The American mogul, who has since become the richest man on the planet, is replaced by Andy Jassy, who ran Amazon Web Services, the company's burgeoning cloud computing business.
Bezos is no longer CEO, but he does not leave the company entirely and will continue to serve on its board of directors.
But what about the future CEO of Amazon?
Unlike his predecessor, Andy Jassy keeps a very low profile.
Born in New York State, he was signed by Amazon in 1997, just after graduating from Harvard Business School (HBS)."I took my final exam at HBS on the first Friday in May 1997, and I started on Amazon the following Monday," Jassy said on an HBS podcast in September last year.
Head of one of the engines of the company
His first position would be as a marketing manager and he worked his way up until he helped found Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the early 2000s, which is now considered one of the company's great profit engines.
The division provides cloud computing and storage, creating the infrastructure used by governments and millions of companies, including McDonald's and Netflix.
Jassy, now 52, was promoted from Senior Vice President to Chief Executive Officer of AWS in 2016.
"Andy is well known within the company and has been with Amazon almost as long as I have," Bezos wrote in an email to his employees.
"He will be an outstanding leader and he has my complete confidence."
Amazon's new CEO has mostly stayed away from politics, but last year he expressed on Twitter his support for the US Supreme Court's decision to block the Trump administration's attempt to dismantle the program that protects undocumented immigrants. brought to the US when they were children.
He also welcomed the order to make discrimination against LGBTQ people illegal in his workplace.
"It was not an accident"
Jassy is also a well-known lover of sports, especially ice hockey. So much so that he is a co-owner of the Seattle Kraken, a new team that will compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) starting this year.
Sophie Lund-Yates, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, says it was "no accident" that Amazon chose the cloud business director to lead the company, as his rise to the top underscores how important this division has become.
"(AWS) continued to shine in the (most recent) quarter and now represents a more significant portion of sales. The potential is huge," he explained.
Total Amazon sales rose 44% in the last three months of the year to $ 125.6 billion, driven in part by renewed lockdown measures in some parts of the world, as well as a later date for "Prime Day," when the company sells products at deep discounts.
Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, registered a 28% increase in sales, reaching US $ 12.7 billion.
Bezos is still in a position of "immense power"
James Clayton, a BBC technology reporter, notes that although the replacement is a surprise, it should be remembered that Jeff Bezos has a fortune of around $ 200 billion.
The mogul also owns the aerospace transportation company Blue Origin and the Washington Post.
For her part, Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said on Twitter that Jassy's rise "says a lot."
"It shows without a doubt that AWS is the core of the company. The level of knowledge that Jassy has about the technology, the business, and the ecosystem, in general, has been seen brilliantly," he wrote on the social network.
But later he added that he does not believe that Bezos "has stopped having an impact on the future of the company."
Critics of the company reacted to the announcement similarly.
"Don't be fooled by Amazon. Jeff Bezos is still in a position of immense power as CEO," said Public Citizen, a US-based consumer rights activist group.
"This predatory and abusive monopoly still needs a complete overhaul."
