Jeff Bezos Steps Down As Amazon CEO, Who Will Replace Him?

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of online retail giant Amazon, announced on Tuesday that he would be stepping down from his role in the third quarter.

In a letter to Amazon employees, Bezos said he intends to focus his "energies and attention on new products and early initiatives."

Andy Jassy, chief of Amazon’s cloud computing division, will become the chief executive, while Bezos will serve as executive chairman. Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 as the company's marketing manager.

Bezos, 57, founded Amazon in 1994 and has steered it ever since, attaining a $1 trillion market cap at the start of 2020 that expanded to $1.6 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition,” Bezos said in his internal announcement. “Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else.”

Bezos says he’ll keep his foot in the door for important projects, but will be focusing on the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin’s space aspirations, and the Washington Post, which he acquired in 2013 for $250 million.

His various projects, and his salary as Amazon’s CEO, rocketed him to the top of the world’s most wealthy individuals. Bezos’ fortune now sits at almost $200 billion dollars, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index.

His personal life has also been demanding, going through an apparently amicable divorce with his wife of 25 years MacKenzie Bezos. The two said they’d continue to be friends and work together as co-parents.

That almost-too-friendly divorce was tested by the National Enquirer, which ran stories of Bezos having an affair with television anchor Lauren Sanchez and released a “cache of lewd selfies” to support the claim.

Bezos responded by saying the Enquirer was motivated by political animus related to his ownership of the Post and accusing them of extortion in a blog post.