For years, Amazon warehouse staffers have complained about unsafe working conditions and the injury risks they face when rushing to fill packages and get them to customers in two days or less.
While Amazon claims its injury rate is coming down, facility-level data released last month from the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration underscores worker concerns, showing that in 2022 Amazon laborers were injured at a rate of 6.9 for every 100. In January, OSHA investigators cited Amazon for “failing to keep workers safe.”
Industrywide numbers for last year won’t be released until November, but OSHA head Doug Parker said Amazon has a history of injury rates that are far higher than others in the warehouse category. In 2021, Amazon’s injury rate was almost 1.5 times the industry average. At some Amazon warehouse locations, Parker said, the rate was as high as 12 workers out of 100.
“That’s more than 10% of the workforce every year who are receiving injuries on the job that are serious enough that they have to take time away from their jobs,” Parker said, regarding those warehouses. “We know that it’s affecting thousands of workers and it’s very alarming.”
Bobby Gosvener is one former worker living with pain.
Gosvener worked at an Amazon warehouse in Tulsa, Oklahoma, until 2020. He said after a conveyor belt malfunctioned that December he was left with a herniated disk that required neck surgery. He’s now on permanent partial disability.
“I have to live with this injury for the rest of my life,” Gosvener said. “I hate to this day even to order through Amazon because it’s so convenient, but every time I look at a box, I think of the process of what went through it and who got hurt in the midst of it.”
Jennifer Crane works through pain at an Amazon warehouse in St. Peters, Missouri, after hurting her wrist in October. She said she tore a ligament from “packing a case of sparkling water repetitively all day, along with dog food and Gatorades.” She wears a brace to help her get through the day.
“After like two hours of heavy lifting, I’m taking pain meds,” Crane said.
She needs the job. Crane became a single mom to her seven sons when her husband died of a heart attack in 2019.
“I’ve got to be able to support them. I have bills to pay,” she said. Crane said she knows she could look for other work, “but right now I’m in the fight to try to make it better there for everybody.”
Amazon worker Jennifer Crane at her house outside St. Louis, Missouri, in 2022.
Missouri Workers Center
Crane is circulating a petition at her warehouse asking for a slower pace of work, more breaks, ergonomic changes and equipment updates.
In response to those accounts of injury and pain, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said in a statement, “Amazon worked diligently to accommodate both employees and ensure they had what they needed not only to work safely but also to recover. Any claim to the contrary is false.”
Amazon’s self-reported injury rate fell 9% between 2021 and 2022. Beyond warehouses, the e-commerce giant says its injury rate across all worldwide operations, some 1.5 million employees, dropped nearly 24% from 2019 to 2022.
“I don’t dispute that their injury rates may have gone down some over a period of time, but they’re still not good enough,” OSHA’s Parker said.
Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labor unions, crunched OSHA’s new data and found Amazon’s injury rate was more than double that of all non-Amazon warehouses in 2022. According to the report, Amazon employed 36% of U.S. warehouse workers in 2022, but was responsible for more than 53% of all serious injuries in the industry.
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said by email that the group’s findings “paint an inaccurate picture.”
“The safety and health of our employees is, and always will be, our top priority, and any claim otherwise is inaccurate,” Nantel said. “We’re proud of the progress made by our team and we’ll continue working hard together to keep getting better every day.”
“Amazon’s apparent attitude about this is to deny that they have a problem,” said Eric Frumin, SOC’s health and safety director.
Federal scrutiny
Federal authorities are now looking into the health and safety issues, with inspections across seven Amazon warehouses in five states last summer. OSHA issued citations at all seven locations.
“At every single facility we found serious hazards that were putting workers at serious risk of bodily harm,” Parker said. “What is most concerning is the scale. We have every reason to believe that the types of processes where we found hazards in these facilities are processes that are used in Amazon facilities across the country.”
OSHA also acted on referrals from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which pointed to similar hazards in its own investigation of the facilities. Two more warehouses were cited for safety violations by Washington state’s Department of Labor. OSHA also cited Amazon for 14 record-keeping violations, finding that the company failed to properly report worker injuries and illnesses.
Amazon is appealing all the citations. If they’re upheld, the company will have to pay its first ever federal fines for worker musculoskeletal injuries. So far, they total nearly $152,000. The Washington state DOJ fines add an additional $81,000.
Amazon has a market cap of roughly $1 trillion and last year generated revenue of over $500 billion.
“There’s no amount of money that the Labor Department can impose as a penalty that’s going to make a difference to a company that runs through billions of dollars a day,” Frumin said. “What matters is, are they going to respect the need for their workers to be safe?”
In a rare case of federal cooperation, the Department of Justice is alsoinvestigating Amazon, asking if the company “engaged in a fraudulent scheme designed to hide the true number of injuries,” according to a January press release. The DOJ’s civil division is looking into whether Amazon executives made “false representations” to lenders about its safety record to obtain credit.
In a statement, Amazon told CNBC, “We strongly disagree with the allegations and are confident that this process will ultimately show they’re unfounded.” The company said it’s expanding the team responsible for record-keeping.
‘If you’re rushing, you’re going to make mistakes’
For Daniel Olayiwola, who’s worked at Amazon since 2017, the primary concern is the pressure to work quickly.
“You have to make sure these rates are met,” Olayiwola said. “Otherwise you’re going to be getting a write-up. Then you’re not going to be getting any opportunities to switch positions or move up at all.”
Olayiwola introduced a proposal at last year’s annual shareholders meeting, asking Amazon to stop tracking workers’ rate of work and what’s called “time off task.” The measure failed.
“It is a big contributor to the amount of injuries we get at Amazons worldwide,” Olayiwola said. “I can hands down say that. If you’re rushing, you’re going to make mistakes and someone’s going to get hurt.”
Amazon worker Daniel Olayiwola poses outside his warehouse in San Antonio, Texas, on March 9, 2023.
Lucas Mullikin
Olayiwola drives a forklift to pick up heavy items in a warehouse in San Antonio, Texas. He said the slowest acceptable rate at the facility is about 22 an hour, “meaning you’d have to pick an item every three minutes.”
“Which is crazy if the item is a mirror, a dresser, a bed frame,” Olayiwola said. “But you have to keep picking these items and you have to drop them off at these designated drop zones.”
An Amazon spokesperson said in an email that the “pace of work” isn’t referenced in any of OSHA’s citations. But the Southern DIstrict of New York’s investigations at six warehouses cited pace of work as an issue. And three states — New York, California, and Washington — have passed legislation seeking to curtail the use of productivity quotas at Amazon warehouses.
In the meantime, Olayiwola has sought support from United for Respect, a retail worker advocacy group, and he hosts a podcast called “Surviving Scamazon.” Like Crane, he wants to support his family while working to produce change from the inside. His wife is pregnant with their second child, and he calls his work at Amazon a “necessary evil.”
OSHA says similar investigations are currently underway at 10 other Amazon sites, with broader investigations pending at dozens more.
TikTok’s grip on the short-form video market is tightening, and the world’s biggest tech platforms are racing to catch up.
Since launching globally in 2016, ByteDance-owned TikTok has amassed over 1.12 billion monthly active users worldwide, according to Backlinko. American users spend an average of 108 minutes per day on the app, according to Apptoptia.
TikTok’s success has reshaped the social media landscape, forcing competitors like Meta and Google to pivot their strategies around short-form video. But so far, experts say that none have matched TikTok’s algorithmic precision.
“It is the center of the internet for young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at Emarketer. “It’s where they go for entertainment, news, trends, even shopping. TikTok sets the tone for everyone else.”
Platforms like Meta‘s Instagram Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts have expanded aggressively, launching new features, creator tools and even considering separate apps just to compete. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, traditionally a professional networking site, is the latest to experiment with TikTok-style feeds. But with TikTok continuing to evolve, adding features like e-commerce integrations and longer videos, the question remains whether rivals can keep up.
“I’m scrolling every single day. I doom scroll all the time,” said TikTok content creator Alyssa McKay.
But there may a dark side to this growth.
As short-form content consumption soars, experts warn about shrinking attention spans and rising mental-health concerns, particularly among younger users. Researchers like Dr. Yann Poncin, associate professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University, point to disrupted sleep patterns and increased anxiety levels tied to endless scrolling habits.
“Infinite scrolling and short-form video are designed to capture your attention in short bursts,” Dr. Poncin said. “In the past, entertainment was about taking you on a journey through a show or story. Now, it’s about locking you in for just a few seconds, just enough to feed you the next thing the algorithm knows you’ll like.”
Despite sky-high engagement, monetizing short videos remains an uphill battle. Unlike long-form YouTube content, where ads can be inserted throughout, short clips offer limited space for advertisers. Creators, too, are feeling the squeeze.
“It’s never been easier to go viral,” said Enberg. “But it’s never been harder to turn that virality into a sustainable business.”
Last year, TikTok generated an estimated $23.6 billion in ad revenues, according to Oberlo, but even with this growth, many creators still make just a few dollars per million views. YouTube Shorts pays roughly four cents per 1,000 views, which is less than its long-form counterpart. Meanwhile, Instagram has leaned into brand partnerships and emerging tools like “Trial Reels,” which allow creators to experiment with content by initially sharing videos only with non-followers, giving them a low-risk way to test new formats or ideas before deciding whether to share with their full audience. But Meta told CNBC that monetizing Reels remains a work in progress.
While lawmakers scrutinize TikTok’s Chinese ownership and explore potential bans, competitors see a window of opportunity. Meta and YouTube are poised to capture up to 50% of reallocated ad dollars if TikTok faces restrictions in the U.S., according to eMarketer.
Watch the video to understand how TikTok’s rise sparked a short form video race.
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.