Bezos may step down without stepping away

New Amazon CEO will have to deal with antitrust scrutiny

Even after stepping aside as CEO, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will likely keep identifying new frontiers for the world’s dominant e-commerce company. His successor, meanwhile, gets to deal with escalating efforts to curtail Amazon’s power.

Tuesday’s announcement that Bezos will hand off the CEO job this summer came as a surprise. But it doesn’t mean Amazon is losing the visionary who turned an online bookstore founded in 1995 into a behemoth worth $1.7 trillion that sometimes seems to do a little bit of everything.

Bezos, 57, has never let Amazon rest on its laurels. In the last year alone, it bought a company developing self-driving taxis; launched an online pharmacy selling inhalers and insulin; and won government approval to put more than 3,200 satellites into space to beam internet service to Earth.

Long-time Amazon executive Andy Jassy will be the new CEO, but Bezos will be the company’s executive chairman.

“Jeff Bezos has held a firm grip on the company for a long time,” said Ken Perkins, president of RetailMetrics LLC, a retail research firm. “I have to believe he will have a say in what is going on and have a big hand in big picture decisions.”

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky made the move sound like a mere shuffling of chairs.

“It’s more of a restructuring of who’s doing what,” he said on a Tuesday call with reporters.

Investors didn’t flinch upon after hearing about Amazon’s forthcoming change in command, and instead appear to be more focused the company’s blockbuster earnings.

In a blog post, Bezos said the CEO job had pulled him away from exploring new ideas and initiatives that could yield growth opportunities. He now intends to focus on such innovation, along with other ventures, like his rocket ship company Blue Origin and his newspaper, The Washington Post.

The shift will saddle Jassy with some of the responsibilities that Bezos clearly didn’t enjoy. Perhaps the most daunting is the increasing scrutiny of Amazon’s clout in an online shopping market that has become even more essential to consumers during the past year’s pandemic. The U.S. government already has slapped Google and Facebook with antitrust lawsuits. Both regulators and lawmakers have left little doubt that they are taking a hard look at whether similar action is warranted against Amazon and Apple.