How do I add a new owner to my AWS account?

Question

How do I add a new superuser to my AWS account? I need this new user to have all the same privileges to manage AWS as the owner (me)?

Answer 1

As far as I know you can only maintain one set of root account credentials with one owner per account. Even if this is an account you maintain yourself, Amazon recommends creating an IAM user for yourself with administrative privileges to keep the root account credentials secure.

In order to add a user with the same privileges, from your root account you can create that user in the IAM console and grant the user Administrator access with the full-admins policy below.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "*",
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

To allow the user to access the Account Activity and Billing section, you need to activate the pages in the "IAM user access to the AWS" section on the Manage Your Account Page from your root account.

That should give the user the same level of access as the account owner without passing out the root credentials.