s standards). He presides over a collection of properties that spans not only Amazon but The Washington Post, several philanthropies, and a space company, Blue Origin LLC, that lags far behind its chief rival, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

Read: The Second Act of Jeff Bezos Could Be As Big As His First

Just consider the ways Bezos’s various assets have collided over the past few years. His ownership of The Washington Post consistently angered the last U.S. president and arguably cost Amazon the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract, which the Donald Trump-controlled Defense Department awarded to Microsoft. When he traveled to India in early 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declined to meet with him, and a senior official criticized the Post’s coverage of the country.

Union organizers perpetually protest Amazon’s treatment of its blue-collar workforce and periodically show up in front of Bezos’s homes - and once, with gallingly poor judgment, even wheeled out a guillotine. When Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, started canvassing climate philanthropies last year to begin making the first of $10 billion in grants from the Bezos Earth Fund, at least some of the organizations were skeptical of Amazon’s relationship with its front-line workers and hesitant to accept Bezos’s largesse.

Many of the criticisms levied against Bezos and his empire are reasonable and can be addressed. But the most constrained resource in Bezos’s web of conflicting business holdings is his own time, and that can’t be easily reconciled said Stone (watch the video above).