What an exciting first day Monday for Andy Jassy at Amazon!
He takes the role formerly held by Jeff Bezos — Amazon Web Services CEO – and the company stock hits a record high.
Probably had fresh donuts in the breakroom, too.
Life is good for Andy Jassy. But it’s been good for a while.
Here are some need-to-know bits of information about the world’s newest major power broker.
Now 53, Jassy is a Harvard man, both for his undergraduate studies and for his MBA.
He has the requisite backing of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have,” Bezos wrote in an email to employees earlier this year. “He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.”
He arrived on board at Amazon almost 25 years ago, hired as a marketing manager (with cutting edge ideas, it turned out).
His head was always in the clouds – in a very good way. In 2003, Jassy started up Amazon Web Services, now the cloud computing unit that basically prints money for the company.
Many busy days and nights later, in 2016, Jassy moved up from senior VP of Amazon Web Services to its CEO of AWS.
Compensation for Jassy’s contributions? He is now even more heavily invested in Amazon, whose stock continues to rise, with shares trading at $3,616 just past noon ET on Tuesday.
Political lean? No strong indications, but he did support Supreme Court decisions that made it illegal to discriminate against LGBTQ people in the workplace, and applauded the Court’s decision to block former President Trump’s attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Sports? It’s hockey first: A lifelong fan of the New York Rangers, he’s part owner of the expansion Seattle Kraken. And Amazon bought the naming rights to the former Key Arena, now the Kraken’s home rink, dubbing it Climate Pledge Arena.
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