Jeff Bezos steps down as Amazon's CEO on Monday, 27 years after the company's founding. Moving into his role is Andy Jassy, who joined the company in 1997 as a bookseller but has since risen through the ranks to head the company's successful cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS). He inherits the e-commerce behemoth at a "critical time" as the company faces "a growing threat of regulatory action to control its dominance of markets across the world," explain Rupert Neate Wealth and Sarah Butler at The Guardian. Is Jassy up for the challenge?
He certainly has a good track record, having conceived of and overseen AWS, which is now Amazon's most reliable source of profit, bringing in $13.5 billion in revenue in the first 3 months of 2021. He also apparently was the mastermind behind Amazon's move into the world of CDs and DVDs in the late '90s. He is "more of a continuity candidate than a revolutionary," The Economist says, adding that Jassy is "detail-oriented and more than a little nerdy — much like Mr. Bezos in his first couple of decades in charge."
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