Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday took aim at regulators who are increasingly blocking mergers, including the company’s planned acquisition of robotic vacuum maker iRobot, which fell apart earlier this year amid antitrust concerns.
“I think it’s really kind of a sad story,” Jassy said in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box” after the Amazon chief released his annual shareholder letter. The acquisition stood to give iRobot a competitive boost against rivals, Jassy said, but regulators blocked the deal “because they worry that we’re going to feature our vacuum cleaner, the Roomba, vs. others, which of course is not our model.”
Amazon in January walked away from its plan to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion after Europe’s antitrust watchdog and the Federal Trade Commission said it raised competition concerns. iRobot laid off 31% of its staff, and its shares have plunged more than 75% so far this year.
Jassy said the move showed that regulators “trust these two large Chinese companies with maps of the inside of U.S. consumers’ homes more than they do Amazon.”
The robotic vacuum industry has become increasingly crowded in recent years, with companies like China-based Anker, Ecovacs and Roborock, as well as SharkNinja, eating into iRobot’s once-dominant share of the market.
The iRobot decision also comes as global regulators have been more aggressive in attempting to block Big Tech companies from expanding further, with the Biden administration making antitrust enforcement in the tech sector a top priority.
As megadeals have slowed to a crawl, tech companies have made a flurry of investments in artificial intelligence startups, seeking to gain a foothold in the burgeoning market. Amazon last month added $2.75 billion to its stake in AI startup Anthropic, which also counts Google as one of its biggest backers. Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Regulators have zeroed in on these partnerships as well, with the FTC launching an inquiry into the deals in January.
“I think people don’t know what they can do right now,” Jassy said. He urged regulators to be “more reasonable” in their stance on Big Tech deals.
Amazon also faces an ongoing lawsuit by the FTC. The agency sued Amazon in September, accusing it of operating an illegal monopoly that stifles competition and raised prices for consumers, while increasing costs for sellers.
The lawsuit centers on Amazon’s sprawling third-party marketplace, which is the linchpin of its e-commerce business. The marketplace now accounts for more than 60% of goods sold on the platform, and includes numerous businesses that generate millions of dollars in annual revenue on the site.
Through the years, Amazon has built a well-oiled fulfillment and logistics machine that enables it and third-party sellers to deliver products to customers at increasingly breakneck speeds. CNBC previously reported that a massive network of groups have sought to take advantage of Amazon’s scale and lenient returns processes by carrying out fraudulent refunds.
It’s ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail.
When asked how Amazon is tackling returns fraud, Jassy said the company has teams charged with examining returned goods to make sure they’re “appropriate.”
“At our scale, you find you get some of everything,” he added.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.