The world's largest online store giant, Amazon, officially has a new leader. He is Andy Jassy, who replaced the founder of Amazon who is also the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos.
Jassy's elevation as CEO was a historic event. Exactly 27 years after Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5, 1994, he decided to step down and was replaced by Jassy as the second CEO.
Jassy was a longtime Amazon employee before becoming the online store giant's top executive. He is considered to be the main credit in growing Amazon's cloud business.
"Andy is well-known in the company and has been at Amazon as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence," Bezos said.
Jassy, who is 53 years old, previously worked as the CEO of Amazon Web Services or AWS since 2016. He has long been touted as the strongest candidate for Amazon CEO should Bezos choose to step down.
AWS under his leadership made Amazon not only an online store, but also a leading cloud computing infrastructure company and made huge profits. When it was founded in 2006, AWS focused on providing services mostly to small technology companies. AWS later managed to attract many companies to use its services and became the market leader.
Jassy is a Harvard alumnus, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1990 and continuing his studies at Harvard Business School until he graduated in 1997. He immediately worked at Amazon and never left the company.
Jassy's appointment shows that Amazon considers the cloud business very important to the future of the company and does not want to be taken over by Microsoft or Google, which have recently been very aggressive. Of course, Jassy didn't want to disappoint Jeff Bezos.
Bezos himself will not leave Amazon completely because he will still serve as chief executive and will still be involved in important projects at the online store.
But he says he will have more time to focus on other projects such as the Blue Origin rocket company, the Washington Post newspaper, as well as the Bezos Earth Fund and the Amazon Day 1 Fund.
After resigning from Amazon, Jeff Bezos will undertake an ambitious project, which is a trip to space. He will be one of the passengers on Blue Origin's first manned mission into space, which will launch on July 20.
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