Analysis: Bezos gives up the Amazon top job – at precisely the right time

Jeff Bezos' decision to step down reflects an uncomfortable reality for one of the wealthiest people in the world: the walls of his highly compartmentalised empire have been crumbling for some time

Jeff Bezos' decision to step down reflects an uncomfortable reality for one of the wealthiest people in the world: the walls of his highly compartmentalised empire have been crumbling for some time. File picture: AP /John Locher

Jeff Bezos has a formulation about one-way doors and two-way doors – decisions that are irreversible and permanent and those that can always be unwound. Stepping through what’s almost certainly a one-way door this week, Mr Bezos said he would resign as chief executive of Amazon and become executive chairman later this year. 

He will hand day-to-day control to Andy Jassy, his longtime head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a swiftly growing division that has almost singlehandedly changed the way companies buy the technology that powers their businesses.

Jeff Bezos is to step down as chief executive of Amazon to focus on his other ventures. He founded the e-commerce giant in his garage nearly 30 years ago and now boasts a fortune of almost $200 billion.

With that comes at least a partial end to one of the most epic runs in modern business history. Yet, Mr Bezos’s move feels, in many ways, natural and even inevitable. Over the last 25 years, the Amazon founder, now 57, led the company through perhaps the most fertile period of any American business ever. 

Amazon was first just an idea at the Wall Street hedge fund DE Shaw, where Bezos was a vice president; then it was an online bookseller and high-flying dot-com stock during the late 1990s. 

Mr Bezos then rescued the company from the internet bust by formulating and guiding new inventions like the Kindle, Amazon Prime, and AWS. Over the last decade, he has piloted Amazon to a $1.7trn (€1.4trn) market capitalisation, where it currently occupies the same rarified trillion-dollar air as Microsoft and Apple. 

Union organisers perpetually protest Amazon’s treatment of its blue-collar workforce. Picture: Reuters

But Mr Bezos’ decision to step down also reflects an uncomfortable reality for one of the wealthiest people in the world: the walls of his highly compartmentalised empire have been crumbling for some time. 

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be Jeff Bezos (at least by Mr Bezos’ standards). He presides over a collection of properties that spans not only Amazon but the Washington Post, several philanthropies, and a space company, Blue Origin, that lags far behind its chief rival, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies. 

Just consider the ways Mr Bezos’ various assets have collided over the past few years.

His ownership of the Washington Post consistently angered the last US president and arguably cost Amazon the Pentagon’s $10bn Jedi cloud computing contract, which the Donald Trump-controlled Defense Department awarded to Microsoft. 

When he travelled to India in early 2020, prime minister Narendra Modi declined to meet with him, and a senior official criticised the Post’s coverage of the country.

Union organisers perpetually protest Amazon’s treatment of its blue-collar workforce and periodically show up in front of Mr Bezos’ homes – and once, with gallingly poor judgement, even wheeled out a guillotine. 

When Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, started canvassing climate philanthropies last year to begin making the first of $10bn in grants from the Mr Bezos' Earth Fund, at least some of the organisations were sceptical of Amazon’s relationship with its front-line workers and hesitant to accept Mr Bezos’ largesse.

With Mr Jassy, 53, Amazon now has an accomplished and disciplined leader who performs well in the spotlight and presents a somewhat humbler target for Amazon’s political opponents. 

Mr Jassy was Mr Bezos’ first “shadow,” or technical assistant, at the company. As a new graduate from Harvard Business School, Jassy made his first mark on the founder in the late ‘90s by inadvertently hitting him in the head with a kayak paddle during a recreational game of broomball. 

More recently, he has steered AWS to a $50bn annual rate of sales, an extraordinary accomplishment for a business that is only 15 years old. 

Mr Jassy has totally internalised Mr Bezos’ operating philosophy and longtime credos about customer obsession, long-term thinking and the need for constant self-scrutiny and change. 

“It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time,” Mr Jassy said last December. “To do it, you will have to reinvent yourself many times over.” 

Mr Bezos promised employees he intends to stay active at the company and to “focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives,” much as he did during the early days of Alexa and the Kindle. 

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said on a call with reporters that Mr Bezos “will be involved in many large, one-way door issues,” the sort of practically irreversible decisions that include major acquisitions. 

This is no doubt a comfort for investors, who expressed their satisfaction with the orderly transition by resisting a panicked sell-off. If there’s one thing they’ve learned about Mr Bezos over the last 25 years, it’s to trust he knows exactly which door to go through at precisely the right time. 

• Bloomberg