Jeff Bezos Steps Down As Amazon CEO

Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos has decided to step aside and allow his successor, Andy Jassy to take the helm of the company Bezos founded. At the height of Amazon’s success, Bezos believes that this is the right time for the transition to occur, which should spur further innovation. He will now assume the role of Executive Chair, but its unclear how much control he will actually relinquish.

This was announced at the same time that the company opened up about its impressive fourth quarter in 2020. Net sales increased 44% to $125.6 billion compared with $87.4 billion in 2019. This is also reflective of Amazon’s performance for the entire year. It saw a net sales increase f 38% to $86.1 billion compared to $20.5 billion in 2019.

Speaking of the company’s performance, Bezos said, “Amazon is what it is because of invention. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more.”

Though COVID-19 wreaked havoc across various industries, Amazon seems to have emerged unscathed. In fact, it came out of the year stronger than ever. It also claims that it’s working to get its front-line employees vaccinated as soon as possible. The company is also ramping up its in-house testing program to help keep its team safe.

Bezos’ decision to vacate the top seat isn’t really newsworthy. He’s taken a page out of Google’s playbook. Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from their leading role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company and handed the reigns to Sundar Pichai in 2019. But they still play active roles as Board members, shareholders and co-founders.

And like the Google duo, Bezos may be looking to venture into other projects, which may not have been possible had he not relinquished control of managing the day to day operations at Amazon. Take a look at the full statement here.