MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Jeff Bezos no longer CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon

Bezos leaves the position of Amazon CEO the richest man in the world

What goes up must come down and even the unthinkable has happened – Jeff Bezos, founder of e-commerce giant Amazon.com has left his position of CEO as of Monday, it was announced. Bezos will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who for years led Amazon's lucrative division of cloud computing AWS.

According to Forbes, Bezos leaves with a personal fortune of US $ 177 billion, most of it in Amazon stock. He thus ends a 27-year- long career at the helm of Amazon, which made him the richest man in the world.

Bezos, who will remain closely linked to the company, had already announced earlier this year his intention to withdraw from the front line, and a few months later, during a virtual intervention at the company's annual shareholders meeting, he had also specified he planned to do it on July 5, marking the 27th anniversary of the formal constitution of the company.

“When you look at our financial results, what you are actually seeing is the long-term and cumulative results of the invention. Right now, I see Amazon being more inventive than ever, which is the optimal conditions to carry out this transition.” Bezos said in a letter to investors.

Bezos will continue to influence the company's decision-making, but will have more time to focus on both the philanthropic and management initiatives of his other firms: aerospace Blue Origin and The Washington Post.

One of the first things that the founder of the e-commerce firm has already anticipated that he will do in the coming days will be to travel to space this July 20 - along with his brother Mark and the 82-year-old pilot Wally Funk - on the first trip Blue Origin crew.

According to Bezos, this is a dream that he has had since he was a child and that now he will be able to carry out together with his “best friend” (in reference to his little brother), a journey that he hopes will change himself as well as his relationship “with him. planet and with humanity.”

In early May, Bezos sold 739,000 Amazon shares, according to public filings filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That amount represents only a small fraction of what Bezos continues to control, estimated at 52.4 million shares, representing more than 10% of the company's stock.

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 - just three years after the company's founding. He has led AWS since its inception, an outstanding leader in the cloud computing industry ahead of competitors such as Microsoft's Azure. and Google Cloud and hs been long regarded as the “shadow” behind Bezos.

Under Jassy's leadership, AWS has achieved so much market share so that a temporary failure in its services, as in last November, can paralyze the activity of hundreds of thousands of companies and organizations worldwide.