Mike Blake/Reuters
- Andy Jassy will take over as Amazon CEO on July 5, 2021.
- Jassy has been at Amazon since 1997 and built AWS into a $40 billion business.
- He's a huge sports fan, loves beef jerky, and is known as a kind but exacting leader.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
On July 5, Andy Jassy will become only the second CEO in Amazon's history.
The 53-year-old Amazon veteran is taking over the top job after 15 years spent growing Amazon's cloud unit into a $40 billion business. Once Amazon founder Jeff Bezos passes the torch, Jassy will oversee one of the world's most valuable companies and one of its largest employers.
Known for his obsession with the customer experience and his high standards for those who work under him, Jassy seems like the natural choice to take over for the famously hard-charging Bezos.
With Jassy just days away from taking the helm, here's a look at how he got his start and earned the top job at Amazon.
Jassy grew up outside of New York City and went to Harvard
Jassy was raised in Scarsdale, New York, a ritzy enclave about 20 miles north of New York City. His father, Everett, is a lawyer who was a partner at Manhattan law firm Dewey Ballantine. His mother, Margery, worked as a trustee at youth theater program TheaterWorksUSA, according to The New York Times.
Jassy attended Harvard University for undergrad, then went on to get his MBA from Harvard as well. In between, he worked as a project manager at collectibles company MBI, according to the Financial Times' Leslie Hook.
He joined Amazon in 1997 as a marketing manager
Jassy came onboard at Amazon the same year it went public and quickly stood out as a promising hire: Rick Dalzell, the company's chief information officer at the time, told Fortune's Leena Rao Jassy had a competitive streak and a photographic memory that set him apart, despite his lack of engineering chops.
According to Fortune, Jassy oversaw music sales at Amazon. Then, in 2002, he was chosen as Bezos' first "shadow advisor," essentially a chief-of-staff who accompanied the CEO to all of his meetings for a year or more.
Jassy came up with the idea for AWS and started building it in 2003
Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
AWS was Jassy's idea: He wanted to offer up Amazon's expertise in managing troves of e-commerce data, along with its expansive network of data centers, to make data storage cheaper and easier for other companies. He wrote a memo to Bezos to convince him the idea would work, and Bezos signed off in October 2003, according to Fortune.
Since then, AWS has grown into a $40 billion business within Amazon, generating more than 60% of the entire company's operating profits. AWS now owns over 30% of the cloud-computing market share.
Jassy's work in building AWS has attracted the attention of his industry peers: Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered Jassy as his successor prior to choosing Satya Nadella, and Jassy was also rumored to take the helm of Uber after Travis Kalanick's departure, Insider reported.
Jassy is known as a down-to-Earth yet exacting leader
He has a packed schedule of seven or eight meetings every day and keeps a close eye on the specifics of AWS' business, including reading every press release before it goes out. But he's also considered an "authentic, genuine, empathetic" boss, company insiders told told Insider's Ashley Stewart and Eugene Kim.
"He doesn't suffer foolishness," Scott Chancellor, a former AWS director who's now the chief product and technology officer at the IT management software company Apptio, told Insider.
Current and former AWS employees also told Insider that Jassy has operated with almost complete autonomy at Amazon, even prior to his upcoming promotion.
"Jeff has allowed Andy to do his job without anybody looking over his shoulder," one former senior-level employee said. "It's 100% Andy's show. Jeff does not tell Andy what to do. ... They're almost side-by-side on the org chart."
He's been married since 1997 and has two kids
Jassy and his wife, Elana, got married in California in August 1997. The couple has two children together.
In October 2020, the Jassys bought a $6.7 million home in Santa Monica, California, according to Variety. The 5,500-square-foot home has four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a library, an outdoor kitchen, and an in-ground pool.
The Jassys' main residence in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood is a 10,000-square-foot historic landmark. The family bought the house for $3.1 million in 2009, according to Variety.
He's a huge sports fan - and now owns a team
Associated Press
Employees told Insider that Jassy continued to use a BlackBerry device long after their early 2000s heyday, loves Dave Matthews Band, and has a fondness for beef jerky - so much so that Amazon's annual re:Invent cloud conference used to have buffet tables full of beef jerky assortments. Jassy also describes himself as an "experienced Buffalo wings eater" on Twitter.
Jassy is a huge sports fan, running a football pool with Amazon employees and attending major sporting events like the Super Bowl. Despite living in Seattle since the late 1990s, Jassy is still a fan of his hometown teams: In the basement of his Seattle home, Jassy built his own sports bar in order to watch New York Mets, Giants, and Rangers games, according to Fortune.
He took his sports fandom to the next level in 2018 when he became a minority owner the NHL's Seattle Kraken.
Jassy is outspoken about social justice issues
While Bezos has become increasingly public about his opinions in recent years, Jassy is perhaps the most outspoken leader at the company. He's taken to Twitter to condemn police killings of Black Americans and recently became the executive sponsor of Amazon's Black Employee Network. Jassy has also been public on Twitter about his thoughts on immigration, LGBTQ discrimination, and affordable housing
While he's made comments about Trump's "disdain" for Amazon, Jassy has mostly steered clear of politics, though his wife, Elana, has made political donations: She donated $250 to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in 2016 and later gave $750 to Hillary Clinton's campaign after she secured the nomination.