Jeff Bezos announces when he will step down as CEO of Amazon 0:53
New York (CNN Business) -
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will present his CEO title to Andy Jassy on Monday, ending a career spanning more than two decades at the helm of a company that grew from an online bookstore to a global retail, logistics and internet giant worth 1.75 trillion dollars.
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The company announced in February that Bezos would move from CEO to CEO, because he wanted to spend more time with his other companies, including The Washington Post, the space company Blue Origin and philanthropy.
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But even as he moves into a less public role at the company, Bezos will continue to have tremendous influence at Amazon (AMZN) for years to come, by virtue of being its largest individual shareholder, a mentor to the incoming CEO, and his role at the helm of board.
"He will likely remain involved, although he will no longer focus on the day-to-day and instead may focus on company-wide initiatives and new products and services," said Daniel Elman, global technology analyst at the market research firm. Nucleus Research.
"His abilities to get through the noise by identifying high-value opportunities cannot be underestimated ... so it would make sense for Amazon to free him from the operational routine to maximize those areas."
Bezos's departure as CEO comes at a critical time for Amazon.
The pandemic created a massive demand for their services, causing an increase in profits and hiring.
But the company's explosive growth has only raised the attention of regulators, some of whom believe it has gotten too big.
Not having the richest man on Earth at the helm of the company could help it weather better some of that scrutiny.
And stepping aside could also help insulate Bezos from some criticism from lawmakers.
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PHOTOS | Jeff Bezos, from founding Amazon in 1995 to today
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Bezos is seen in 1996, a year after Amazon.com started.
At that time it was just an online bookstore.
Dean Rutz / KRT / ABACA / Alamy Stock
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Bezos and Sotheby's President and CEO Diana Brooks pose in a customized Volkswagen Beetle from the 1999 movie "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Sotheby's and Amazon had teamed up to launch sothebys.amazon.com, a online auction site that would offer a wide range of objects, including this car.
Henny Ray Abrams / AFP / Getty Images
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Bezos holds an electric drill and a Pikachu stuffed animal in 1999. At this point, Amazon had started selling items other than books.
Chris Carroll / Corbis / Getty Images
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Gregory Nixon, left, delivers a set of vintage golf clubs that he sold to David Robichaud, center, through Amazon.com Auctions in 1999. Bezos was there for the time, as Robichaud, a worker from construction, was Amazon's 10 millionth customer.
Paul Connors / AP
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Bezos watches as Microsoft CEO Bill Gates presents a T-shirt as a retirement gift to Clippy, the Microsoft Office assistant, in 2001. Microsoft was launching Office XP.
Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images
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Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, arrive at a press conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2003. They divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage.
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Pizac / AP
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Jeff Bezos represents one of Amazon's trademarks on the doors of the company's Seattle headquarters in 2004. Andy Rogers / AP
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Bezos introduces the Kindle e-reader at a press conference in 2007. Mark Lennihan / AP
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Bezos announces the Kindle DX in 2009. James Leynse / Corbis / Getty Images
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Bezos, third from left, meets with NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver at Blue Origin headquarters in Kent, Washington, in 2011. Bezos's Blue Origin was started in 2000 with the goal of providing low-cost access to private space travel.
Bill Ingalls / NASA / e yevine / Redux
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Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire HD during a 2012 press conference in Santa Monica, California. David McNew / Getty Images
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Bezos appears on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in 2012. Lloyd Bishop / NBCUniversal / Getty Images
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Bezos introduces the Fire Phone during an event in Seattle in 2014. Mike Kane / Bloomberg / Getty Images
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Bezos poses in a truck while visiting Bangalore, India, in 2014. Manjunath Kiran / AFP / Getty Images
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Bezos tours the new Washington Post offices in 2016. Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013. Bill O'Leary / The Washington Post / Getty Images
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Bezos listens to first lady Michelle Obama at a White House event in 2016. The event announced commitments from more than 50 companies to hire and train veterans and military spouses.
Bezos announced Amazon's commitment to hire 25,000 more military veterans in the next five years.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
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Bezos joins "Transparent" actor Jeffrey Tambor and director Jill Soloway after the Amazon Studios show won Emmy Awards in 2016. Todd Williamson / Getty Images for Amazon Studios
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Bezos talks about his Blue Origin reusable rocket system in 2017. Reusable rockets would substantially reduce the cost of spaceflight.Nick Cote / The New York Times / Redux
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US President Donald Trump and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella listen to Bezos at a meeting of the US Technology Council at the White House in 2017. According to the White House, the council's goal is " explore how to transform and modernize government information technology. "
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
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Bezos shakes hands with Kim Kardashian West while attending the Met Gala in New York in 2019. Actor Jared Leto is on the right.
Kevin Mazur / MG19 / Getty Images for The Met Museum / Vogue
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Bezos with kids from the Blue Origin Club for the Future in 2019. At the event in Washington, Bezos presented a Blue Origin prototype of a lunar lander.
Melissa Lyttle / Redux
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Bezos shows off Blue Moon, the Blue Origin moon landing prototype, in 2019. Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images
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Bezos announces the co-founding of The Climate Pledge in 2019. Bezos's broad plan to fight climate change includes complying with the Paris climate agreement 10 years earlier.
That would make the company carbon neutral by 2040. Bezos also announced that Amazon would buy 100,000 electric trucks.
Paul Morigi / Getty Images for Amazon
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Bezos with Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as a plaque is unveiled near the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2019. It was a year after Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, was assassinated.
Lefteris Pitarakis / AP
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Bezos sits between his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour at a Tom Ford fashion show in Los Angeles in February 2020. Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for Tom Ford: Fall / Winter 2020 Runway show
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Bezos testifies before a House subcommittee during an antitrust hearing in July 2020. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg were also questioned about their competitive tactics.
Graeme Jennings / Pool / Getty Images
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Bezos posted this photo of himself and his mother, Jacklyn, after the Blue Origin recovery ship was named in their honor.
"I'm pretty sure someone down the road saw [the regulatory attention] and said, 'Here's another perk of this moment,'" said James Bailey, professor of leadership development at George Washington University.
Amazon has also recently faced criticism for its treatment of workers in its warehouses, something Bezos has vowed to address as CEO.
"Bezos should stop being the lightning rod" on Amazon's labor practices issue, said William Klepper, a management professor at Columbia Business School, "and instead innovate to get out of this."
The timing of Bezos' transition in many ways mirrors that of other Silicon Valley founders, for whom giving up the CEO title meant losing much of the spotlight, but not necessarily all the power.
Google's co-founders, for example, lost their executive titles in 2019 amid increasing regulatory scrutiny of the company, but they remain on the board and have a special class of stock that gives them voting control as shareholders.
Bezos doesn't have the same voting power, but he's still Amazon's largest shareholder by a large margin.
Until last month, it owned 51.2 million shares, or about 10%, of Amazon's common stock, far more than the next largest shareholder, Vanguard Group, which owns about 6.5%.
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That means that if a shareholder initiative seeks to make a major change to the company, Bezos' voting power could give him some influence on the outcome, Bailey said.
Bezos will almost certainly continue to get the attention of incoming CEO Jassy.
The two have worked closely together since the inception of the company.
In the early 2000s, Jassy spent time in a position known at the time as Bezos's "shadow," a role similar to that of a corporate chief of staff, which was designed to train promising young executives, Ann said. Hiatt, a former executive business partner at Bezos, told CNN Business in February.
Jassy went on to become a longtime member of Bezos's elite leadership group, the "S team."
If there's a clear blueprint for what Bezos' role change at Amazon might look like, it could be the other founder of a Seattle-based tech firm that previously held the title of richest man in the world.
When Bill Gates resigned as CEO in 2000, Microsoft was one of the most powerful companies in the world, but it was also in the middle of a long antitrust battle and faced the possibility of being dissolved by the US government. At the time, Gates was seen as a ruthless monopolist, but his focus on philanthropy in the years that followed helped him cultivate a different reputation as a global benefactor, all while maintaining a leadership role at Microsoft (MSFT) for two decades, until last year. .
Amazon Jeff Bezos