Amazon Now Has 3 CEOs You know Jeff Bezos. Now meet the others.
By Jonathan Vanian •
This story originally appeared on Fortune Magazine
Amazon has given CEO titles to two of its division leaders in what it described as "recognition" of their important roles rather than a reorganization.
The online retailing giant said on Thursday that Jeff Wilke, the senior vice president of consumer business at Amazon.com, is now Amazon's CEO of Worldwide Consumer. Additionally, Andy Jassy, the senior vice president of Amazon's cloud computing arm, is now CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos remains in charge of the company, overall.
The new titles are a largely symbolic move because the two newly appointed CEOs were already leaders of their respective divisions. They have both been with the company since the late 1990s during the company's huge expansion.
The shift in titles is somewhat similar to how Google parent Alphabet has organized its various business units. Although under one corporate umbrella, the individual units like Google, Calico and Nest are all led by executives with CEO titles while co-founder Larry Page presides over them all as a sort of uber-CEO.
In a blog post, Amazon said that the change "is not a reorganization but rather a recognition of the roles they've played for a while." Bezos congratulated the two new CEOs via Twitter:
Thank you and congrats to my friends and colleagues Jeff and Andy - very well deserved! https://t.co/hGLGMDluKu
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 7, 2016
Earlier this week, Bezos said in a letter to shareholders that "Amazon became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales." He added that Amazon's fast-growing cloud computing business hit $10 billion in annual sales.
"AWS, Marketplace and Prime are all examples of bold bets at Amazon that worked, and we're fortunate to have those three big pillars," Bezos wrote. "They have helped us grow into a large company, and there are certain things that only large companies can do."
Amazon's shares were down less than 1 percent in after-hours trading to $590.70 on Thursday.
