Jeff Bezos resigns as CEO of Amazon. This ends the long-standing metamorphosis of the multi-billionaire, who can now devote himself more to his rocket project.
You have to give Jeff Bezos that: he knows when he can no longer put off things. He has impressively demonstrated this with the announcement that he will be stepping down as CEO of Amazon. This step was inevitable. Or as the news portal Vox puts it: "The metamorphosis of Jeff Bezos is complete."
It's been a long development. Over the past 27 years, Bezos has had a gigantic success story with Amazon. An almost epic ascent. In 1994 Amazon was nothing but an idea to open an online bookseller. The trained engineer and computer scientist presented these to his superiors at the D.E. Shaw. They waved them off with thanks. Bezos, who was 30 at the time, quit his job and set up Amazon in Seattle with his then wife MacKenzie. Today the company is worth $ 1.7 trillion on the stock market.
For the next few years, Bezos was a completely normal internet company boss who saw himself as a family man. He read the newspaper, had breakfast with his children, and made sure to get his eight-hour sleep. In 2018 he said he wanted to be "seen as an inventor, entrepreneur or father." That is important to him. But by then he was already the richest person on the planet, and Amazon had passed the $ 1 trillion mark in its market value.
And Bezos had started shaving his hair. This made the slow transformation from a tech CEO to a tech titan visible to everyone. In the same year 2013, Bezos also bought the Washington Post for a whopping $ 250 million. At that time it was already heading towards glamor for him. His group started with streaming provider Amazon Studios, and Bezos began to be photographed on red carpets.
Billions for space travel
On the way there, Bezos had initially turned the online bookseller into a hyped startup that was celebrated on the stock exchange, survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble and dominated online retail in large parts of the world. And it went on and on: Amazon gained new momentum through the Kindle and Amazon Prime, for example, and later through the voice assistant Alexa. The most decisive step, however, was AWS – with this cloud service Amazon reinvented itself. The IT services and storage space on the Internet division is by far Amazon's biggest profit driver. In this respect, it is only logical that Andy Jassy, the AWS boss, will succeed Bezos.
With a prominent bald head and sunglasses, it was time for the next step in 2015. His space company Blue Origin, which is supposed to make private flights into space possible at some point, managed the first unmanned test flight. Up until the previous year, Bezos had invested around $ 500 million in the company he founded in 2000. Now he's pumping a billion dollars into Blue Origin every year – funded by the sale of shares from his Amazon package.
While Bezos started numerous new projects, it became clear: The man wants to be cool. Against this background, the founding of his "Day One Fund", which he launched in 2018 with his still-wife, should also be classified. The charity fund helps homeless families and preschools in deprived areas. However, Bezos only decided when public pressure increased on the multi-billionaire to donate part of his fortune.
This pattern was repeated. In the past two years he has put billions of dollars into his "Earth Fund", which deals with combating climate change. Previously, demands from Amazon employees had become louder and louder that Bezos should please take action to protect the environment. It was the same with the minimum wage introduced by Amazon in the US. This decision was preceded by pressure from well-known Amazon employees and US politicians. Meanwhile, Bezos and his wife got divorced. MacKenzie Scott became a multi-billionaire, joined the giving pledge and promised to donate a large part of her fortune.
"Never had more energy"
With his resignation as CEO, Bezos is accepting the inevitable: The challenges for Amazon are so great that day-to-day business would require his full attention. Then there would hardly be time for the many other things that the 57-year-old would like to deal with.
For example, there is the problem that with online trading, Amazon's core business is losing momentum. In addition, there is trouble with retailers who offer goods on the Marketplace platform. The accusation: the company would abuse its dominant position. In addition, Amazon has been targeted by competition watchdogs in both Washington and Brussels. In other words, Amazon managed to break the barrier of $ 100 billion in sales last quarter. It will be almost impossible to keep this pace in the years to come.
"I've never had more energy," Bezos wrote to Amazon employees. In his future role as chairman of the board of directors, he wants to focus his attention on new products and initiatives – as he had done with Alexa and the Kindle.
Last July, Bezos and the heads of Apple, Facebook and Google had to stand in front of the US Congress' antitrust subcommittee for hours to answer questions. According to most observers, Bezos was doing well. But surely he would have preferred to do something else – for example, build a rocket.
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