Bezos isn't going away entirely. He'll remain executive chairman of Amazon's board and plans to stay involved with the company's new projects. Yet, his decision to hitch a ride on his rocket company's suborbital space flight just weeks after handing over control suggests Bezos won't constantly be second-guessing Jassy, a deputy he's long trusted to manage his own shop.
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It falls on Andy Jassy to continue Amazon's track record of stellar growth and innovation, which extends from cloud-computing and smart speakers to the heavily automated warehouses that enable one-day shipping. The 53-year-old executive will also dictate Amazon's response to regulators around the world who are probing whether big US tech companies have become too powerful.
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Jassy will also have the task of seeing through Bezos's recent pledge that Amazon will do better by its employees, a declaration that follows a year of unrest in the company's warehouses.
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The new CEO grew up in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale. His father led a prominent Manhattan law firm. Jassy was a skilled youth tennis player and played soccer. He did not read outside of his studies. "School was a bit of a game to me," he said in a speech at the Scarsdale school.
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After following his father to Harvard and earning a degree in government, Jassy moved to New York to pursue a career as a sportscaster. He later worked for a collectibles company and co-founded a short-lived startup.
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Jassy figured he was in the running for a job in San Francisco. That’s when Amazon's marketing chief spotted his resume in a pile from the business-school career office. Jassy took his final exam on a Friday in May 1997 and joined Amazon in Seattle the next Monday, a week before the company's initial public offering.
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Posted to the tiny marketing department, Jassy was quickly drafted to explore what the company should sell after books. While two business-school classmates studied video and packaged software, Jassy wrote the plan for Amazon's entrance into the music business. An obsessive fan whose tastes span guitar-heavy rock, East Coast jam bands and singer-songwriters, Jassy was passed over to be the first leader of Amazon's CD business.
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Shortly after the dot-com bust, Bezos asked Jassy to become his shadow. For about 18 months, Jassy followed the boss around every day, sitting with him in meetings and serving as his ears in rooms where Bezos' presence could throw discussions off track. Bezos was already a Jassy fan, even saving his job during a round of layoffs in the marketing department.
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At about this time, Amazon was starting to reorganize its technology infrastructure. New initiatives were getting bogged down. In 2003, Jassy left the shadow job to outline how such a business might work and, when the board approved his proposal, bring it to market before a high-tech rival like Microsoft or Google. Amazon Web Services launched its first major offerings three years later.
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Jassy is worth roughly around $500 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But he's an unknown quantity outside technology circles, giving Amazon an opportunity to introduce him to the public. Jassy's work with AWS, a business he steered from 57 employees to tens of thousands and annual revenue of more than $50 billion, is already the subject of reverent business-school case studies. While Bezos is an idea-a-minute machine whose musings led to the Alexa digital assistant and cashierless Amazon Go stores, Jassy is better known as a facilitator of creative thinking in others.
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