Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon said in a filing on Friday that it will grant Andy Jassy 61,000 shares on Monday if he replaces Jeff Bezos as the online retailer’s second CEO. The shares vest over a period of ten years.
The grant represents financial recognition of a high priority leadership change for one of the world’s leading technology companies.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and is now the richest person in the world with a net worth of nearly $ 200 billion, according to Bloomberg. Now he’s handing the entire business over to a trusted manager who has run Amazon Web Services since its inception, helped Amazon expand beyond retail and make the company more profitable.
After Jassy served as Bezos’ shadow, Jassy led the company’s foray into technology that allows companies to perform compute workloads and store data in Amazon’s data centers. The first services came out in 2006. Today the company leads with Microsoft, Google and the market to other companies trying to catch up.
The additional shares are valued at $ 214 million at Amazon’s closing price of $ 3,510.98 per share on Friday. In addition to the award, Jassy owns 0.02% of Amazon shares valued at more than $ 300 million, according to FactSet.
Jassy’s successor as AWS boss is Adam Selipsky, who returned to Amazon from Salesforce earlier this year.
CLOCK: The Week Ahead: Bezos resigns as Amazon CEO
