Amazon CEO Andy Jassy founded Amazon Web Services in 2003 and ran it for 18 years. The cloud business he built became Amazon’s profit engine — and his path to the top job.
Source: Amazon historyVerified 2026-07-10
Andy Jassy’s Amazon pay is often headlined at tens of millions, but the proxy’s Summary Compensation Table reports about $2 million — a $365,000 salary and security. The gap is the vesting value of a one-time 2021 stock grant.
Amazon launched in 1994 as an online bookstore run out of a garage. Jeff Bezos reportedly chose books because they were a huge, standardized market easy to ship.
Amazon went nearly a decade after its 1997 IPO without turning an annual profit — Wall Street doubted it for years — before finally posting one in 2003.