Amazon grants 61,000 shares of stock to incoming CEO Andy Jassy
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Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon said in a filing on Friday that it will grant Andy Jassy 61,000 shares of stock on Monday, when he replaces Jeff Bezos as the online retailer’s second CEO. The shares will vest over a period of ten years.
The grant represents a financial acknowledgment of a high-priority leadership change for one of the world’s top technology companies.
Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and is today the world’s richest person, with a net worth of nearly $200 billion, according to Bloomberg. Now he is handing over the entire company to a trusted executive who led Amazon Web Services since its inception, helping Amazon expand beyond commerce and making the company more profitable.
After serving as Bezos’ shadow, Jassy led the company’s push into technology that companies could use to run computing workloads and store data in Amazon’s data centers, with the first services arriving in 2006. Now the company leads the market, with Microsoft, Google and other companies trying to catch up.
The additional shares are worth $214 million at Amazon’s Friday closing price of $3.510.98 per share. In addition to the award, Jassy owns 0.02% of Amazon stock, worth more than $300 million, according to FactSet.
Jassy’s successor as AWS chief is Adam Selipsky, who rejoined Amazon from Salesforce earlier this year.
