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Amazon is on a spending spree to grow its shipping business and isn’t content with only delivering products purchased on its own site. The company is now moving cargo for outside customers in its latest move to compete directly with FedEx and UPS.

“They want to be a new kind of U.S. Postal Service where everything can get everywhere, but also quickly,” said e-commerce consultant Chris McCabe, who was a seller performance investigator at Amazon from 2006 to 2012.

Amazon said in its first-quarter earnings report that capital expenditures were up a whopping 80% from a year earlier, helping it increase capacity of its in-house logistics network by 50% year over year. According to SJ Consulting Group, Amazon is now shipping 72% of its own packages, up from 46.6% in 2019. 

In 2014, Amazon started building its global transportation network from scratch. Seven years and 10 billion deliveries later, Amazon now has 400,000 drivers worldwide, 40,000 semi-trucks, 30,000 vans, and a fleet of more than 70 planes. Perhaps the biggest investment so far is the new $1.5 billion Amazon Air hub that opened in Kentucky in August.

For outside merchants, Amazon already offers a variety of shipping services. In the U.K., Amazon has a “logistics as a service” program — a business model that researchers from DePaul University predict Amazon will launch in the U.S. in the next 18 months, while Morgan Stanley predicted it could happen this year. According to one investigation, Amazon has already begun quietly transporting cargo on its planes for the U.S. Postal Service, although analysts say it won’t try to replicate the vast array of services offered by FedEx and UPS. 

“They’re not going to be just this blanket carrier that will deliver whatever package that you want them to, to whatever address,” said Dan Romanoff, who researches Amazon for Morningstar. “Amazon is sort of cherry-picking their routes. They want to run and sort the parcel sizes they want to deliver.”

Amazon’s algorithms also allow sellers to take advantage of LTL (less than load) truck space at discounted rates, while allowing Amazon to make money on otherwise wasted space. Amazon seller Keith Gregory just started using the program, called Amazon Freight. Gregory’s vitamin and supplement company, Highland Laboratories, is based in a 3,500-person town in Oregon and does about $4 million of annual sales on Amazon. Gregory says Amazon charges up to $1,700 less than FedEx or UPS Freight for some of his routes from Oregon to Southern California.

“For us being in a rural community, the fact that somebody is willing to cater to us, and they’re willing to accommodate pick-up schedules and not just say, ‘Okay, we’ll be there every day at 3:30,’ is also very attractive, too. So not just not just the rate piece, but the fact that they’re also willing to use their vast fleet of vehicles to help us with our logistics as well, which UPS and FedEx are not cooperative in that sense,” Gregory said.

Amazon also offers its Fulfilled By Amazon, or FBA, services for orders not made on Amazon.com, which explains why some orders from eBay, Walmart, and others arrive at your door in Amazon packaging.

“There were points in time in our company’s existence where really Amazon shipped 100% of our orders for all channels,” said Amazon seller Bernie Thompson, who uses what Amazon calls multi-channel fulfillment for many of the consumer electronics sold by his company, Plugable Technologies.

“If you go today and buy a Plugable product on eBay, it’s actually going to be coming from an Amazon warehouse and very often delivered by an Amazon delivery service,” Thompson said.

Former Amazon product safety manager Rachel Greer says the current shipping expansion is reminiscent of other times Amazon has used immense resources and data to disrupt an industry, such as with Prime Video and Amazon Web Services.

“I was part of the process for making sure that FBA sellers were compliant more than a decade ago. And they were like, ‘Well, we have excess capacity. Let’s use it,'” Greer said. “And then when AWS started, we had excess capacity. Let’s use it. So of course if Amazon develops a platform, it works well, and of course if it’s going to have excess capacity, they’re going to try to sell it to someone.”

Watch the video to hear more from former Amazon executives and online sellers about how third-party shipping is the company’s next big venture.

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Tesla shares drop on Musk, Trump feud ahead of Q2 deliveries

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Tesla shares drop on Musk, Trump feud ahead of Q2 deliveries

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.

Jim Lo Scalzo | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday’s closing price of $323.63 to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company’s second-quarter deliveries report.

Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% decline compared to deliveries of nearly 444,000 a year ago, according to a consensus compiled by FactSet. Prediction market Kalshi told CNBC on Tuesday that its traders forecast deliveries of around 364,000.

Shares in the electric vehicle maker had been rising after Tesla started a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in late June and CEO Elon Musk boasted of its first “driverless delivery” of a car to a customer there.

The stock price took a turn after Musk on Saturday reignited a feud with President Donald Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive spending bill that the commander-in-chief endorsed. The bill is now heading for a final vote in the House.

That legislation would benefit higher-income households in the U.S. while slashing spending on programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.

Musk did not object to cuts to those specific programs. However, Musk on X said the bill would worsen the U.S. deficit and raise the debt ceiling. The bill includes tax cuts that would add around $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The Tesla CEO has also criticized aspects of the bill that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in support for renewable energy development in the U.S. and phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.

Such changes could hurt Tesla as they are expected to lower EV sales by roughly 100,000 vehicles per year by 2035, according to think tank Energy Innovation.

The bill is also expected to reduce renewable energy development by more than 350 cumulative gigawatts in that same time period, according to Energy Innovation. That could pressure Tesla’s Energy division, which sells solar and battery energy storage systems to utilities and other clean energy project developers.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Musk was, “upset that he’s losing his EV mandate,” but that the tech CEO could “lose a lot more than that.” Trump was alluding to the subsidies, incentives and contracts that Musk’s many businesses have relied on.

SpaceX has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others.

Tesla has reported $11.8 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by Geoff Orazem, CEO of FedScout.

These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.

Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. Credit revenue amounted to approximately 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024.

WATCH: Threats to SpaceX & Tesla as Musk, Trump feud heats up

Threats to SpaceX & Tesla as Musk, Trump feud heats up

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Jeff Bezos sells $737 million worth of Amazon shares

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Jeff Bezos sells 7 million worth of Amazon shares

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.

Yara Nardi | Reuters

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.

The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.

Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.

Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.

The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.

Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.

WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' Italian wedding sparks protests

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page ‘Doodle’

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Google promotes ‘AI Mode’ on home page 'Doodle'

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images

The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.

Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.

The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”

Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”

AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.

“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.

AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.

In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.

WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom

Google buyouts highlight tech's cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom

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