Sarah Rhoads, who was responsible for Amazon‘s burgeoning air cargo business, is shifting roles to oversee the e-retailer’s workplace health and safety division.
John Felton, Amazon’s head of worldwide operations, announced the move in a note to staffers on Thursday, according to a copy of the memo viewed by CNBC. Rhoads will also be in charge of Amazon’s global operations learning and development unit, which deals with things like career advancement and skills improvement in the company’s front-line workforce.
“Safety is paramount in every aspect of aerospace and other industries look to aviation for best practices in safety,” Felton wrote in the memo. “Sarah’s background as a decorated military pilot and her success leading Amazon Global Air positions her as the ideal leader to assume this critical role.”
Raoul Sreenivasan, who joined Amazon in 2016 and currently oversees planning, performance and cargo for Amazon Global Air, will take over most of Rhoads’ Amazon Air responsibilities, Felton said. Prior to joining Amazon, Sreenivasan worked at DHL and TNT Express, a European courier acquired by FedEx.
Rhoads, a former U.S. Navy F-18 pilot, has been one of the top executives in Amazon’s sprawling logistics business. She joined the e-commerce giant in 2011.
Over the past several years, Amazon has steadily moved more of its fulfillment and logistics operations in house, building a transportation network that the company says rivals UPS in size.
As part of an effort to handle and deliver more of its own packages, Amazon launched an air cargo business. Rhoads joined Amazon Air in its early days and has overseen much of the unit’s growth, including the opening of a $1.5 billion air hub in Kentucky.
Amazon has contracted more passenger airlines to fly packages in addition to other operators like Atlas Air and ATSG. Sun Country, a leisure-focused carrier, began flying converted Boeing 737 freighters for Amazon in 2020, after travel collapsed in the Covid pandemic. In October, Amazon announced that it reached an agreement with Hawaiian Airlines to fly leased Airbus A330 converted freighters, which would be the largest aircraft in Amazon’s fleet and its first Airbus jets. The planes will help replace older jets in the company’s fleet, Amazon said.
Air cargo rates have plunged from record highs hit during late 2021, when port snarls and a dearth of international flights pinched capacity and drove up prices. The rebound in air travel has added capacity to the market, while inflation has fueled shifts in consumer spending. FedEx last year said it would park some aircraft and reduce some of its flights as part of its plan to slash costs.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is in the midst of a broad overview of the company’s expenses as the company reckons with an economic downturn and slowing growth in its core retail business. Amazon rapidly scaled up its fulfillment and transportation network in recent years in response to a pandemic-driven surge in demand. It’s since closed, canceled or delayed several warehouses across the U.S.
The company has also faced growing pressure to address its workplace-safety record. Employees criticized Amazon’s coronavirus response, arguing it wasn’t doing enough to protect them on the job, and the company has faced widespread scrutiny over the injury rates in its warehouses.
In September, Amazon appointed Becky Gansert to oversee its workplace health and safety unit after Heather MacDougall resigned from the company, CNBC previously reported.
Amazon has disputed reports of unsafe working conditions. During MacDougall’s tenure, the company set ambitious goals to reduce injuries, including a plan to cut recordable incident rates, a federal government measurement covering injury and illness, by half by 2025.
Last year Amazon committed to become “Earth’s Best Employer,” adding it to its list of corporate values, even as labor unrest intensified. The executive tasked with overseeing that effort, Pam Greer, departed Amazon last April, according to Bloomberg.
Correction: Sarah Rhoads joined Amazon in 2011. An earlier version misstated the year.
Waymo announced it is now offering teen accounts for its self-driving car service Waymo One, beginning in Phoenix, Arizona.
Courtesy of Waymo
Waymo announced Tuesday that it is offering accounts for teens ages 14 to 17, starting in Phoenix.
The Alphabet-owned company said that, beginning Tuesday, parents in Phoenix can use their Waymo accounts “to invite their teen into the program, pairing them together.” Once their account is activated, teens can hail fully autonomous rides.
Previously, users were required to be at least 18 years old to sign up for a Waymo account, but the age range expansion comes as the company seeks to increase ridership amid a broader expansion of its ride-hailing service across U.S. cities. Alphabet has also been under pressure to monetize AI products amid increased competition and economic headwinds.
Waymo said it will offer “specially-trained Rider Support agents” during rides hailed by teens and loop in parents if needed. Teens can also share their trip status with their parents for real-time updates on their progress, and parents receive all ride receipts.
Teen accounts are initially only being offered to riders in the metro Phoenix area. Teen accounts will expand to more markets outside California where the Waymo app is available in the future, a spokesperson said.
Waymo’s expansion to teens follows a similar move by Uber, which launched teen accounts in 2023. Waymo, which has partnerships with Uber in multiple markets, said it “may consider enabling access for teens through our network partners in the future.”
Already, Waymo provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, and the company is preparing to bring autonomous rides to Miami and Washington, D.C., in 2026.
In June, Waymo announced that it plans to manually drive vehicles in New York, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo said it applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives at the White House to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump on Feb. 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s X said Tuesday that the Indian government ordered the company to block 2,355 accounts, including Reuters, in the country.
“The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology demanded immediate action- within one hour- without providing justification, and required the accounts to remain blocked until further notice,” X’s global government affairs account posted.
The main Reuters account, along with ReutersWorld, was blocked Saturday for users in India, the news service said. Screenshots showed the message “Account withheld @Reuters has been withheld in IN in response to a legal demand.”
The Indian government’s Press Information Bureau told Reuters that no government agency had required blocking the account and said it was working with X to resolve the issue. The accounts were restored on Sunday.
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The statement by X on Tuesday is the latest development in an ongoing censorship legal battle between Musk’s social media site and the Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
X sued Modi’s government in March, accusing India’s IT ministry of unlawfully expanding online censorship to allow the easier removal of content.
Musk often refers to himself as a free speech absolutist and has said his takeover of Twitter was partly due to what he viewed as the unfair restriction of conservative views and voices.
The Tesla CEO swiftly made changes to moderation after he acquired the site, which he later renamed to X.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says it’s not “entirely relevant” that the trading platform’s so-called tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX aren’t technically equity in the companies.
It comes after OpenAI raised concerns about the product, which is designed to give users in the European Union exposure to various U.S. stocks — including private companies, which are less liquid than publicly listed firms.
OpenAI last week warned that Robinhood’s stock tokens do not represent equity in the company and said in a post on X that, “any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer.”
Robinhood says its OpenAI stock tokens are “enabled by Robinhood’s ownership stake in a special purpose vehicle.”
“It is true that these are not technically equity,” Tenev, who co-founded Robinhood in 2013 with fellow entrepreneur Baiju Bhatt, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Tuesday, echoing his initial response to OpenAI’s concerns.
Tenev said that OpenAI’s complex company structure enables institutional investors to gain exposure to the company through “various instruments, like equity upon the event of a conversion to a for-profit at a later date.”
OpenAI was initially founded as a non-profit organization. However, it has since evolved to include a for-profit entity, which is owned by the non-profit.
“In and of itself, I don’t think it’s entirely relevant that it’s not technically an equity instrument,” he said. “What’s important is that retail customers have an opportunity to get exposure to this asset” — even if it’s a private company — due to the disruptive nature of AI, he added.
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On Monday, the Bank of Lithuania, which is Robinhood’s lead authority in the European Union, told CNBC it was “awaiting clarifications” regarding the structure of the company’s stock tokens following OpenAI’s statement last week.
“Only after receiving and evaluating this information will we be able to assess the legality and compliance of these specific instruments,” Bank of Lithuania spokesman Giedrius Šniukas told CNBC. “The information for investors must be provided in clear, fair, and non-misleading language.”
Tenev said in response to the Lithuanian regulator’s comments that Robinhood is “happy to continue to answer questions from our regulators.”
“Since this is a new thing, regulators are going to want to look at it, and we’ve built this program in a way that we believe will withstand scrutiny — and we expect to be scrutinized as a large, innovative player in this space,” he told CNBC.