By Jennifer Ugwueke
Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, on Monday officially stepped down as the Chief Executive Officer of the e-commerce empire he founded 27 years ago.
The world’s wealthiest man handed over the role to Andy Jassy, in order to focus on “new products and early initiatives”.
Mr Jassy joined the company in 1997 and has led its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), since 2003.
This is coming five months after Mr Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as the company’s CEO.
Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said “Jeff is not really going anywhere. It’s more of a restructuring of who’s doing what.”
“Bezos also retains just over 10% of all of Amazon’s shares, making him the single largest shareholder and securing his ability to shape the decisions of the new CEO, especially when they disagree about the firm’s strategic direction,” Sky news reported on Monday.
Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said; “The fact he is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon doesn’t mean he is disappearing; far from it as he is becoming executive chairman.
“The chairman’s role is to keep the chief executive in order, so Bezos will still be ingrained in the business and be able to provide guidance on a range of strategic issues,” he said.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr Bezos, 57, has a total net worth of $203 billion and is now expected to devote more of his time towards execution of personal projects.
Mr Bezos started Amazon selling books out of his garage in 1994. The company he took public in 1997 at $18 a share now trades at $3,380 a share since it moved into an online retailing giant responsible for a massive 37 per cent of all online sales in the U.S.
Amazon market valuation surpassed $1 trillion in January 2019. It is now worth more than $1.6 trillion.