Yahoo Finance Amazon Prime Passed 200 Million Members Worldwide; Incoming Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy Made $35 Million Last Year On Stock Grant
Incoming Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy made $35 million last year on a large stock grant according to SEC filings Thursday morning. Founder Jeff Bezos, who is planning to step away from the-day-to day operations, earned $1.6 million for the year, unchanged from 2019 and mostly for security, the company said in its annual proxy statement.
Bezos revealed in a letter to shareholders that the company’s Amazon Prime delivery service has passed 200 million members globally. That broader service offers Prime Video among its perks but Amazon doesn’t break out Prime Video numbers.
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Bezos will hand the reins to Jassy, head of the e-commerce giant’s fast-growing web services division, in the third quarter of the year.
In his last annual letter as CEO, Bezos called the post “a hard job with lots of responsibility.”
“Andy is brilliant and has the highest of high standards. I guarantee you that Andy won’t let the universe make us typical. He will muster the energy needed to keep alive in us what makes us special. That won’t be easy, but it is critical. I also predict it will be satisfying and oftentimes fun,” Bezos said.
The company’s year-end letters include details of commitments to workplace policy – in the wake of a much-watched vote to unionize at an Alabama warehouse this month that the company ultimately won – and its commitment to social and environmental causes.
Bezos letter was a bit of a nostalgia, looking back to the first one he ever sent back in 1997.
“I talked about our hope to create an enduring franchise, one that would reinvent what it means to serve customers by unlocking the internet’s power. I noted that Amazon had grown from having 158 employees to 614, and that we had surpassed 1.5 million customer accounts. We had just gone public at a split-adjusted stock price of $1.50 per share. I wrote that it was Day 1. We’ve come a long way since then.”
The stock is changing hands today at $3,378. Bezos was recently named the world’s richest man atop the Forbes annual list of global billionaires.
Last year Amazon hired 500,000 employees and now directly employ 1.3 million people around the world. We have more than 200 million Prime members worldwide. More than 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses sell in our store, and they make up close to 60% of our retail sales. Customers have connected more than 100 million smart home devices to Alexa. Amazon Web Services serves millions of customers and ended 2020 with a $50 billion annualized run rate. In 1997, we hadn’t invented Prime, Marketplace, Alexa, or AWS. They weren’t even ideas then, and none was preordained. We took great risk with each one and put sweat and ingenuity into each one. Along the way, we’ve created $1.6 trillion of wealth for shareowners.
But his letter said that the company push to serve customers and shareholders must now, also, be directed more clearly towards employees. Although workers ultimately voted not to unionize at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., Bezos said, “it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees – a vision for their success.” If successful, it would been Amazon’s first unionized location.
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