Andy Jassy

Jassy is the son of Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, New York.[3] He is Jewish[11][12] with Hungarian ancestry.[11] His father was a senior partner in the corporate law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York, and chairman of the firm's management committee.[3] Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, and attended Scarsdale High School,[3][13] where he played varsity soccer and tennis.[10]

Jassy graduated with honors, cum laude, from Harvard College in government, where he was advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson, before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1989, he wrote in The Crimson that the newspaper should continue to publish advertisements from Eastern Airlines, despite an ongoing labor dispute there.[14][15][16]

Jassy worked for 5 years after graduation before entering his MBA program. He worked as a project manager for a collectibles company, MBI, and then he and an MBI colleague started a company and closed it down.[15][17]

He joined Amazon as a marketing manager in 1997,[10] with several other Harvard MBA colleagues.[17][15]

In 2003, he and Jeff Bezos came up with the idea to create the cloud computing platform that would become known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006.[18] Jassy headed AWS and its team of 57 people.[1]

Jassy in 2016.

In March 2016, Jassy was named a Person of the Year by the Financial Times.[15] A month later, Jassy was promoted from senior vice president to CEO of AWS.[19][16] That year Jassy earned $36.6 million.[20]

In 2020, for his work as CEO of AWS, Jassy earned a base compensation of $175,000, plus a restricted stock unit award of 4,023 shares (a value of $12,104,844.93 as of July 26, 2020[21]) of Amazon with vesting beginning in 2023. He also received a restricted stock unit award in April 2018 for 10,000 shares (a value of $30,089,100 as of July 26, 2020),[21] which vest 37.5% in 2021, 12.5% in 2022, 37.5% in 2023, and 12.5% in 2024.[22]

In February 2021, it was announced that Jassy would succeed Bezos as the CEO of Amazon sometime in the third quarter of 2021, with Bezos transitioning to executive chairman.[23] This took effect on July 5, 2021.[8] During his first year running Amazon, he received a pay package of $212.7 million which was a substantial increase from his compensation in 2020. [24]

Outside of his roles at Amazon, Jassy is also the chairman of Rainier Prep, a charter school in Seattle.[25]

In 1997, Jassy married Elana Rochelle Caplan, a fashion designer for Eddie Bauer and graduate of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, at the Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel.[3] Their wedding was officiated by New York Rabbi James Brandt, a cousin of Elana.[26] Both their fathers were senior partners in law firm Dewey Ballantine.[3] They have two children.[4]

They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, in a 10,000-square-foot house bought in 2009 for $3.1 million.[2][27] In October 2020, it was reported that Jassy had bought a $6.7 million 5,500-square-foot house in Santa Monica, California.[28][29][27]