Jeff Bezos to Step Down as Amazon CEO in Q3

In the third quarter of this year, Jeff Bezos will become Amazon.com’s executive chairman, handing over the reins to Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s cloud computing division, the company revealed yesterday. The announcement came after Amazon reported record holiday 2020 earnings during the e-commerce heyday of the pandemic.

“As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition,” Bezos said in a letter to employees, announcing the end of his 27-year run. “As exec chair, I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have 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.”

After graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986, he joined the New York investment bank D.E. Shaw & Co. in 1990. Soon named the firm’s youngest senior vice president, Bezos was in charge of examining the investment possibilities of the Internet. By then, web usage was growing by more than 2,000 percent a year. In 1994, he resigned from Shaw and moved to Seattle to open a virtual bookstore. Working out of his garage with a handful of employees, Bezos began developing the software for Amazon, which sold its first book in July 1995.

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