Jassy is the son of Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, New York.[4] 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.[4] Jassy grew up in Scarsdale, and attended Scarsdale High School.[4][13]
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.[14][15]
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.[14][16]
He joined Amazon in 1997, with several other Harvard MBA colleagues.[16] His early roles included marketing manager.[14]
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.[17] Jassy headed AWS and its team of 57 people.[1]
In March 2016, Jassy was named a Person of the Year by the Financial Times.[14] A month later, Jassy was promoted from senior vice president to CEO of AWS.[18][15] That year Jassy earned $36.6 million.[19]
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[20]) 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),[20] which vest 37.5% in 2021, 12.5% in 2022, 37.5% in 2023, and 12.5% in 2024.[21]
On February 2, 2021, it was announced that Jassy will succeed Jeff Bezos as the CEO of Amazon sometime in the third quarter of 2021, with Bezos transitioning to executive chairman.[22] This took effect on July 5, 2021.[23]
Outside of his roles at Amazon, Jassy is also the chairman of Rainier Prep, a charter school in Seattle.[24]
Personal life[edit]
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.[4] Their wedding was officiated by New York Rabbi James Brandt, a cousin of Elana.[25] Both their fathers were senior partners in law firm Dewey Ballantine.[4] They have two children.[5]
They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, in a 10,000-square-foot house bought in 2009 for $3.1 million.[2][26] In October 2020, it was reported that Jassy had bought a $6.7 million 5,500-square-foot house in Santa Monica, California.[
