Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has said in an open letter he plans to step down as CEO at some point in the third quarter to take his place as executive chairman.
Jeff Bezos. Credit: Doc Searles / Flickr
Jeff Bezos has announced he will be stepping down as Amazon's CEO in the third quarter. Credit: Doc Searls / Flickr
The world's second-richest man told staff he was stepping down from the company to focus on personal climate change initiatives, as well as diverting attention to Blue Origin, his spaceflight company, and The Washington Post, the newspaper which he owns.
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Bezos is to be replaced with Andy Jessy, who currently heads the e-commerce giant's cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The news came when the company published its latest financial results.
Bezos founded the company in 1994 as an online book retailer and has since grown the company to amass a wealth of $185 billion.
He stipulated the point of this move wasn't to retire but to focus on other avenues.
He said: “Amazon is what it is because of invention. If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive. When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention.
“Right now, I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition.”
AWS - which supplies cloud storage to some of the world's largest companies - has become one of Amazon's most important divisions, accounting for 10% of its sales and 52% of its profits.
Amazon profited heavily during the pandemic when a population working from home significantly bolstered the company's profits.
Amazon also reported a $125.56 billion profit margin for Q4 2020, its largest quarter on record.
The company, like many other tech giants, has come under scrutiny for their monopoly over markets and information.
Amazon has received flak from both the US Congress and the EU for their seeming exploitation of their dominant position on the market to gain an advantage over smaller competitors.
Other tech giants have been lambasted by the EU for supposedly stifling competition and creating an environment in which creating local startups become impractical.
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The EU want to curb the power of tech giants such as Amazon and Google in order to allow for European competition to enter the market.
A number of EU officials may want to push for the endgame of eventually breaking up these tech giants as a way to stop them dominating the European tech market entirely.
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