Today, Andy Jassy will take over as the CEO of Amazon from billionaire Jeff Bezos. Here’s everything you need to know about the CEO shakeup.
Today Jeff Bezo officially steps down as Amazon CEO on the company’s 27th birthday. Former cloud-computing boss Andy Jassy will take over the top spot. Bezos isn’t leaving Amazon behind though — he’ll transition to executive chairman of Amazon’s board after the shakeup.
The move comes at a critical time for the world’s largest online retailer, which is facing growing demands for regulatory action to control its global market dominance.
Who is Andy Jassy?
Jassy has been working at Amazon for 24 years as Bezos’ shadow and second-hand-man.
Dan Ives, another analyst at Wedbush, described Jassy as “one of the most powerful leaders, not just within the cloud and tech sector but in the world of business”.
The brains behind Amazon Web Services
Amazon’s move into cloud storage was Jassy’s idea. In the early 2000s, he identified that internal cloud storage would be a much faster way of sharing large amounts of information. Other companies eventually picked up this internal cloud network idea.
“I don’t think any of us had the audacity to predict it would grow as big or as fast as it has,” Jassy has said of AWS.
The new CEO doesn’t shy away from taking a political stance
Jassy has show himself to be more prepared than former CEO Bezos to take a political and social stance. After the death of Breanna Taylor, he Tweeted that the US can’t let the death “go with no accountability”.
“If you don’t hold police depts accountable for murdering black people, we will never have justice and change, or be the country we aspire (and claim) to be,” he Tweeted.
Aside from issues on race, he’s also spoken out about the persecution of LGBTIQ+ people and mass incarciration in the US.
“It’s nuts that the US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the imprisoned population,” he also said on Twitter. “And, the racial bias with which this incarceration is happening is awful.”
The increasing anti-Asian violence in this country is pretty shocking and deeply concerning. At Amazon & AWS, we stand in solidarity w/ the Pan-Asian community. #StopAsianHate https://t.co/7IpJMP6ePm
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) March 18, 2021
What will the CEO shakeup mean for shareholders?
As the world locked down amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Amazon’s sales soared by 38% to a record $386bn. So, shareholders shouldn’t be complaining too much.
How much does it pay to be the CEO of Amazon?
The company will award Jassy 61,000 shares, which is currently worth more than $US200 million. Amazon will pay out the shares over the next 10 years.
With a salary of $US175,000, these stocks are where the real money is at for Jassy. However, the salary is also substantially more generous than Bezos’ base salary of $US81,840. Of course, the founder’s outsized stake in Amazon has made him the richest person in the world.
Former CEO set to go to space
This comes after Bezos announced he would be going to space with his other company, Blue Origin.
