Amazon Web Services began as an internal idea. Andy Jassy spent years turning it into the dominant cloud platform and the division that pays for most of what Amazon does elsewhere. In 2021 he took Jeff Bezos's job.
AWS changed the industry by making computing something you rent rather than something you buy and rack yourself. Startups could launch on a credit card; enterprises could stop running data centres. Having built that made him the obvious successor.
He built the business that quietly funded Amazon's ambitions. Then he inherited the whole thing.
What he inherited is enormous and messy — retail, logistics, devices, advertising, cloud — and it had just been through a pandemic expansion that left costs everywhere. Much of his tenure so far has been narrowing focus and taking those costs back out.
The job now is holding growth across all of it while defending the AWS lead in a cloud and AI market that has become genuinely competitive. His background suits the fight exactly. The scale of it is the part nobody can be prepared for.