Jeff Bezos plans to hand over the management of Amazon

After almost three decades at the helm of Amazon, the founder of the company, Jeff Bezos, plans to hand over the management of the company on July 5th. His designated successor Andy Jassy will be "an extraordinary director and has my fullest confidence," said Bezos at a shareholders' meeting. The date has "sentimental" value to him as the 27th anniversary of the company's founding. Andy Jassy, ​​who currently heads the Group's cloud computing division, has been with Amazon for almost as long as Bezos. The departing company founder becomes chairman of the board of directors and thus remains influential in the group. At the same time, he wants to dedicate himself more to other projects, such as his space company Blue Origin. Bezos founded Amazon in Seattle in 1994 as a small online mail order company for books. Since then, Amazon has developed into one of the largest internet companies in the world, which is not only active in online trading, but also in streaming music and films, in the field of cloud computing and in artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the company announced that it would buy the legendary Hollywood studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) for around 6.9 billion euros. Amazon employs more than a million people worldwide, with around 800,000 most of them in the United States. The company currently has a market value of around 1.69 trillion dollars (just under 1.4 trillion euros) - ten times as much as ten years ago. Bezos himself became the richest person in the world; most recently he had a fortune of nearly $ 197 billion, according to the financial magazine "Forbes". The group is one of the big winners of the corona crisis, which has shifted consumption to the Internet even more than it has already done. With the mark of 200 million customers, Amazon recently reached another milestone with its subscription service Prime, which offers access to free shipping and streaming services, among other things. For comparison: at the beginning of 2020 the number of customers was only 150 million.