Amazon's 2020 letter to shareowners, Jeff Bezos's last as chief executive

About this letter

Jeff Bezos wrote this letter to Amazon's shareowners as founder and chief executive, and describes it as his last annual shareholder letter in that role. He was handing the chief executive job to Andy Jassy and moving to the role of executive chair. As always, the 1997 letter is attached at the end.

The letter opens by measuring how far Amazon has come since 1997, when it had grown to 614 employees; in 2020 alone it hired 500,000. It then asks what the company owes the people it touches. A long section responds to the union vote at Bessemer and commits Amazon to becoming Earth's Best Employer and Earth's Safest Place to Work, with detail on injury prevention and wages. An update on The Climate Pledge follows, and the letter ends with a short essay built on a passage from Richard Dawkins.

What to notice

1. 1

   Bezos sizes 2020 value creation by group: $21.3 billion of net income for shareholders, $91 billion for employees, at least $25 billion for third-party sellers and $164 billion for customers.

“be kind, be original, create more than you consume”