Amazon to grant incoming CEO Andy Jassy stock awards worth more than $200 million

Incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been given stock awards valued at well over $214 million based on the tech giant’s four-figure stock price at present. According to Bloomberg, Jassy has been granted 61,000 shares of Amazon common stock as of July 5, when he takes over the helm from founder Jeff Bezos. The stock awards will vest over the next 10 years, the company said on Friday in a regulator filing. 

Jassy was named as Bezos’ successor as CEO in February. As of next week, Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, will shift to executive chairman of the e-commerce and web services giant that he founded in 1994. Jassy was hired at Amazon in 1997 and he quickly had caught the eye of Bezos as a promising star. He helped form the company’s profitable Amazon Web Services division in 2003 and he’s served as CEO of the unit since 2016.

Andy Jassy - New CEO of Amazon 

Andy Jassy is reportedly joining with a high commitment towards gaming development. He has spent major time of 15 years converting Amazon into a highly profitable technology company from an e-commerce giant creating and then dominating the cloud infrastructure market. The 53-year-old tech expert is a member of Bezos’ elite group of executives called the S-team.

According to the regulator filing, Jassy’s base salary has been $175,000. On top of that, he has $45.3 million in previously awarded stock that is vesting this year and had a $41.5 million vest in 2020. He holds about 85,000 shares, valued at $287.3 million as per the latest close.

A graduate of Harvard University, Amazon was Jassy's first job straight after graduating in 1997 from Harvard Business School. In an interview earlier, Jassy had mentioned that he and his wife will move to the west coast to be closer to her family for a few years and then move back to New York. He has won business from the Central Intelligence Agency and Democratic National Committee. He had already built heavily in cloud platform and recently Microsoft and Google also started investing in the same for better performance.  

(Image: AP)