50 TheEconomistFebruary 6th 2021
1O
n february 2ndAmazon, America’s
third-most-valuable public company,
announced its best-ever quarter. Propelled
by the covid-19 pandemic, which has con-
fined consumers to their homes, the firm
reported that quarterly sales had risen 44%
year on year, and exceeded $100bn for the
first time. It was a barnstorming perfor-
mance. But it was not the main story. On
the same day the firm announced that Jeff
Bezos, its boss and founder, will step down
as chief executive this summer after nearly
three decades in charge.
Mr Bezos will not leave the company. He
plans to boot himself upstairs to become
executive chairman. That role, he said, will
allow him to remain “engaged in important
Amazon initiatives”, but also give him
more time to focus on other interests, no-
tably space travel, fighting climate change
and the Washington Post, a newspaper he
bought in 2013. His replacement as ceowill
be Andy Jassy, a long-serving Amazon em-
ployee who built and runs Amazon WebServices (aws), the firm’s highly profitable
cloud-computing division.
The news prompted gushing tributes to
a man who began selling books online in
1994 with a recycled wooden door for a
desk. Bernstein, a broker, described Mr Be-
zos as the “greatest of all time”. Mr Bezos
has certainly made a mark. In 2019 Amazon
delivered 3.5bn parcels, one for every other
human being on the planet—and that was
before the pandemic turbocharged online
shopping. His rigorous, tight-fisted insis-tence that Amazon’s employees treat every
day as if it were “day one” at a hard-pressed
startup has helped the firm move into new
lines of business, from smart speakers and
video-streaming to advertising and cloud-
computing. Its valuation has risen 3,000-
fold since its market debut in 1997.
Mr Jassy, in other words, will take con-
trol of a firm in an enviable position. Ama-
zon is not without problems—it has strug-
gled in some overseas markets, and faces
attention from trustbusters in America and
elsewhere. Still, few firms are in better nick
to face those challenges down.
Founders often find it hard to let go. One
immediate question is therefore how
much control Mr Bezos will actually cede.
“I think it’s inevitable that there will be at
least a bit of back-seat driving for the first
few years,” says Nick McQuire of ccsIn-
sight, a research firm. But Mr Bezos may
not need day-to-day involvement to see his
company carry on in his image. “Amazon
has the most codified culture of any big
tech firm,” says Aaron Levie, the boss of
Box, a cloud-computing company. “It is
built to outlast its founder.”
Mr Jassy is in any case more of a con-
tinuity candidate than a revolutionary. Bri-
an Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, reas-
sured analysts on the earnings call that
“He’s been here almost as long as Jeff.” Mr
Jassy joined in the year Amazon went pub-
lic and has been close to Mr Bezos since. HeThe future of AmazonLife after Jeff
NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO
The online giant’s larger-than-life founder is a tough act to follow.
Does Andy Jassy have the chops?Business
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