Yesterday @JeffBezos announced he's stepping down from being Amazon CEO.
Here are my thoughts in a thread.

Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world with a net worth of nearly 200 billion dollars. This mostly comes from his stake in Amazon which he owns 11% of or 55 million shares.

Similar ultra-wealthy individuals have stepped down from their main venture to focus on other pursuits.

Bill Gates -> Stepped down as CEO of Microsoft at age 53.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin -> Stepped away from Alphabet 46.

Jeff Bezos is 57.

There is the idea from Andrew Carnegie of civic philanthropy. Basically of giving back all the wealth these individuals have accumulated to uplift society. Carnegie states, "the man who dies...rich, dies disgraced".

Carnegie did this by building 3,000 public libraries, Gates has BMGF, and Sergey and Larry are focusing on the moonshot projects within Alphabet. For Bezos, this would be Blue Origin, Bezos Earth Fund, Day 1 Fund + whatever new initiatives he launches.

Then comes the key question of how should a titan dedicate their resources (time and capital)? The end objective let's assume, is to build societal wealth.

If Bezos continued to focus on Amazon and build his wealth that would mean he would have even more capital to build societal wealth. What if Bezos could become the first trillionaire? He would then have that much more wealth to work with on his moonshot endeavors.

I think that has probably been his justification to this point to not leave Amazon even sooner. Bezos has been focusing fully on Amazon and that in part has contributed to its meteoric rise in the past 5 years. The stock rose 600% from $500 -> >$3000.

The key point this is missing is the value of his time. Bezos doesn’t know how much time left he has to work on these moonshot and philanthropic endeavors. He could have 5 more healthy years or he could have 20.

Also, many of the problems that Bezos plans to work on are intensifying at a fast rate such as climate change. Delaying action means the problem snowballs.

The last factor that Bezos has realized is his necessity to keeping each system running. Has AMZN become a well-oiled machine that with either him or Jassy at the helm continues to grow dramatically? Are Bezos talents best used elsewhere at an early-stage, high impact initiative?

I would say yes. @ajassy has a terrific track record with AWS and it is not like Bezos will be away from the company completely. I would argue this shift could have happened even earlier in Bezos' career.

What are your thoughts? What would you have done if you were Bezos in this situation? What do you think Bezos should do with all the wealth he has accumulated to this point?