From today Amazon has a new boss. Andy Jassy won’t be a new Jeff Bezos, it could never be. First, because Amazon’s Bezos is and always will be the founder, the one who imagined it. Second, because it is always Bezos who built it, day after day, for exactly 27 years today. Third because Amazon’s Bezos was and remains the major shareholder, even after selling over a million shares in May for nearly $ 5 billion. Andy Jassy, it is true, is the second largest individual shareholder but also with the bonus of 61,000 shares just collected, it stops well below 1 percent of the total, while Bezos is above 10. In short, the new CEO of Amazon will never have the power that Bezos had for the simple reason that Bezos who becomes executive president, could theoretically kick him out while no one has ever been able to kick out Bezos. That said Andy Jassy – 53 years old, two children, a graduate with honors from Harvard – is not a paper passer, he never was. And that’s why Bezos has always liked him. Since their first meeting which did not happen in an office but on a synthetic grass field. Andy Jassy had just been hired at Amazon, it was 1997, and there was a challenge planned for broomball, a kind of hockey without skates and with brooms – or sometimes kayak oars – instead of rackets, much practiced among Amazon employees. Bezos was also on the pitch that day, and the newly hired Andy Jassy hit him on the head. With an oar. Instead of firing him, Bezos praised the competitive spirit of the young New Yorker who fifteen years later took the lead in the new cloud industry and made Amazon a market leader here too. He’s a fighter, Andy Jassy. Having chosen him clearly tells us how Amazon intends to counter attempts to reduce his excessive power.
.