Billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos, who 27 years ago incorporated retail giant Amazon, officially retired as CEO of the $1.78 trillion company on Monday, handing over the reins to his protege Andy Jassy.

Bezos, 57, will transition to the executive chair amid surging revenue. Sparked by the pandemic, Amazon reported $126.5 billion in fourth-quarter sales.

New endeavors await Bezos, who Bloomberg's billionaire index lists as the world's richest person at $203 billion. He will travel to space later this month with his brother Mark and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk.

Since founding the company in 1994 out of his garage in his Seattle home, Bezos has overseen Amazon grow into one of the richest companies in the world. His company began selling books to customers at low prices and now it has encompassed other businesses like Whole Foods, Audible, Prime Video, and Twitch.

John Doerr, an early investor of Amazon recalls the early days of the financial behemoth, “I remember flying up to Seattle to visit the company’s offices at First Avenue. We built these tables out of desk doors we purchased at Home Depot,” he told CNBC’s “Tech Checks.”

“We went online with a very fast website and could deliver all the world’s books in a shorter period of time at better prices than anyone else in the world,” he added.

Jassy, 53, officially became CEO on Monday. He has overseen Amazon Web Services, which he built up in 2003. AWS owns roughly 30% of the cloud computing market share.

He has been known to be obsessed with the customer experience and has set high standards for those working under him. Jassy, who received his undergraduate and business school degrees from Harvard, joined the Amazon staff in 1997 as a marketing manager.

In 2018, Jassy became a minority owner of the Seattle Kraken, an NHL expansion team that will debut next season.

Bezos is likely to remain in the spotlight to embark on a new career.

“As an exec chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy to focus on the Day 1 Fund, The Bezos Earth Fund, The Washington Post, and my other passions,” Bezos wrote in a letter to Amazon employees.

One of Bezos's biggest ambitions will be to travel to space in the Blue Origin Spacecraft on July 20th, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that made Neil Armstrong the first man to walk on the moon. In a 2018 interview with Business Insider, Bezos has called his Blue Origin project "The most important work that I'm doing."

“To see the relationship with space, it changes you, it changes your relationship with the planet. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in an Instagram post. “I’ve wanted to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do my entire life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me,” Bezos added.

Another ambition Bezos has is to work with his Earth Fund by donating $791 million to organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Nature Conservancy. The mission of the Bezos Earth Fund is to combat climate change and accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy, and equitable access to healthy air water, and land.

Bezos also plans to work with his Day 1 Fund, the $2 billion philanthropic organization committed to fighting homelessness and establishing pre-schools in underprivileged communities. The organization has given tens of millions of dollars to non-profit groups.

Amazon