Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of the online retail behemoth, Amazon, has announced that he will step down later this year.
The announcement comes after Amazon has had its best-ever quarter with over $100 million in sales, boosted primarily by the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to The Economist, Bezos will still remain involved in the company, the third-most valuable public company in the United States. He plans to become executive chairman of Amazon but will be able to give more attention to his other interests which The Economist says are space travel, climate change, and the Washington Post, a newspaper he bought in 2013.
Bezos is to be succeeded by Andy Jassy, who was the driving force behind the company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.
Bezos is currently the wealthiest man in the world, being worth nearly $200 billion. Second to him is the South African-born entrepreneur, Elon Musk.