Considered the richest man in the world, 57-year-old Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO to his number two, Andy Yassi, next Monday, July 5, to devote himself to other projects, namely one trip into space. July 20, France Press news agency reported today.
However, Bezos will retain “a key role in the company he founded just 27 years ago as executive chairman of the board of directors,” France Press reported today.
Bezos is leaving Amazon, a company that currently employs over 800,000 people in the United States of America (USA) alone, after his business skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and also after he faced a lot of criticism. by workers ‘and regulators’ advocates who regularly denounced the obsession with efficiency but treated employees like machines.
If, on the one hand, there has been criticism of the boss of the e-commerce giant for ignoring certain business practices that stifled competition, or for the way he treated his employees, there are also those who praise him for his innovations, which at times shook entire sectors of the economy.
“Whether it’s selling books, cloud information or home delivery,“ Bezos is the leader who drives change, ”says Darrell West of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technological Innovation.
“This has given impetus to the development of many services that are now taken for granted, such as shopping online, ordering something and getting it the next day,” said Darrell West.
Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, believes, for his part, that Bezos “has the instinct to know what will work” in the next market.
Bezos’ company outperformed its competitors by choosing the first few years to “reinvest all profits into growth,” Kay recalls.
A strategy that at times baffled investors, but now “seems completely logical,” adds Kay.
Bezos is leaving his company’s day-to-day management to devote more time to other projects, such as his other company, Blue Origin, which will make its first space tourist flight on July 20 and in which Jeff Bezos is on board.
The businessman is also the owner of the Washington Post and has already announced that he wants to devote time and money to the fight against climate change.
Amazon (an online bookstore) was launched in Jeff Bezos’s garage, where he started by consolidating orders placed “online.”
Today, the e-commerce giant is worth more than $ 1.7 billion on the stock exchange and raised $ 386 billion in 2020.
It is a group that covers various market sectors such as e-commerce, cloud storage, artificial intelligence, or film production.
The company said it lost nearly $ 4 billion (€ 3.5 billion) due to the pandemic.
