Analysts said Jeff Bezos appears to have picked a successor who’s up for the challenge
Even after stepping aside as CEO, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will likely keep identifying new frontiers for the world’s dominant e-commerce company. His successor, meanwhile, gets to deal with escalating efforts to curtail Amazon’s power.
Tuesday’s announcement that Mr. Bezos will hand off the CEO job this summer came as a surprise. But it doesn’t mean Amazon is losing the visionary who turned an online bookstore founded in 1995 into a behemoth worth $1.7 trillion that sometimes seems to do a little bit of everything.
Mr. Bezos, 57, has never let Amazon rest on its laurels. In the last year alone, it bought a company developing self-driving taxis; launched an online pharmacy selling inhalers and insulin; and won government approval to put more than 3,200 satellites into space to beam internet service to Earth.
Long-time Amazon executive Andy Jassy will be the new CEO, but Bezos will be…