So, let’s talk about the guy who actually has to follow up the richest person in the world. Who is Andy Jassy? If you only know him as "the guy who replaced Jeff Bezos," you’re missing the most interesting part of the story.
Most CEOs of trillion-dollar companies spent their lives hopping from one C-suite to another. Not Jassy. He’s been at Amazon since 1997. He literally walked into the office the Monday after his final MBA exam at Harvard and never left.
Now, in 2026, he’s no longer just "the new guy." He is the architect of a version of Amazon that looks radically different from the one Bezos built. While Bezos was the guy who sold us books and built the "Everything Store," Jassy is the guy who built the engine under the internet.
The Scarsdale Kid Who Built the Cloud
Andy Jassy didn't come from some tech-obsessed garage in Silicon Valley. He grew up in Scarsdale, New York. His dad was a big-time corporate lawyer, and Jassy himself was more of a sports junkie than a coder. He played varsity soccer and tennis. He even wanted to be a sportscaster at one point.
He stayed on the East Coast for school, hitting Harvard for both his undergrad and his MBA. When he joined Amazon in the late 90s, the company was tiny. It was just a struggling online bookstore trying to figure out if it could survive the dot-com bubble.
But here’s what most people get wrong about him: Jassy isn’t just a "manager." He’s a builder.
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In 2003, he and Bezos basically sat down and realized that Amazon was really good at running its own infrastructure. Jassy took a team of 57 people and turned that realization into Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you’re reading this on a phone, or using an app, or watching Netflix, you are using the cloud Jassy built.
By the time he took over as CEO of the whole company in July 2021, AWS was bringing in more profit than the actual retail store. He didn't just inherit the throne; he built the treasury.
Why the "Shadow" Role Mattered
For years, Jassy was known as Bezos’s "shadow."
That was his actual title for a while—Technical Assistant to the CEO. He sat in every meeting. He saw how Bezos thought. He learned the "Leadership Principles" by heart. But don't think he's just a Bezos clone.
While Bezos is known for being visionary and sometimes "out there" (blue origin, anyone?), Jassy is famously detail-oriented. Insiders describe his meetings as "the Chop." If you go into a room with him and you don't know your data, he will find the hole in your logic in about thirty seconds.
Honestly, that’s what Amazon needed. By 2021, the company had become a massive, bloated bureaucracy. It had over-hired during the pandemic. It was slow. Jassy’s job hasn’t been to be the "ideas guy"—it’s been to be the "discipline guy."
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The 2026 Reality: AI and the "Startup" Pivot
If you work at Amazon today, things feel a lot different than they did five years ago.
Jassy has been on a warpath against bureaucracy. In late 2024 and throughout 2025, he made some moves that ticked a lot of people off. He ended remote work, telling everyone they had to be in the office five days a week. Why? Because he wants Amazon to feel like a "startup" again.
He recently mandated that all 350,000 corporate employees submit lists of their "top accomplishments" for 2026 performance reviews. He’s not looking for participation trophies. He wants to know exactly what you’ve built.
He’s also betting the entire farm on Generative AI.
While Google and Microsoft were getting all the headlines with ChatGPT and Gemini, Jassy was quietly spending $150 billion on AI infrastructure. He’s released things like Amazon Q (an AI assistant for business) and Trainium chips to take on Nvidia. He's been very blunt about it: AI will reduce the number of people working at Amazon. He basically told staff to lean into the tech or get left behind.
The Man Behind the Desk
Despite being worth somewhere around $550 million, Jassy isn't a flashy guy. He lives in a 10,000-square-foot house in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, which is nice, sure, but it's not a private island.
He’s still a massive sports fan. He’s a part-owner of the Seattle Kraken NHL team. If you see him at a game, he’s usually wearing a jersey and actually paying attention to the play, not just sitting in a suite. He’s also a die-hard New York Giants fan, which, considering their recent seasons, shows he has a lot of patience.
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What You Can Learn From His Rise
- Be a "Ravenous Learner": Jassy says this is his #1 secret. He didn't know anything about cloud computing when he started AWS. He just learned it because he had to.
- Control Your Attitude: He’s big on the idea that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react.
- Finish the Job: In a recent internal talk, he mentioned that his only regrets are the things he didn't "see through."
Moving Forward
If you’re trying to understand where Amazon is going, stop looking at what Jeff Bezos is doing on his yacht. Watch Andy Jassy. He’s the one turning the "Everything Store" into an AI-first infrastructure company.
To stay ahead of the curve, you should look into how AWS Bedrock is changing how small businesses use AI. It’s the clearest window into Jassy’s strategy for the next decade. If you can understand the cloud, you understand Jassy.
Start by auditing your own "bureaucracy." Jassy’s "Bureaucracy Mailbox" at Amazon is a real thing where employees flag stupid rules. You should do the same for your own workflow. Cut the fluff. Focus on the output. That is the Jassy way.