02.08.21 - As Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO, Amazon finds itself on the eve of a new era. After 27 years, Amazon will have a new CEO for the first time. Bezos will be replaced by Andy Jassy, a company executive who joined Amazon in 1997, only three years after its founding.
Jassy has for the last 15 years run Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s less than uninteresting but innovative and highly profitable cloud computing business that controls about a third of the cloud industry and powers websites big and small all across the world. Jassy will be taking the helm as finds itself in the stratosphere as a global powerhouse.
The COVID-19 pandemic boosted ecommerce, and Amazon topped $100 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time reporting over $125 billion during the last three months of 2020 alone. But with that growing power, Amazon is facing unmatched scrutiny from antitrust regulators, from labor activists pushing to unionize Amazon warehouses, and from politicians who believe no one company should have such an unmatched power in industries as varied as retail, logistics, and cloud computing.
With Amazon’s massive influence on the economy and society, a couple of obvious questions come to mind. How will Jassy’s arrival as CEO impact the 1.3 million people who work for Amazon? And more importantly, what will his tenure mean for the hundreds of millions of people who are directly or indirectly affected by Amazon’s products and services across the globe?
Source: ReCode
