With Bezos out as Amazon CEO, Zuckerberg is the last man standing Elizabeth Dwoskin Jeff Bezos’s resignation letter landed Tuesday with the swiftness of an Amazon Prime package. But Bezos’s departure as CEO after 27 years doesn’t just mean the end of an era for Amazon, a company he transformed from a novel online bookstore into one of the most innovative, powerful and ubiquitous firms in the world. His stepping back is also the most visible symbol of a profound changing of the guard in the vaunted halls of Silicon Valley leadership, in which a generation of charismatic founders have left their companies in the hands of trusted deputies who are known as expert tactical operators but not necessarily visionaries. These deputies have also been saddled with an array of challenges in the form of regulatory scrutiny that arose from their visionary bosses’ style.