Stints at ABC Sports and Fox ended in frustration at the prospect of putting in years of work before getting a shot, impatience often found in the halls of Amazon. “School was a bit of a game to me,” he said in a speech at the Scarsdale school district booster club, where he credited a talented American history teacher with getting him to engage more with schoolwork.Īfter following his father to Harvard and earning a degree in government, Jassy moved to New York to pursue a career as a sportscaster. Ī skilled youth tennis player, Jassy also played soccer and considered himself a jock. “You never got away with telling a story without being interrupted constantly with questions about the details or decisions you made,” Jassy said in a 2018 commencement address. He could easily have been describing how Amazon employees feel sitting across from him in high-pressure meetings. Dinner-table conversation frequently turned into debate about sports teams, teachers or favorite relatives. His father led a prominent Manhattan law firm, and his mother was a homemaker. Jassy grew up in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale, the middle of three children. “He will be just as ambitious and bold as Jeff has been, if not more so,” said Jennifer Cast, who hired Jassy at Amazon in 1997. Interviews with current and former colleagues, partners and competitors suggest he’ll be as hard-charging as Bezos when pursuing new opportunities. The company declined to make him available for this profile. It’s not clear what Jassy might do differently in the CEO’s chair and, aside from endorsing Amazon’s preference for invention and big bets, he’s been publicly quiet about his priorities. And he’ll have the task of seeing through Bezos’s recent pledge that the company will do better by employees, a declaration that follows a year of unrest in the company’s warehouses and, occasionally, at its Seattle headquarters. Days before Jassy’s ascension, the company updated its leadership principles, urging managers to lead with empathy and consider employee and societal welfare when making decisions. He will dictate Amazon’s response to regulators around the world who are probing whether big U.S. It falls to Jassy to continue Amazon’s track record of invention, which extends from cloud-computing and smart speakers to the heavily automated warehouses that enable one-day shipping. Yet his decision to hitch a ride on his rocket company’s suborbital space flight just weeks after handing over control suggests Bezos won’t constantly be second-guessing Jassy, a deputy he’s long trusted to manage his own shop. He’ll remain executive chairman of Amazon’s board and plans to stay involved with the company’s new projects. Moreover, unlike the sometimes single-minded Bezos, Jassy has long engaged with society outside Amazon’s walls, as he showed by declaring unequivocally that Black lives matter.īezos isn’t going away entirely. At the same time, he is unassuming and connects easily with colleagues. Known for piercing questions that cut to the heart of the matter, he has a formidable radar for subordinates’ hyperbole. He shares his boss’s competitive streak and mistrust of conventional wisdom.īut the 53-year-old executive is no Bezos clone. Jassy, who succeeds Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s chief executive on July 5, is steeped in the company’s corporate religion: Put customers first, move fast, be frugal. “The reality is for the last several hundred years, the way we treated Black people in this country is disgraceful and something that has to change,” he said. After acknowledging the tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic, Jassy called out the killings of three Black Americans that had sparked unprecedented protests across the country. But last December, at an event held virtually rather than in a Las Vegas ballroom, the Amazon Web Services boss did something different: He talked about society.
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