Last week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos finally revealed when he’ll pass the CEO baton to his hand-picked successor, Andy Jassy: July 5. But Jassy has spent months getting ready for the moment.
Since Amazon announced the change in February, Jassy has begun quietly pitching in on efforts that would normally fall to Bezos, even though Jassy is currently still the chief of Amazon’s cloud computing unit. According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Jassy led the recent recruiting of two former Amazon executives, Jeff Blackburn and Adam Selipsky, to come back to the company.
Such boomerangs are rare at the senior levels of Amazon. Jassy’s involvement in the campaigns to win them back, which hasn’t been previously reported, may partly have been an effort to signal to Blackburn and Selipsky that a new era is dawning at the company.
