Tom Taylor, a former Amazon executive, was the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund as of 2025. ¹

According to a report in the media outlet Observer, Taylor is widely expected to continue the organization’s focus on technologically driven initiatives. Taylor was quoted by the outlet as describing his leadership as aligning with a “mandate” to “invent our way out” of environmental issues. ²

Early Career

After undergraduate studies, Tom Taylor worked for General Motors for about a decade as an engineer and plant supervisor. During this time, he also earned two graduate degrees while on a General Motors fellowship. Later, Taylor moved to Seattle, Washington to work as a plant manager for K2, an American ski and snowboard company. ³

Amazon

In 2000, Taylor started working for Amazon, the international technology company and online retailer founded by Jeff Bezos, as a director of fulfillment, running several of the company’s warehouses. Later, Taylor took on roles in business areas including operations, seller services, and payment processing before ultimately running the company’s Alexa program, an artificial intelligence assistant. Just prior to retiring from Amazon in 2022, Taylor was a vice president and member of the CEO’s Senior Team. ^{1 3}

Bezos Earth Fund

In July 2025, Tom Taylor announced that he had been selected by his former employer’s founder and longtime CEO, Jeff Bezos, to succeed Andrew Steer as the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking project that Bezos launched in February 2020. Bezos seeded the project with an endowment of $10 billion to be disbursed over the course of a decade to environmentalist projects aimed at combatting climate change. As of 2025, it has already made grants of $100 million to organizations including the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund. ^{4 5 6}

According to reporting from the American technology news website GeekWire, Taylor’s appointment to the role is notable given that his predecessor and others at the fund had largely been drawn from prominent environmentalist organizations rather than for-profit corporations. For instance, Taylor’s predecessor, Steer, who was the organization’s first CEO and president, had previously been the head of the World Resources Institute. The organization’s former vice president and deputy CEO, Charlotte Pera, had previously been the president and CEO of ClimateWorks. ⁷

According to a report in media outlet Observer, Taylor is widely expected to continue the organization’s focus on technologically driven initiatives. In that vein, in a statement published in the same report, Taylor described his leadership hopes as aligning with a “mandate” to “invent our way out” of environmental issues. ²

Views

Environmentalism.

In an alumni interview published by Virgina Tech prior to his appointment to the Bezos Earth Fund, Tom Taylor expressed interest in becoming involved with environmentalist activism, noting that the last book he had read was How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Microsoft and Gates Foundation founder Bill Gates. ³

Labor Unions

In the same alumni interview mentioned above, Tom Taylor described his experience working as a plant manager in factories, noting how in a “hostile union environment” he was “not allowed to pick up a screwdriver to help someone” whereas in in a more “flexible” one, he was “proud” to help “make the company one of the Fortune 50 Best Places to Work.” ³

1. “Tom Taylor.” Bezos Earth Fund. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://www.bezosearthfund.org/who-we-are/our-people/tom-taylor.
2. Tremayne-Pengelly, Alexandra. “Jeff Bezos Names Ex-Amazon Exec Tom Taylor as CEO of $10B Earth Fund.” Observer. July 17, 2025. Accessed September 2, 2025. https://observer.com/2025/07/jeff-bezos-name-amazon-exec-tom-taylor-lead-earth-fund/.
3. “Tom Taylor ’84.” Virginia Tech. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://link.vt.edu/alumni/profiles/tom-taylor.html.
4. Gamboa, Glenn. “Bezos plans to spend $10 billion by 2030 on climate change.” Associated Press. March 9, 2021. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://apnews.com/general-news-bee1aea9cffc377400048dcb5b7405f0.
5. Palmer, Annie. “Jeff Bezos taps former Amazon Alexa head to lead $10 billion Earth fund.” CNBC. July 15, 2025. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/15/jeff-bezos-taps-tom-taylor-earth-fund.html.
6. Stiffler, Lisa. “Bezos Earth Fund announces first grants totaling $791M of his $10B pledge to help planet.” GeekWire. November 16, 2020. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://www.geekwire.com/2020/bezos-earth-fund-announces-first-grants-totaling-791m-10b-pledge-help-planet/.
7. Stiffler, Lisa. “Jeff Bezos picks retired Amazon exec as the new CEO of his $10B Bezos Earth Fund.” GeekWire. July 15, 2025. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/jeff-bezos-picks-retired-amazon-exec-as-the-new-ceo-of-his-10b-bezos-earth-fund/#:~:text=Bezos%20launched%20the%20fund%20in,weights%20from%20the%20environmental%20community.