Amazon is pursuing ‘too many ideas’ and needs to focus on best opportunities, analyst says in letter to Jassy
In its quest to upend everything from health care and grocery stores to internet satellites, Amazon has become too unfocused and is missing out on opportunities in its core businesses, according to Bernstein analysts, who on Wednesday published what they called an “open letter” to CEO Andy Jassy and the board.
Amazon remains dominant in e-commerce and cloud computing with Amazon Web Services. In some other areas, however, the company has spent heavily without seeing the results, the analysts said.
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“We fully support Amazon’s efforts to uncover and capture the next AWS-sized opportunity,” wrote Bernstein’s Mark Shmulik, who has an outperform rating on the stock. “But what we’ve seen recently is a company simply pursuing too many ideas, with weaker ideas taking away the oxygen, capital, and most importantly focus from the truly disruptive initiatives that ‘only Amazon can do.'”
Amazon’s stock performance compared with its “closest mega-cap peers” — Apple, Microsoft and Google — has also left investors wanting, Shmulik said. Amazon shares are up 50% year to date, but they’ve underperformed top peers by about 52% over a five-year period, he said.
The stock was down 3.6% to $122.12 as of early afternoon New York time.
Shmulik urged Amazon to get back to its “Day One” mentality, referring to a phrase championed by Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, who was succeeded by Jassy in July 2021. Bezos famously said a Day One mentality would help Amazon stave off its demise, and described it as continuing to innovate rapidly like a startup, no matter how large the company becomes.
“Day 2 is stasis,” Bezos said in a 2017 shareholder letter. “Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Amazon should “divest, seek outside funding, or trim spend” in health care and its nascent low Earth orbit satellite venture, called Project Kuiper, Shmulik wrote. He pointed to Amazon’s multiyear effort to break into health care, before abandoning efforts like its Care telehealth service, Halo health and fitness band, and a joint health-care venture called Haven.
Kuiper “appears even more extreme as an investment area,” according to Shmulik, with Amazon committing $10 billion to build out the initiative. Google’s lack of success with its Project Loon, Fiber and Fi efforts signals “capital intensive low-margin utilities aren’t worth the effort regardless of how ‘cool’ the technology may be,” he wrote.
Amazon should even take a page out of Alphabet’s book and strip out Kuiper, health care and possibly Alexa into “other bets,” Shmulik said. Doing so, he says, would show a “far healthier and more profitable core business” and wouldn’t detract from the company’s effort to “build the next AWS.”
Shmulik is also skeptical of Amazon’s ongoing efforts to expand in international markets like Brazil, Singapore and India, where competition remains stiff. He calls it a case of throwing “good money after bad,” despite the strategic value that those markets may hold.
When it comes to Whole Foods, Fresh supermarkets and Go cashierless convenience stories, Amazon needs to “make a call on physical grocery,” Shmulik wrote. Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, and has continued to build out its grocery offerings on its website, while launching other experimental shops. Recently, the company paused further expansion of its Fresh and Go stores as Jassy looks to cut costs.
Instead of continuing to “tinker with” its Fresh and Go stores, Shmulik said Amazon should “purchase a proven concept such as potential divested KR/ACI stores,” referring to the stores Kroger and Albertsons’ are selling off as part of their planned merger.
Amazon should focus on its core strengths and keep pushing into other areas where it’s gained traction, Shmulik said, encouraging a continued build-out of its advertising and media arms, as well as its Buy With Prime service, which allows websites off of Amazon to take advantage of its Prime delivery benefits.
The current scattershot approach is confusing to shareholders and needs to be cleared up to stem continued underperformance, Shmulik added, calling out uncertainty around where Amazon falls in the artificial intelligence race.
“We get investor questions today asking ‘is AWS in last place in AI?’, ‘is retail actually a profitable business?’, and even ‘do we want Andy on the earnings call?'” Shmulik wrote. “It points to one underlying issue: Amazon doesn’t own its own narrative.”
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple Inc., during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, US, on Monday, June 9, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Apple said on Tuesday that Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, a 27-year company veteran, will be retiring later this year.
Current operations leader Sabih Khan will take over much of the COO role later this month, Apple said in a press release. For his remaining time with the comapny, Williams will continue to head up Apple’s design team, Apple Watch, and health initiatives, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
Williams becomes the latest longtime Apple executive to step down as key employees, who were active in the company’s hyper-growth years, reach retirement age. Williams, 62, previously headed Apple’s formidable operations division, which is in charge of manufacturing millions of complicated devices like iPhones, while keeping costs down.
He also led important teams inside Apple, including the company’s fabled industrial design team, after longtime leader Jony Ive retired in 2019. When Williams retires, Apple’s design team will report to CEO Tim Cook, Apple said.
“He’s helped to create one of the most respected global supply chains in the world; launched Apple Watch and overseen its development; architected Apple’s health strategy; and led our world class team of designers with great wisdom, heart, and dedication,” Cook said in the statement.
Williams said he plans to spend more time with friends and family.
“June marked my 27th anniversary with Apple, and my 40th in the industry,” Williams said in the release.
Williams is leaving Apple at a time when its famous supply chain is under significant pressure, as the U.S. imposes tariffs on many of the countries where Apple sources its devices, and White House officials publicly pressure Apple to move more production to the U.S.
Khan was added to Apple’s executive team in 2019, taking an executive vice president title. Apple said on Tuesday that he will lead supply chain, product quality, planning, procurement, and fulfillment at Apple.
The operations leader joined Apple’s procurement group in 1995, and before that worked as an engineer and technical leader at GE Plastics. He has a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.
Khan has worked closely with Cook. Once, during a meeting when Cook said that a manufacturing problem was “really bad,” Khan stood up and drove to the airport, and immediately booked a flight to China to fix it, according to an anecdote published in Fortune.
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Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives to “Shut up” on Tuesday after the analyst offered three recommendations to the electric vehicle company’s board in a post on X.
Ives has been one of the most bullish Tesla observers on Wall Street. With a $500 price target on the stock, he has the highest projection of any analyst tracked by FactSet.
But on Tuesday, Ives took to X with critical remarks about Musk’s political activity after the world’s richest person said over the weekend that he was creating a new political party called the America Party to challenge Republican candidates who voted for the spending bill that was backed by President Donald Trump.
Ives’ post followed a nearly 7% slide in Tesla’s stock Monday, which wiped out $68 billion in market cap. Ives called for Tesla’s board to create a new pay package for Musk that would get him 25% voting control and clear a path to merge with xAI, establish “guardrails” for how much time Musk has to spend at Tesla, and provide “oversight on political endeavors.”
Ives published a lengthier note with other analysts from his firm headlined, “The Tesla board MUST Act and Create Ground Rules For Musk; Soap Opera Must End.” The analysts said that Musk’s launching of a new political party created a “tipping point in the Tesla story,” necessitating action by the company’s board to rein in the CEO.
Still, Wedbush maintained its price target and its buy recommendation on the stock.
“Shut up, Dan,” Musk wrote in response on X, even though the first suggestion would hand the CEO the voting control he has long sought at Tesla.
In an email to CNBC, Ives wrote, “Elon has his opinion and I get it, but we stand by what the right course of action is for the Board.”
Musk’s historic 2018 CEO pay package, which had been worth around $56 billion and has since gone up in value, was voided last year by the Delaware Court of Chancery. Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled that Tesla’s board members had lacked independence from Musk and failed to properly negotiate at arm’s length with the CEO.
Tesla has appealed that case to the Delaware state Supreme Court and is trying to determine what Musk’s next pay package should entail.
Ives isn’t the only Tesla bull to criticize Musk’s continued political activism.
Analysts at William Blair downgraded the stock to the equivalent of a hold from a buy on Monday, because of Musk’s political plans and rhetoric as well as the negative impacts that the spending bill passed by Congress could have on Tesla’s margins and EV sales.
“We expect that investors are growing tired of the distraction at a point when the business needs Musk’s attention the most and only see downside from his dip back into politics,” the analysts wrote. “We would prefer this effort to be channeled towards the robotaxi rollout at this critical juncture.”
Trump supporter James Fishback, CEO of hedge fund Azoria Partners, said Saturday that his firm postponed the listing of an exchange-traded fund, the Azoria Tesla Convexity ETF, that would invest in the EV company’s shares and options. He began his post on X saying, “Elon has gone too far.”
“I encourage the Board to meet immediately and ask Elon to clarify his political ambitions and evaluate whether they are compatible with his full-time obligations to Tesla as CEO,” Fishback wrote.
Musk said Saturday that he has formed the America Party, which he claimed will give Americans “back your freedom.” He hasn’t shared formal details, including where the party may be registered, how much funding he will provide for it and which candidates he will back.
Tesla’s stock is now down about 25% this year, badly underperforming U.S. indexes and by far the worst performance among tech’s megacaps.
Musk spent much of the first half of the year working with the Trump administration and leading an effort to massively downsize the federal government. His official work with the administration wrapped up at the end of May, and his exit preceded a public spat between Musk and Trump over the spending bill and other matters.
Musk, Tesla’s board chair Robyn Denholm and investor relations representative Travis Axelrod didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
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