Empire-builder Jeff Bezos turning to new challenges beyond Amazon

Starting three decades ago in his garage, Jeff Bezos built one of the world’s most successful business empires — and became the richest person on the planet.

Now Bezos is turning to new challenges, giving up his role as chief executive of the technology giant to focus his energy on other business and philanthropic ventures.

Now 57, Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and went on to grow it into a colossus that dominates online retail, with operations in streaming music and television, groceries, cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and more.

Bezos announced Tuesday he would transition to executive chair at the company he founded more than 26 years earlier and hand over the job of chief executive to Andy Jassy, who heads the cloud computing unit AWS.