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Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, three years after it was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. He is credited with the rapid growth of cloud computing into a $51 billion business for Amazon with market share of 28%. He now takes over the role of CEO of Amazon with day to day responsibilities just as Bezos shifts his attention to other opportunities. Jassy shares the traits of inventive spirit and investing heavily in growth opportunities one finds in Jeff Bezos. Careful planning and a long term plan in entering a business and achieving one goal after another as the business accelerates.

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After 80 years of ownership the Graham family will sell The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, for $250 million in cash. Post publisher, Katherine Weymouth, says the main reason the paper agreed to sell to Bezos is the way he has patiently prepared and nurtured his business enterprises for the long term. Donald Graham said The Washington Post could have survived on its own, but could not have made the investments that Bezos could now make to strengthen the newspaper. Graham said: "The Post could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the forseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive."

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MacKenzie Scott who cofounded the early startup on books of Amazon with Jeff Bezos, and her foundation gift giving to the underprivileged, native Americans, Black Americans, and other causes by 2026. Scott's stake is $18 billion in Amazon in 2025. Data driven approach she adopted gets through 6490 organizations and narrows that down to 822, and comes up with 384 grant recipients, says the WSJ. No applications just a call and $20 million or $50 million is the approach she has taken and the money is given on trust no monitoring.

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This Times report looks at the management style of Jeff Bezos who started Amazon as a online store selling books and the extraordinary growth of the company. Bezos is stepping down from the day to day role of CEO to focus on new growth opportunities. His role as CEO will be taken by the head of the cloud computing business, Andy Jassy. He joined in 1997. Amazon was started in 1994.  Amazon's growth comes from carefully focussing on specific growth fields, first retail, then cloud computing, and changing the way business is run with innovative ways of conducting business. One click and Prime in retail, Kindle e reader in books, and massive investments in logistics, warehousing, cloud computing to run its business efficiently. During the pandemic criticism of low wages for warehouse workers was met with an increase in wages to $15 an hour.  Management style discourages meetings. Most meetings are held in the morning, and after 10 am. The person presenting is asked to hand out a six page memo which is read in silence before the meeting. The idea is that writing it out helps make the ideas clear. Decisions are made in this way. Employees are asked to think in innovative ways to run the business. Thrift is practiced as part of the Bezos way. Bezos is relatively young, only 57 years. Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964 when his mother was in high school. His mother married a Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos 4 years later and the boy took the name Bezos. He spent much time at his grandparents ranch in South Texas working on the farm, and went to school at Princeton University, graduating in 1987. In 1993 he married Mackenzie Tuttle, a novelist, then started an online bookstore called Amazon from Seattle. Before this he worked at a telecom company and at a hedge fund, which helped him finance his new online bookstore. Bezos turned Amazon into a retail store selling a wide variety of merchandise, an built up a strong warehousing and delivery network. ...

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U.S. president elect Trump meets with the heads of tech businesses on Dec. 14, 2016. CEO's of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft were present. Trump was exuberant about the advantages secured by U.S. tech companies in global business, saying- "there's nobody like you in the world. Anything that the government can do to help this go along, we're going to be there for you." The discussions covered need for more vocational education, advantages and disadvantages of trade with China, and immigration. Quarterly meetings of this type are now planned with a smaller group organized by Jared Kushner to cover immigration and education.  Jeff Bezos of Amazon described the meeting as "very productive." Bezos says he told the group that the best way was to use innovation to create jobs outside of tech in agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing elsewhere, to create large number of jobs. Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, and other executives are part of the Strategic and Policy Forum set up to provide business input to the president. ...

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Bezos talks about his acquisition of the Washington Post in conversation at the Business Insider Ignition conference, Dec. 2014. He says he was initially skeptical about the acquisition as he knows little about the newspaper industry. His decision was based on his expertise in internet related technologies and the potential of bringing the newspaper into the digital age. One of the steps taken is to introduce a free Washington Post app for the Amazon Kindle, which will cost $1 following a trial period. He is working closely with Shailesh Prakash, the Post's head of technology. Bezos sees The Post newspaper not just as a local paper, but a paper with national and global reach using the internet for access.

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At the time of Jeff Bezos's purchase of The Washington Post, three Post journalists write about his patient nurturing of business enterprises with long term investments. Jeff Bezos sees the future of journalism in reader access through internet based devices like the tablets now in use, with each family having multiple tablets. Bezos reads newspapers only on a tablet, and sees the current period as one of transition from the print medium to the internet, so that in 20 years the transition from print will be completed.

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Power Point presentations are banned at Amazon. Founder and CEO Bezos thinks this encourages lazy thinking and prefers narratives about 6 pages long, which he sees as making people think clearly and focus. Titles are not important and people are encouraged to work outside their strict job description to do work that will help Amazon. What excites the buyer is kept uppermost in the minds of employees. New ideas are tested by writing mock releases of the new product or product improvement. Smaller teams, called "two-pizza teams" are preferred for getting things done. Wage structure is skewed towards stock options and modest salaries to provide incentives for improving company performance. Bezos is seen as being a patient long term investor. His management style makes this possible by keeping the buyer in mind and making the retail experience exciting and friendly, new products innovative and exciting, and the process of execution of ideas efficient. The management style and the long term investments help to retain the confidence of investors in the company's future prospects....

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his passion for reading, books and journalism.

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 Members of Congress in the US are worried about skewed priorities. They prefer not to fund Amazon's space exploration projects and prefer to fund projects essential for national security and technological progress such as semiconductor production. Amazon and its head, Mr. Bezos, are facing antitrust legislation in the American Congress. Even a Representative in Congress from Seattle district, home to Amazon, says Jeff Bezos doe not need a "handout," if he wants to explore space fine he can do it one his own money not federal dollars needed for America's priorities. 

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Top 5 Things emails from junior and senior employees, from 30,000 employees of Nvidia, is how Jensen Huang stays on top of strategic direction for the AI company. Sunday night he gets such emails which tell about what is important to junior emplopyees that can geve Huang a feel for what is happening outside. He does not pay much attention to strategy meetings, tries to work in conference rooms with his ever present favorite marker. Jensen Huang is unlike anything seen in America's tech companies. 

Amazon's Jeff Bezos does not like tech presentations, he prefers a one page writeup that requires writing skills. Huang prefers emails that say briefly what junior employees are thinking.

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Cloud computing is a growing $300 billion business, with Amazon a key player having 28% of the market. It competes with Google and Microsoft in cloud computing. Andy Jassy has built the cloud computing business with $51 billion in sales. It generates 10% of sales in the final quarter of 2020 for Amazon but over half the profit. Renting out server space and software to customers is a profitable business compared to online retail. Sales of $12.7 billion in the final quarter of 2020 generated $3.6 billion in profit. And growth a brisk 28% over the prior year quarter.

Satya Nadella ran the cloud computing business at Microsoft before becoming CEO. IBM named a new CEO from this business that revived growth. Now Andy Jassy is promoted to CEO at Amazon in the sequence of new CEO's from cloud computing.

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ProPublica Report that shows taxes paid by Warren Buffett of Berkshire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg, Soros of financial business, and Elon Musk of Tesla. This report put out by Americans for Tax Fairness shows tax rates of a group of 25 such business persons at 3.4% on wealth growth between 2014-2018 of $401 billion. This is not to say that Democrats or Republicans can be elected to solve this, which is basically a problem not of fairness but of how it enables underfunding of America's basic infrastructure of health, education, transportation, and public services such as parks, clean air, and renewable energy, energy grids, water supplies, heating infrastructure, on and on on the list. Why because the difference between a modern industrial base country and a backward, lack of industrial base country is just this list. When the companies also unfund maufacturing in the US as Apple does by making almost  all products overseas it means lossof manufacturing knowhow and loss of leadership of the free world which simply means chaos without America's leadership based on its founder's values.   ...

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Amazon's revenue for 4th quarter 2011 increased 35% to $17.4 billon. Profit for the 4th quarter 2011 declined by 57% over prior year quarter, as Amazon increased hiring, and invested in warehouses, technology and in Kindle electronic promotional sales. Operating expenses were up 38% from the prior year quarter. Operating margin was 1.5%, declining from 3.8% in the prior year quarter, but up from 0.7% in third quarter 2011. Analysts estimate that Amazon sells the Kindle at a loss of $15 per unit. Kindle Fire sales were up to an estimated 6 million units for the 4th quarter 2011. Hiring jumped and employee count was up 67% for 2011 over the prior year, up to 56,200 employees. Forrester Research estimates that overall internet sales growth for 2011 was 10%, showing that Amazon sales growth was much faster.

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Amazon's cash level of $9.6 billion in Jan 2012, and heavy discounting on the Kindle Fire Tablet device and on Prime shipping, is raising questions about dwindling margins.