Jeff Bezos folds. The man who founded Amazon in 1994 (with the name of Cadabra.com, which he changed the following year), making it over the years one of the most capitalized companies in the world, and in turn becoming the richest man on the planet ( the first ever to break through the 200 billion dollar assets), starting from the third quarter of this year he will no longer be the CEO of his creature. He will be replaced by a loyalist, an "Amazonian" of the first hour: Andy Jassy, a 53-year-old Harvard graduate from New York, has been at Amazon since 1997 and he was the inventor of Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing platform launched in 2003 and which is the real goose that lays the golden eggs of the Bezos empire.
In fact, if many of us use or know Amazon above all for e-commerce, streaming Prime Video, Alexa or even for futuristic space travel with Blue Origin (priced at $200), the latest crazy idea from manager born in Albuquerque, actually financially the pearl is the company that sells servers to many Internet sites, profiting from its gigantic technological infrastructure: to give a parameter, already in 2018 out of 208 billion in sales, Amazon was making profits of 5 billion, against the 7 billion collected by AWS alone out of 26 billion in turnover. Still in the fourth quarter of 2020, AWS accounted for 67% of the operating profit of the entire company. It is therefore thanks to Jassy that Bezos can afford to give work to 840 people worldwide and above all to earn, in just 9 seconds, the equivalent of the annual salary of a warehouse worker.
Jassy is therefore the right arm, the shadow man of Bezos for a lifetime. She recently recounted on a Harvard Business School podcast how she came to work at Amazon: “I took my last exam on the first Friday in May of 1997, and I started working at Amazon the following Monday. I had no idea what my job would be, nor what role I would have." Initially he worked at the company as a marketing manager, and in the early 2005s he became Bezos' "technical assistant", a sort of chief of staff. In XNUMX he was already president of Amazon Web Services, and in a few months without any kind of surprise, because the succession had been in the air for some time, he will take over the reins of the parent company. Meanwhile, following the sporting passion that often characterizes American managers (but not Bezos), Jassy has also become one of the owners of the Seattle Kraken ice hockey team, who will make his debut in the top league of the NHL next season.
His appointment also has a political value, given that it coincides with the new presidency of Joe Biden. Relations between Bezos and former President Donald Trump have been bad, also due to the fact that the owner of Amazon is also the editor of the Washington Post, one of the newspapers that immediately and most openly sided against the tycoon . But Jassy was one of the managers who spoke most against some choices of the former tenant of the White House, experienced as real reprisals. In 2019 Amazon's CEO in pectore said the Defense Department's decision to choose Microsoft as a partner to manage its cloud services it was solely due to Trump's dislike of Bezos: "When you have a president openly expressing his contempt for a company and the leader of that company, it's really hard for government agencies, including the Defense Department, to make an objective decision without fear of retaliation."
We can bet that with the new political course Jassy and Amazon will be able to create a more favorable collaboration. As for Jassy's story, at the moment his Wikipedia page is rather sparse, but he will inevitably get richer. As well as her bank account: as of November 2020 his net worth has been estimated at “just” $377 million. A little bit, for someone who is about to become the head of one of the most powerful companies in the world.
