Andy Jassy officially takes over as the CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezos, who has served as the CEO of Amazon since founding the company exactly 27 years ago on July 5th, 1994, has officially stepped down from the role. Andy Jassy is now listed as the company’s CEO on its investor relations website, after previously having run Amazon Web Services since 2003, while Bezos is listed as Executive Chair.

Under Bezos’ leadership, the company survived the dot-com bubble bursting in the late 90s to become one of the world’s most prominent technology companies. Amazon currently dominates online commerce in the US and parts of Europe, and serves as a backbone to much of the modern web thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Bezos’ successor, Andy Jassy, joined the company shortly after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1997, and has led AWS since the team was founded in 2003. He was officially named the division’s CEO in 2016. At the end of 2020, AWS controlled around a third of the total cloud computing market, according to Synergy Research, which is about as much as its closest rivals Microsoft and Google, combined.

While Amazon’s share price has seen remarkable success under Bezos’ leadership, its labour practices, not to mention the former CEO’s extreme wealth, have been the focus of sustained criticism. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers have said the company’s high productivity targets take a physical toll on employees, and a ProPublica investigation recently alleged that Bezos paid no federal income tax in 2007 or 2011.

Bezos is handing Jassy a company with ambitions extending far beyond electronic books. The e-commerce and cloud computing giant is also a company that’s willing to make big bets on new areas of business. Amazon is a sizable player in consumer tech thanks to its range of Kindle, Echo, Ring and Eero devices, as well as general consumer goods under its Amazon Basics label. It has an expanding presence in physical retail after its acquisition of Whole Foods, and the launch of its own Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores.