Can Amazon’s next boss fill Jeff Bezos’s supersized boots?

Amazon, America’s third-most-valuable public company, announced its best-ever quarter. Propelled by the covid-19 pandemic, which has confined consumers to their homes, the firm reported that quarterly sales had risen 44% year on year, and exceeded $100bn for the first time. It was a barnstorming performance. But it was not the main story. On the same day the firm announced that Jeff Bezos, its boss and founder, will step down as chief executive this summer after nearly three decades in charge.Mr Bezos will not leave the company. He plans to boot himself upstairs to become executive chairman. That role, he said, will allow him to remain “engaged in important Amazon initiatives”, but also give him more time to focus on other interests, notably space travel, fighting climate change and the , a newspaper he bought in 2013. His replacement as will be Andy Jassy, a long-serving Amazon employee who built and runs Amazon Web Services (), the firm’s highly profitable cloud-computing division.