There is a change of guard at American Tech & retail behemoth Amazon Inc. Andy Jassy will be the new CEO who will replace Jeff Bezos who was at the helm of affairs at Amazon since 1994. Andy is associated with Amazon for more than 24 years now.
Andy will be awarded approximately $200 million worth of Amazon stock which will be paid out over the next 10 years. Jeff Bezos will now be executive chairman of Amazon Inc.
Andy Jassy Becomes Amazon’s New CEO
Amazon will allot 61000 shares of Amazon which are worth approximately $214 million based on Friday’s closing price. As per the latest filing to stock exchanges and SEC, Jassy`s base salary is $175,000 and he has $86 million worth of Amazon stock awarded earlier. The yearly median payout at Amazon works out to be $29,007 across all its existing workforce including full, part-time, and temporary employees.
Amazon started laying off its employees in the marketing department in 1997 and Andy Jassy was almost fired However, Bezos came to his rescue and said that Andy is one of our most high potential people as per Brad Stone who wrote a book titled “Amazon Unbound”.
Actually, the succession planning started just after the dot-com bust in the early 2000s when Bezos asked Jassy to become his shadow. For the next 18 months, Jassy was following the footsteps of his boss almost every day and was watching him carefully in meetings and discussions with multiple stakeholders.
Jassy and Bezos came up with the idea of creating a platform that will be cloud-based in 2003, which was later known as AWS- Amazon web services.
Jassy was promoted to CEO of Amazon Web Services in the year 2016. AWS unit was held very secret at Amazon and the detailed financial statement was available separately only from 2015 onwards. Its high EBITDA margin business was offsetting other expenses incurred in different other business verticals like e-commerce, entertainment, and other discount-led businesses.
Andy Jassy was born in the year 1968 in New york. Post completion of his graduation in honors Andy worked for 5 years as a project manager in MBI, a collectibles company. He then went to Harvard business school to pursue MBA. Post completion of his MBA he joined Amazon as marketing manager.
