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In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com out of his garage in Seattle as an online bookstore.
Over the next decade, Bezos led Amazon's rapid growth into an e-commerce giant that sold far more than just books, offering consumer goods, digital media, cloud computing services and devices.
By diversifying Amazon's product lines, Bezos turned the company profitable in 2001 despite the dot com crash.
In 2007, Bezos launched both the Kindle e-reader and Amazon Prime membership, innovations which locked in customer loyalty. Amazon Web Services, unveiled in 2006, soon dominated the cloud computing industry.
After going public in 1997 and weathering the Great Recession, Amazon's stock price skyrocketed in the 2010s, making Bezos the world's richest man by 2017.
Fueled by Bezos's customer obsession and willingness to make bold long-term bets, Amazon fundamentally disrupted the retail sector—by the time Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021, Amazon had over 1.3 million employees and was valued at over $1.7 trillion.
Though controversial for Amazon's cutthroat management tactics, Bezos undeniably built one of the world's most influential tech companies and left a profound impact on the digital economy during his nearly 3 decades leading the firm he founded out of his garage.
Andy Jassy, a longtime Amazon executive, succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon's CEO in July 2021 at a critical juncture when the company was valued over $1.7 trillion.
Having led Amazon Web Services since its launch in 2006, Jassy provided the cloud computing innovation that helped subsidize Amazon's e-commerce domination.
Promoted by Bezos as his technical and strategic right-hand-man, Jassy seemed poised to lead Amazon to new heights while still prioritizing invention, customer obsession and long-term thinking.
Jassy confronted significant challenges in his early tenure, including increased antitrust scrutiny, unionization pressure, supply chain bottlenecks and the need to continue diversifying Amazon's revenue streams outside retail.
While profits dropped under Jassy in 2022 amid a tech downturn and excess warehouse capacity, he focused spending on growing AWS and areas that reinforce Amazon's vertical integration, like robotics and healthcare.
Both a public face for Amazon's inventions and a fierce defender against critics in government, Jassy's leadership in Amazon's next era aims to prove he can take Bezos's creation to the $2 trillion valuation mark and beyond.
Only a couple years into his tenure as Bezos's successor, Jassy is still writing the next chapters of Amazon's monumental impact on consumers, technology and the global economy.
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