Number Crunch

Amazon’s New CEO Created Its Biggest Cash Cow

Now that he’s conquered Earth, Bezos is handing over the reins to focus on outer space

63%: That’s the share of Amazon’s operating profits — a portion equal to $13.5 billion — that the Amazon Web Services division was responsible for in 2020, per GeekWire.

When Jeff Bezos announced earlier this week that he planned to step down as CEO of Amazon, all eyes were on his soon-to-be replacement Andy Jassy. Jassy, the head of the Amazon Web Services division, joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997 and became Bezos’ first technical adviser, a role that was known internally as Bezos’ “shadow”. In the early 2000s, he spearheaded the least flashy arm of the business: a division that could address the dearth of reliable data warehousing infrastructure on the internet — a need that Amazon felt acutely as it struggled to roll out new projects.

What began as a solution for Amazon’s own needs turned into its biggest cash cow, with companies like Netflix, Apple’s iCloud, and even NASA relying on its services. AWS may not be the beast it once was, as its dominance in the cloud computing market is being challenged by more recent entrants, like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which are gaining market share quickly.