Amazon said on Tuesday that its CEO Jeff Bezos will transition to the role of executive chair in the third quarter, with Andy Jassy, who heads Amazon Web Services (AWS), becoming the company's top boss.
In a letter to Amazon employees, Bezos said he would "stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives" but would pivot towards philanthropic initiatives and other business ventures in space exploration and journalism.
"I've never had more energy, and this isn't about retiring," Bezos wrote. "I'm super passionate about the impact I think these organizations can have."
The news came after Amazon reported a blowout holiday quarter with profits more than doubling to $7.2 billion and revenue jumping by 44 percent to $125.6 billion as pandemic lockdowns have caused online sales to explode around the globe.
The announcement that Bezos will hand the keys of the world's largest online retailer to Jassy ends a long-running question about who would succeed the world's second-richest person at the company's helm.
Jassy, 53, joined Amazon in 1997 after earning an MBA from Harvard Business School, founding AWS and growing it to a cloud platform used by millions, the company's website said.
He had been a clear contender for the top job since Amazon created two CEO roles reporting to Bezos, the other held by recently retired consumer CEO Jeff Wilke.
Tom Johnson, chief transformation officer at Mindshare Worldwide, said Jassy's promotion underscored the importance of web services to Amazon's future.
Jassy is known for understanding technical details, and he has regularly taken jabs at legacy player Oracle Corp. and cloud rival Microsoft Corp., which AWS continues to exceed in sales.
Under Jassy's leadership, Amazon's cloud business has signed major customers including Verizon, McDonald's and Honeywell. The division's quarterly revenue consistently rose by double digits, helping cement its position as the market leader.
Bezos, 57, founded Amazon in his garage in 1994 and went on to grow it into a colossus that dominates online retail, with operations in streaming music and television, groceries, cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and more.
(Cover: Jeff Bezos, president and CEO of Amazon, speaks at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.'s "Milestone Celebration Dinner" in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 13, 2018. /Reuters)