Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at the 2021 GeekWire Summit in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Dan DeLong)

Calling him a “great leader” with “incredible intellectual capacity and curiosity,” former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer heaps praise on Andy Jassy in a new issue of Time, in which the Amazon CEO has made the magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People.”

The list includes artists, icons, titans — such as Jassy and Apple’s Tim Cook — leaders, innovators, and pioneers and uses write-ups from contemporaries in assorted fields to celebrate or summarize varied careers and accomplishments.

Ballmer, who said he’s known Jassy for 14 years, called cloud computing one of the great functional transformations of technology in his lifetime and he praised Jassy’s ability to build Amazon Web Services into “one of the world’s most successful businesses.”

“Hats off to him for what he’s done at Amazon over the last two decades and what he will accomplish going forward — even if I’m rooting for Microsoft when the two companies compete,” Ballmer said.

Jassy was previously one of three cover subjects for Time’s recognition of Amazon as part of its annual list of the “100 Most Influential Companies” in the world, released in March.

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