It’s time for Amazon.Com $AMZN to fire CEO Andy Jassy.
Check that. It’s past time.
I had high hopes for the dude when he got the top job in 2021, but if this guy were a football coach he would have been out years ago. Since becoming CEO in the middle of July 2021, Amazon stock is up 27%. But divide that by 4.5, to cover his tenure, and you’re talking about a 6% annual gain. Now compare that to the annual gain of nearly 17% in the S&P 500 and you start to see the problem.
Jassy came to the big chair after running Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud rental division. When he got there, the division had a 32% share of the cloud market. Now it’s more like 28%, with Microsoft and Google each taking nearly 5% of the market each.
Amazon now brings in more revenue than Walmart $WMT, but that includes the cloud, device, and video divisions, businesses where Walmart isn’t participating. Walmart’s online sales are also growing faster than Amazon’s, increasing 20% this year. That can be considered misleading, since Walmart is so much smaller in e-commerce. But Walmart’s online sales should be $122 billion this year.
Amazon had its “Re-Invent” conference this week, basically a trade show for AWS, and the deliverables were modest at best. Most of its announcements were partnerships with clients like Visa, Lyft, and Blackrock. It has made very little progress on basic AI techniques. Even its Nvidia $NVDA “AI Factories” thing comes a year after Microsoft’s nearly identical offering.
But that’s not why I want Jassy to be gone.
Bad Boss
Andy Jassy is a bad boss.
Good bosses see themselves as the leaders of a team. Jassy sees himself as the ruler of a fiefdom. Firing 14,000 people and calling it your “culture” is heartless at its core. Forcing workers into the office five days per week has not improved their productivity. Just the opposite.
Amazon’s best people are in open revolt against the boss. When your own people say, publicly, that your strategy is threatening democracy and the planet, it’s more than an attack on the technology. It’s an attack on management. It’s a vote of no confidence.
Jassy came to his job from decades running programming teams at AWS. I said he had the charisma of a damp squib in 2022, and things have only gotten worse. Now he acts like he’s the only person at the company with a brain in his head. But he’s not a king. He’s an employee just like they are. Bezos is the King, and Jassy is wrecking Bezos’ legacy.
Bezos needs to get off his yacht for a week, take his private plane to Seattle, and fire this joker toot suite. Jeffy, he’s ruining your legacy even faster than you’re doing it. (BTW, , a $5 million donation to help Atlanta with homelessness when you have $250 billion is a tip, not largesse.)
