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meIt’s the end of an era: After nearly three decades at the helm of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is preparing to retire. In a few months, he plans to hand over the position to Andy Jassy, director of the cloud business. Bezos announced this in an email to employees Tuesday night. “Amazon is more innovative than ever,” he wrote, “this is the best time to change leadership.”
Bezos says goodbye to the day to day, but not to the company. The billionaire wants to assume the chairmanship of the board of directors. Therefore, its influence must be preserved, because the committee is above the board of directors. He hoped, Bezos wrote, to find more time for his other “passions” in his new role, such as the Blue Origin space company and the Earth Fund, which promotes clean energy. “I have a lot of energy,” Bezos said, “it’s not about retiring.”
Bezos, 57, resigns in a moment of triumph. Amazon released record numbers on Tuesday: In the fourth quarter of 2020, sales topped $ 125 billion, a 44 percent increase compared to the same period a year earlier. Bezos himself is currently the second-richest person in the world, after Elon Musk, with an estimated net worth of $ 188 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
His company Amazon is an American success story. Bezos founded an online bookstore in the summer of 1994, based on a business plan that he had scribbled on a piece of paper while driving a car, and turned it into an economic empire. He created a corporation that changed the way people shop. He built a miracle logistics machine that delivers seven million packages a day. Today, Amazon has 1.3 million employees and hundreds of millions of customers.
But books are no longer the most important business. It’s the cloud, the division that Andy Jassy controls. Jassy, 53, a Harvard graduate, has long been considered Bezos’s natural successor. On the one hand, because he is what moves his boss. Jassy considers himself cool and obsessed with data. As a micromanager who works deep on projects and has all the details ready for months after a meeting.
There is hardly a large company that can do without AWS
On the other hand, the choice must have fallen on him because Bezos sees the future in the cloud business. The division is officially called AWS, which stands for Amazon Web Services. It is a gigantic computing cloud that provides companies around the world with storage space and chip power. You could call AWS a kind of substructure for the online world.
AWS generated $ 12.7 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020, an increase of 28 percent year on year. The division has boomed since the beginning of the pandemic. One big reason is that more people now use Zoom, Slack, and Netflix – services offered by different companies, but all run on AWS servers.
There is hardly a large company that can do without AWS. Apple, actually a rival, is supposed to transfer $ 30 million a month to Amazon to use the cloud. McDonald’s, General Electric and Twitter are also among the clients. In Germany, almost all DAX companies and thousands of smaller companies trust AWS, as do authorities, hospitals and cultural institutions, for example the Berlin Philharmonic.
Some criticize the power of AWS. “Corona,” says Daniel Hanley, a technology analyst at the Washington-based think tank Open Markets Institute, “has resulted in a near total reliance on the Amazon cloud.” AWS controls one-third of the global cloud market. That’s more than the three biggest rivals: Microsoft, Google, and IBM, put together. “An important part of our professional and social life,” says Hanley, “is in the hands of a single corporation.” You could also say: in the hands of Andy Jassy.
At first, AWS was just a by-product. 20 years ago, when Amazon started selling more than books, managers were rebuilding IT too. Individual departments should no longer operate their own servers, but rather store everything in a cloud. The idea paid off. And Bezos realized that it could be used to make money. In the spring of 2006 he began renting the cloud.
Jassy, with the company since 1997, was there from the beginning. Helped build AWS. Therefore, analysts suspect that Amazon will focus even more on the cloud in the future. “CEOs take care of their babies,” says Sucharita Kodali of US market research firm Forrester. But Jassy will have other things to take care of as well. Above all, the question of how Amazon reacts to US antitrust investigations into abuse of power and spin-off lawsuits.
Amazon is one of the few corporations in which the founder is also the CEO. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin left their management positions in 2019, Oracle founder Larry Ellison in 2014. Bill Gates has not been Microsoft CEO since 2000. Until 2014 he was still head of the board of directors, so he held the position that Bezos now aspires at Amazon. His withdrawal from day-to-day business may seem surprising, but in fact, Bezos continues something of a fine tech industry tradition.
