Jeff Bezos has disclosed that he will step down as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon and assume the role of executive chair from July 1.
The second world richest man would hand over to Andy Jassy, the chief executive of Amazon Web Services.
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.”
Bezos is handing over to Jassy at a time when Amazon market value hovers around $1.7 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
It remains to be seen how active Bezos will be in Amazon’s business in his new role.
In Jassy, Bezos is tapping a longtime Amazon employee who joined in 1997 and built the company’s cloud services business, which started as a small addition to its e-commerce operations but has grown in recent years to account for roughly 60 percent of operating profit and has become one of the leaders of the cloud computing industry.
“The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, ‘What’s the internet?,'” Bezos said in the employee memo about the early days of Amazon. “Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.”
“I’m super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have,” he wrote in his note to employees.
