Why Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon's CEO

Jeff Bezos announced today that he'll step down this year as the CEO of Amazon. But he's not leaving the company entirely.

KUOW's Kim Malcolm spoke with reporter Joshua McNichols, about the announcement and what it could mean for Amazon and Bezos going forward.

Why is Jeff Bezos stepping down?

Well, he wrote a letter to employees today explaining his decision. He said he still “tap dances into work everyday.” So he still loves the job.

But he can’t run Amazon and have enough time left over in his day to do all the other stuff he wants do to.

What will he do?

As the executive chair of Amazon, he says he’ll focus on new products and early initiatives. So what does that mean? We’ll see.

But he also wants time to pursue other interests: He wants his newspaper, The Washington Post, to thrive. He wants to focus on philanthropy — one of his charities is fighting homelessness, for example. He wants to help the citizens of earth transition to clean energy. And of course, he wants to go to space.

He’s said he’s been passionate about space and rockets since he was a five year old boy. I mean, this is a guy who made a cameo in a Star Trek movie ... but he was only on screen for about 8 seconds.

What can you tell me about the new CEO, Andy Jassy?

Well, he’s been there since 1997. So, not as long as Jeff Bezos has … but he has definitely been a big part of Amazon’s transformation over the years. For example, he practically invented the cloud, otherwise known as Amazon Web Services, and then later he became the CEO of that division.

And this is really important. Amazon’s cloud is a big reason why Amazon is so much more than just an online retailer. They have server farms all over the world. These are the guts of the internet, or maybe the nervous system. And it’s on those servers that much of the internet runs, from Netflix to NASA.

It took other companies like Microsoft 7 years to understand how important the Cloud was and to launch their own competing products.

I’m telling you all this because Jeff Bezos puts tremendous value on Amazon’s inventiveness. By inventing things first, they can become dominant in whole new markets, just like they did with the cloud, just like they did with smart speakers.

And choosing Andy Jassy means Amazon doesn’t plan to stop inventing new things.

Do we have any reason to expect big changes at Amazon under this new leadership?

Of course it’s too early to tell. But we do know a couple things.

Change is normal at Amazon. Like, they’re still ramping up their drug delivery business. So it would be odd if we didn’t hear dramatic news coming out of the company under Jassy in the future.

But I don’t think we should expect them to dramatically pull back from any of their current big projects. And I don’t think we should expect them to spin off a big part of their company willingly.

And the reason I feel okay speculating on that is that just a few hours ago, we learned that Amazon earned 125 billion dollars in the last quarter of 2020.

That's a record, I believe.

Yeah, people couldn’t shop in person this holiday season, so they turned to Amazon.