When is jeff bezos stepping down as ceo

Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, on Monday officially stepped down as the Chief Executive Officer of the e-commerce empire he founded 27 years ago.

The world’s wealthiest man handed over the role to Andy Jassy, in order to focus on “new products and early initiatives”.

Mr Jassy joined the company in 1997 and has led its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), since 2003.

This is coming five months after Mr Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as the company’s CEO.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said “Jeff is not really going anywhere. It’s more of a restructuring of who’s doing what.”

“Bezos also retains just over 10% of all of Amazon’s shares, making him the single largest shareholder and securing his ability to shape the decisions of the new CEO, especially when they disagree about the firm’s strategic direction,” Sky news reported on Monday.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said; “The fact he is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon doesn’t mean he is disappearing; far from it as he is becoming executive chairman.

“The chairman’s role is to keep the chief executive in order, so Bezos will still be ingrained in the business and be able to provide guidance on a range of strategic issues,” he said.

ALSO READ: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is first-ever person to amass $200 billion net worth

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr Bezos, 57, has a total net worth of $203 billion and is now expected to devote more of his time towards execution of personal projects.

Mr Bezos started Amazon selling books out of his garage in 1994. The company he took public in 1997 at $18 a share now trades at $3,380 a share since it moved into an online retailing giant responsible for a massive 37 per cent of all online sales in the U.S.

Amazon market valuation surpassed $1 trillion in January 2019. It is now worth more than $1.6 trillion.

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Andy Jassy was elevated to chief executive of Amazon on Monday, taking the reins from its founder, Jeff Bezos, in one of the most closely watched executive handoffs in years.

In recent years, Mr. Bezos has stepped back from much of Amazon’s day-to-day business, focusing instead on strategic projects and outside ventures, like his space start-up, Blue Origin, giving his deputies even more autonomy.

Mr. Bezos, 57, re-engaged on day-to-day matters early in the pandemic. But in February, he announced that he planned to step down from running Amazon and would become executive chairman of the company’s board. On July 20, he is scheduled to fly aboard the first manned spaceflight of his rocket company.

Mr. Bezos anointed Mr. Jassy, 53, a long-serving deputy who built and ran the cloud computing division, to take over as chief executive. Mr. Jassy has worked so closely with Mr. Bezos that he has been viewed as a “brain double,” helping conceive and spread many of the company’s mechanisms and internal culture.

Shifts at the top have trickled down, Karen Weise reports for The New York Times. With Mr. Jassy’s ascent, Amazon Web Services needed a new chief executive. It hired Adam Selipsky, who ran Tableau, a data visualization company that Salesforce acquired in 2019. Mr. Selipsky had worked at AWS until 2016, when the cloud business was a less than a third the size it is now.

Amazon is facing a shift that earlier generations of tech companies experienced as they grew and their strong founders stepped aside, said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who served on Intel’s board for 29 years. Even before a founder leaves, executives sense a business is approaching a new era, he said.

“People get the idea that Jeff is going to be transitioning, and that leads people to start thinking about other options,” he said, adding that as companies get large, executives can often find less bureaucracy and more financial upside if they leave.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has officially stepped down as the company's chief executive, handing that role over to Andy Jassy, in order to focus on "new products and early initiatives".

With a total net worth of $203bn (£146bn) according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the 57-year-old is now expected to devote more of his time to a handful of personal projects.

Among the most immediate adventures for Mr Bezos is a launch with his private spaceflight company Blue Origin, scheduled for 20 July, on which he will be joined by his brother, Mark; a mystery customer who paid $28m (£20m) for the seat in an auction; and 82-year-old Mary Wallace "Wally" Funk.

The Amazon founder also said he would be investing more of his time (and one expects, wealth) in fighting climate change and overseeing The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns.

How much power is Bezos really giving up?

Bezos may be leaving his current role at the company - and on the 27th anniversary of when it was founded - but isn't leaving Amazon itself.

Instead he's transitioning to the role of executive chair - functioning as a kind of strategic adviser to the CEO. The transition from CEO to executive chair has happened before, when Bill Gates was leaving Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt leaving Google, and has been called the apprenticeship model of corporate succession.

As Amazon's chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky told reporters: "Jeff is not really going anywhere. It's more of a restructuring of who's doing what."

Bezos also retains just over 10% of all of Amazon's shares, making him the single largest shareholder and securing his ability to shape the decisions of the new CEO, especially when they disagree about the firm's strategic direction.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, explained: "The fact he is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon doesn't mean he is disappearing; far from it as he is becoming executive chairman.

"The chairman's role is to keep the chief executive in order, so Bezos will still be engrained in the business and be able to provide guidance on a range of strategic issues.

"He is also a major shareholder which gives him considerable influence on how the business is run."

Jeff Bezos picks Wally Funk to join him in space

Who is he being replaced by?

Andy Jassy is now Amazon's chief executive.

He joined the company in 1997 and has led its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), since 2003.

Image: Andy Jassy is stepping up as the company's new chief executive

AWS has been huge success for the business, today contributing roughly 42% of Amazon's total profits, and was instrumental in moving the company from online commerce into enterprise technology.

It put Amazon into direct competition with technology giants including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, and cemented the company's place in the infrastructure of the internet.

AWS has stressed its "low-margin, high-volume" business model when acquiring customers, and now provides the hardware supporting cloud services for massive streaming companies including Spotify and Netflix, as well as large parts of the UK civil service and even the US Central Intelligence Agency.

He has also been more outspoken than Bezos on some of the most divisive issues in America, tweeting about the death of Breonna Taylor last year: "We still don't get it in the US. 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."