Amazon Names Retail and Cloud Computing Heads as CEOs

Web retailer Amazon just announced two big promotions for the heads of two of its biggest units, its consumer and cloud computing businesses.

In a blog post that hit just a few minutes ago, Amazon announced that Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon’s consumer business, and Andy Jassy, the head of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, are now CEOs of those respective units.

Essentially Wilke and Jassy have been doing these jobs for some time. Jassy took what seemed at first in 2006 to be a wonky business of selling computing capacity as a service and turned it into what was as of last year a $7.9 billion business that is the envy of no less than Microsoft, Google and IBM among others. Now it’s on track to become a $10 billion annual business by the end of this year.

The new title can’t help but restart recurring murmurs among financial analysts that AWS might be better spun off as an independent business, rather than as part of the larger Amazon operation.

Wilke, on the other hand, runs Amazon’s core retail business worldwide — essentially the $100 billion or so of everything Amazon does that’s not AWS. He has often been considered the most likely to succeed CEO Jeff Bezos in the event he were to step down as CEO.

There’s no sign that assigning these new titles has anything to do with that, but regular readers of the Amazon tea leaves will wonder all the same. “This is not a reorganization but rather a recognition of the roles they’ve played for a while,” the blog post said.

What’s it all mean, if anything? We’ll get a chance to ask Bezos himself next month at our Code conference.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via