When Trump Hit Pause & Amazon’s Andy Jassy 4/10/25
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I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer, and this is Squawk Pod. Liberation Day plus one week, and now we're on a pause. It was all in the plan, all part of the plan, and it was the art of the deal. Oh, come on. President Trump hitting the brakes on a tariff policy that spooked global markets. Still singling out China with a high rate, but reverting to a 10% baseline tariff for a 90-day negotiation period.

People now experience what it would be like and now they were, you know, shaken to the core. Now they're going to want to negotiate even more. A lot of times it's not a negotiation until it is. So the world has not actually changed that much this morning with the exception of

of the fact that I think the market now understands that Trump can blink. Wall Street reacts with a sigh of relief, notching a nearly 3,000-point jump for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. You watch this fast and furious and wow. But demand for U.S. government bonds plunged, sending investors in that usual safe haven scrambling. The president's top economic advisor Kevin Hassett answers, did the bond market lead to a change in policy?

Plus, the palace intrigue has its comments on who the president actually listens to.

I don't really like the characterization that we're divided amongst teams. And Andrew Ross Sorgan is in Seattle with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy for a rare interview on the state of the world's largest online retailer. We're doing everything we can to try and keep prices the way they've been for customers, as low as possible. It's Thursday, April 10th, 2025. Another super-sized, super-newsy SquawkPod begins right now.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And as Joe mentioned, our 500 points...

First up today on the podcast, a Wednesday we won't soon forget. At about 1.15 p.m. Eastern Time, President Trump posted on his social media network that he'd be pausing tariffs on countries around the world for 90 days and only leaving a 10% baseline tariff in place. But the president said tariffs on China would be raised to 125%.

At the White House with NASCAR racing champions, Trump was asked why he decided on the pause. I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know. They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid. It had to be done. What was happening to us on trade, not only with, you know, if you look at it, not only with China, but China was by far the biggest abuser in history, and others also, but

Somebody had to do it. They had to stop because it was not sustainable. A senior Trump administration official told NBC News that yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged the president to suspend his tariffs in light of volatility in the bond market. But speaking separately in the afternoon, Besson and Lutnick said market reaction was not the reason the president decided to pause the tariffs. Outside the White House, Besson said this.

This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along. And that, you know, you might even say that he goaded China into a bad position. They responded, they have shown themselves to the world to be the bad actors.

Since he unveiled the new U.S. tariff policy last week, President Trump has said dozens of countries have contacted U.S. officials to negotiate on trade. He also says he sees a deal with China happening. Beijing is not pleased with that 125 percent duty on exports to the U.S. Today, China's foreign ministry said pressure, threats and blackmail are not the right way to deal with the country.

But from the Oval Office, the president said, we'll get a phone call at some point and it'll be off to the races. The markets were off to the races yesterday, posting the third biggest gain in post-World War II history. Let's get back to Becky Quick.

Of course, we're coming off a historic day in the markets. President Trump's tariff pause on countries around the world, except for China, sparking a massive afternoon market rally. Man, you had to be watching closely and watching every minute of the day yesterday. The S&P actually gained 9.5%. It was its best day since 2008. FactSet said that it was the S&P's third biggest daily gain since World War II.

The Nasdaq was up by more than 12 percent. That was its best day since 2001 and its second best day ever. And the Dow was up by more than 7.8 percent. That was shy. That was just shy of 3000 points. And it was the Dow's biggest point gain ever. You watch this fast and furious and wow. Talk about the old adage that you have to be in the market because those big days that you miss will be the days that set back. Or just be careful if you're short. I mean, if you if you were short with this.

That would be wrecking. So we've watched this volatility continue. Again, we're down today. Still a lot of questions about what this means. And hopefully it didn't sell. And we've made the point, you know, we keep talking about trillions, $5 trillion.

There was paper losses. Unless you sold, you weren't locking in. And some people probably did sell, which is probably unfortunate. Well, somebody did. The volume was the highest we've seen in more than 18 years, so a lot of people were selling. People that were yippy, as the president said, might have been, unfortunately, people who were close to retirement and didn't feel comfortable staying in the markets, and that's not good.

If you had sold, though, last week, you would still be ahead of the game. I'm not saying if you're trading this, you would still be ahead of the game if you had gotten out before the tariffs. And then given where we are this morning and where this may all go over the next period of time, I think it's hard to suggest that somehow it's going to be better this

That's what I said. The reason you see it down this morning, we're still trying to figure out what the situation is. These are still significant tariffs across the board. You have a lot of trading partners that you're going to have to try and set agreements with. We got faked out on Monday and Tuesday because everybody in the world knew the tariffs were coming. And I think Monday last week and Monday was a bigger than we thought it was a big day up. And then all of a sudden it came on Wednesday and everything changed.

Absolutely hit the fan over the next three, four, five days. I mean, moves of 2,500 in the Dow. So that, I don't know who, I don't know if people really sold before it happened. I don't know how many people sold afterwards. All you had was a week to do all this. Yeah, but you had massive volatility and you had incredibly high volume. So a lot of people sold. It's part of the problem. For every person selling or someone buying. Right, right. It's just, depending on the market,

depending on who you are as you mentioned if you're somebody who's near retirement you panicked and you pulled out of this then this is nothing to laugh about at all this is um and nothing to think that it's an all clear all calm if you're looking at the treasury market today that was really the 800 pound gorilla that was pushing a lot of the decisions behind the scenes

The 10-year Treasury this morning is sitting at 428. The yields had skyrocketed, and that created a lot of concern. The two-year right now is at 385. We have seen the spread narrow. The high-yield spread, I guess, got people spooked, too. But the 10-year, all it did was go back to where it was before the flight to the quality after the tariffs were announced. But the moves, the inter-day moves that you were saying of 35-plus basis points, I mean, that is...

I told you what happened during the credit. I had someone along bonds and it was 300 basis point move that day. Three, three full points or two and a half points. Trump knew we got a market. President knew we got a market, a trial balloon. What was that? Monday or Tuesday where Hassett,

Look like he had and he's going to be on today, but it looked like he was. Some people took it on social media that he did it as a problem. Remember, the market turned around and went up. So they knew that this this would be.

you know they had an idea of of what was in an interesting tweet before state pool uh... it turned about time to buy this is far from settled uh... there's a lot to work through on this and these tariffs are still considerably higher than we were just a week ago and we'll we'll see what that means for all of this uh... and i think that somebody was making the point today

USMCA, NAFTA 2.0, that took two years to negotiate. My guess is they're not going to have fully negotiated deals on this, but starting a dialogue may be the thing that is enough to kind of set in motion and see where we get to with the deal. Yeah, that'd be 150 years. You may disagree with me. I imagine this is going to go on for a very long time, possibly longer than 90 days. I think the only thing that's really happened here is there's a little bit of a floor or

or at least a put that we all will now acknowledge that maybe the president is not going to be willing to go, quote unquote, all the way if he sees the bond market moving in the wrong direction or if he or if he thinks that there's going to be, you know, these issues about rare earth minerals. I kept hearing overnight from a number of CEOs that that was something they were concerned about. So I think there's a whole bunch of things that were happening where he, I think, recognized that he might.

put us on the losing end of this. Well, and losses on Wall Street that translate into losses on Main Street. The idea that you had a president who was elected to try and bring inflation down, if you're bringing prices up and then borrowing costs up for the average American, too, that's not a good situation. It's a false dichotomy, Wall Street and

But the truth is it puts him in a terrible negotiating perspective point. That's that is the truth, because I think the rest of the world literally does think he blinked. So when it comes to actually getting what he wants, the question is how far he's going to be able to push things in truth.

But in 90 days, you could put them right back on. I disagree with that. In 90 days, you could put them right back on. We'll see about that, because if the bond market starts to move the other direction again, and if Elon Musk starts to get concerned that we're not going to have access to rare earth minerals and all the other things that played out over the last 72 hours,

I think changes the dynamic in terms of how much he's able to push. The other piece of this, though, which nobody's talking about, talking about uncertainty, is all of a sudden the budget conversation is going to almost invariably have to get pushed out because part of the, you know, Mike Johnson came on our air and said, oh, we're going to have taxes and the budget and everything squared away in May. That's 20 days from now, right? That now almost can't even be conceived of because

Because part of the whole rationale of putting the tariffs on beyond everything else is that they were hoping to be able to use some of that money that they think that they would have raised from it, whatever those numbers were, and build them in to the ability to therefore take down, you know, tips on, you know, tips. Ackman has entirely.

180 degrees from your take, Andrew. By doing it Trump's way, the entire world and their citizens got to experience the visceral impact of

What massive terrorists would do it wasn't thought the Ackman said he would have done the the pause first and then do it But now he sees a method to the madness and that everybody experienced what it would be like and that's what you're looking at in 90 days Cliff asses. Yeah, so I had to figure that out Yeah, I didn't understand it in I didn't understand it originally in Pulp Fiction I didn't understand what was that thing that came out and I guess it's a bummer

BDSM, that's what you call someone in that suit, is a gimp, but they brought out the gimp. Zed's dead. I don't think it was a compliment. I don't know if I'm on the other side of Bill Ackman or not on this. I didn't see exactly what he said. All I'm suggesting to you is that I think that you're going to have uncertainty over

People now experience what it would be like, and now they were, you know, shaken to the core. Now they're going to want to negotiate even more. So I don't know how you come down with now they don't want to negotiate and they're emboldened. Because all of a sudden you have two things going on, Joe. You have all of these countries now have 90 days not just to make a deal with the U.S., but to make a deal with each other. That's what's happening. So the calls that I was making last night, these countries are now going to band together against us. And now they have time to do it. I think you are on the other side, Bill Ackman.

Yeah, he is. And I think they can band with each other all they want. It's still going to add up to the United States. You can't you can't. We're most of the world's consumption. And it's always been that way. And you're going to see with China, if you don't play ball, we'll see. I'm more interested in how it all plays out with China at this point, because that's not that's not going away either. So the world has not actually changed that much this morning relative today, with the exception of.

of the fact that I think the market now understands that Trump can blink. That's what the lesson of all this is. I think the end result is if we can do this with allies, that puts us in a much better position. I don't know why we rankled our allies to begin with. Never thought that was a great position to be in. If you can move forward with allies, I think that allays...

some uncertainty. But again, we have to see how this plays out over the next 90 days. Depending on how you view the world, depending on how you view the world, the prism you look through, the prism you look through, with your prism, we know how your prism works. And it's either he blinked and folded and he got hit in the head. Leisman, I think, said he saw a

I don't know, you saw something coming at him and he had to duck. The other side is, and you're hearing it from all of his acolytes, and we're going to hear it from Hassell today, it was all in the plan, all part of the plan, and it was the art of the deal. I think it's somewhere between art of the deal, somewhere between art of the deal, and you finally... It's working how? It's working how?

When the market went down 300 points, it went 300 points, you were ready to jump. Goes up 3,000 and nothing's changed and how did it work and everything. But that's your prism, which is fine. But it's somewhere between art of the deal and you hit your head against the wall so hard, it feels so good when you stop. I think it's somewhere in between there. And that's what we all did for eight days. And that's what he did.

for eight days, but it finally was driven home. But if you get why 75 countries wanting to negotiate, why is that not a good thing? Andrew, why do you believe that? And why do you believe that over the next 90 days, you don't believe it? You don't believe we're going to get anywhere with them? I believe it because they said it with each other. What? Who said it? Because the president said it. Did you hear it from the other countries? Because the treasury secretary said it. Okay.

I mean, OK, they're all liars and none of these companies, none of these countries are actually calling. None of them actually want to try to change their their way. I'm sure they're calling. I'm just suggesting to you that, you know, if you think that the folks in Canada who don't want to be the 51st state of America to begin with are desperately trying to make a deal with the U.S., I don't think they wanted this deadline to happen.

But now that they may have 90 days, do you not think that they're going to call Mexico? Do you not think they're going to call the EU? Do you not think that they're going to spend the next however much time they can to try to actually band together themselves? Come on. That's what the one thing I will say is trying to negotiate. I think I think we'll watch with China whether they learn the lesson of not of not getting first in the queue. The one thing I will say is I went back and looked at an interview that we had done with China.

Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Bill Gates six years ago. The last time we were going through these negotiations with China, we happened to have them live on the air as it was happening. And there's...

They all acknowledge that it would be good to get more out of out of China, that, you know, there's there's no there's nothing that says we have to stay with a situation that is not a great situation. But they also one of the things that Warren Buffett said at the time was if you're in a negotiation, you want to make the other guy feel good while still getting everything you want in that negotiation. And that that's an interesting reminder of that.

it'd be nice to maybe have people feel a little better about some of the negotiating we do. At least for our allies, less so with China. Did you not want Trump to make that move? When he was not relenting and just sticking to it, you had so many complaints and so much TDS. And now he doesn't. And you've even stepped it up from there. So it's crazy. I don't know, damned if you do and damned if you don't.

No, no, this is better. Well, yes, there to me, there are very few good outcomes from all of this, at least the way it was approached from the beginning. So this is a marginally better way out than where we where we started the ballgame. That's about as good as we're going to get from that. It's Marshall. OK, that's as good as it's going to get. All right. But the truth is, as we said from the get go, you are always going to have to have these negotiations in.

And they were always going to play out. And the uncertainty that those that that was going to create, whether it was going to be done. I mean, over now, over 90 days before, I think we thought it would still maybe take 90 days. He would just be maybe more painful because he was going to try to keep them on during that period. Well, he was going to do it because that's what he ran on negotiating leverage.

We'll see. This was coming. Whether it's a good thing or not to try and get a more level playing field with bad actors in global trade, that's what he was elected to do. So if you wanted him to do nothing and just have the status quo, that did not happen. You're right.

So in terms of knowing he was going to do this and try to get extract some deals in terms of tariffs and protectionism and what happens with India and what happens, you knew that was coming. Joe, I think that most I think that I don't want to speak for all voters, but I think that most voters, if you look at the polls of those people who voted for President Trump, they voted on issues of immigration. They voted on issues about wokeism.

They voted on the issues about the economy. And to the extent that they voted on the issues about tariffs, it was mostly focused on national security around China. He's been saying it for 40 years. That's what they voted on. He's been saying it for 40 years. It didn't prevent them from voting for him, knowing that he was going to take a very... But he didn't do this extremely in the last... This is a very different... No, but he did it. And he put it on and Biden left him on. Four years ago. No, but this is... But doing it to everybody is very different than what he had done in the first Trump administration. And that may have caught a lot of people off guard. But it's not... Shouldn't have surprised anyone.

that it was happening. And we'll see what the ultimate outcome is. I think when you look at the border, you look at taxes, you look at inflation, those were probably the top three things that people were focused on. I think the hollowed out middle class and America first. I mean, Make America Great Again was talking about

getting a more fair playing field for... There's a million things you can look at that they were talking about. Make America healthy again. You don't think that... Why do you think that the lunch pail people were all voting for him, that they'd have been left out of the economic... Like the Reagan Democrats that came around. All of them. All of the... Why did the unions decide? Why did the unions decide to... Okay, so now what does he tell you? You had the UAW cheering for these higher tariffs, and now he's rolling back. Well, to say that we didn't know the tariffs were coming, I mean, that's what he ran on. That was one of the things he ran on.

But what do those voters think if you roll them back? Joe, do you think that Elon Musk supported him for this reason? No.

I don't think Elon Musk was part of the negotiate. Elon Musk and Scott Besson were negotiations on this side. We got Howard Lutnick and Peter Navarro, Ron Varo, or whatever his name is. We had them on the other side. Right? So we've known all along where the two factions were. They're all on board with you.

They're all on board with something. In fact, you talk to people, Mark Rowan. I mean, you try to talk them out of it. But Mark Rowan said he appreciated trying to take on some of these intractable issues where we've gotten the short end of the stick. I think you just said, Joe, the thing that's important, though, in 90 days is coming back. Not this way at all. Anticipate that. And I wonder. So now you'd like to do it, but this is just the wrong method or something. How would you have done it?

I think that I think the way Rowan walked sort of walked it through with us yesterday is is the right way to do it. You try to make to the extent you can a better deal with Canada and Mexico first. You go from Canada and Mexico to try to get to the EU, our next big ally. You go. We should try something to maybe India and then maybe go to China. And so you're on the edges. You don't like it on the edges. You don't like it with others on the edges. You don't like it. But the basic premise that we need to do something you do think is is true.

I think that you can ask for other things and probably get some things without putting a series of tariffs that are going to effectively create lots of protectionism around the world. Yes, I think that you can do you can you can make some changes around the edges, which will have a big, big impact, even if they're marginal. But they but not the way it's being done thus far. All right. Let me know.

It's a longer debate and we'll get to do it. Let me know if he does do something. Let me know if he ever does do anything that you approve of. And we'll actually have that in a little banner at the bottom. If you're interested in clips of Becky Quick's 2019 interview with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the late Berkshire Hathaway vice chair, Charlie Munger, please check out our show notes for links to video clips of that discussion. We'll put them right there for you. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, a White House insider on just what happened yesterday.

The art of the deal on one side and hitting your head against the wall until, you know, because it feels so good when you stop and that the actual what happened yesterday was somewhere in the middle. Kevin Hassett, one of the president's top economic advisors, was on the pause that shocked.

The president recognizes that in order to get the big change that we need for America's workers, like these are really fundamental changes that we're talking about, that we need to create enough pressure on our trading partners.

The U.S. and China are competing for global leadership. The country who wins will define the world we live in. U.S. international assistance is vital to our national security. It helps prevent terrorism and avoid costly wars. It fights diseases and saves lives. It helps keep America as the number one economy in the world.

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Welcome back to SquawkPod. I'm producer Katie Kramer.

If that 90-day pause on higher tariffs to continue negotiations sounded familiar, a rumor of basically that idea, a 90-day pause, floated on Monday caused a bit of a market jump. Nobody here is aware of any plans for any kind of 90-day pause, at least right now.

thanks to an unconfirmed report about comments attributed to the White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. Maybe. I'm really trying to understand where it came from, when it was said, if it was said. The White House batted down the idea. Spoke to Caroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on the phone just a short time ago, and she tells me it is, quote unquote, fake news.

But just two days later, a 90-day pause comes to be. What does the real Kevin Hassett say? Joe, Becky, and Andrew asked.

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, who all along I think we divided people up into the negotiators. That was Besant and you're going to probably won't like this. That was Besant and Elon and I would say you. And then we had the stand firm, no negotiators, and that was maybe the Commerce Secretary and

and maybe Peter Navarro. It looks like something that you said earlier in the week, Kevin, that sort of got, I don't know, circulated as fact instead of fiction. That was like a market check. Yesterday it happened, and indeed, 3,000 points.

Well, first of all, I don't really like the characterization that we're divided amongst teams. In fact, I would say that the person who right at the final minute was with the president when the president decided to do the pause that we had been talking about all along was Secretary Lutnick. Secretary Lutnick and Secretary Bessette were in the room for the final call with the president.

And I think that's a nice clarification of how we're not on different teams. I know boys will be boys, according to Carolyn Leavitt. But are you not on X? I still don't get anything except talk about that, whatever you want to call it, that food fight between Elon Musk and Ron Varro, Peter Navarro.

Well, as you know, I practice a martial art called Aikido where basically what you try to do is redirect negative energy so that it works against the guy and doesn't turn it into an all-out scuffle. I think verbal Aikido is a better choice. It's a better choice. It's a better choice for people. I characterize it as...

Is the art of the deal on one side and hitting your head against the wall until, you know, because it feels so good when you stop and that the actual what happened yesterday was somewhere in the middle. I guess you'd say it was all art of the deal. This was the plan all along to go China into being isolated. Well, I think that what's been going on all along is the president recognizes that in order to get the big change that we need,

for America's workers. These are really fundamental changes that we're talking about that we need to create enough pressure on our trading partners that things the American presidents have been asking for for the last decades are actually offered at the table.

I can say that I was on a call with the Swiss president yesterday with President Trump. We've got a whole system set up through Susie Wiles and the cabinet secretaries that we're starting to have a meeting today after lunch where we prioritize our allies and other countries and decide who is going to visit and when. But I can tell you that the amount of stuff that's coming to the table came up really a lot long before the market movements this week. And so it was looking like that there had been enough

action to get us to the point where we should really genuinely start negotiating and if you go back and look you can see the negotiation uh signals were out there already even on that monday where somebody made a fake tweet that uh suddenly said that i i was saying something that ended up being kind of mostly true on wednesday and so anyway i think that

Everything was moving forward in an orderly fashion. And there's no doubt that the Treasury market yesterday made it so that the decision that, you know, it's about time to move was made, I think, with perhaps a little more urgency. But it was going to happen at any moment anyway. You expect real negotiations over the next...

90 days. People say it's happy talk. And in fact, all these trading partners are going to be emboldened now to not do anything because they know that the president's not serious or he's going to blink. So they can just wait out. They got 90 days now and they don't have to do anything.

I talked with Jameson Greer, the U.S. Trade Representative, yesterday just to get an update on the number of countries. And, of course, saying you've got a lot of countries calling, that's one thing, right? But they could be calling to say, how's the weather out there? But then having people really begin negotiations to make offers, that's a different number.

That number is like closing in on 20. There's a little bit of discussion about exactly, well, did they really make an offer? But for sure, there's a bunch of offers that are really sensible offers. And they're coming from our top trading partners. And it's some of the most progress in trade negotiation that I think probably the most progress that we've ever seen. And so I think that this...

system that the president set up to say, hey, we're serious about negotiation. We're serious about reciprocity. If you guys come down, we'll come down. To do that, we've got to have some negotiations. The fact that people started to send stuff. We had two deals almost closed as of last week, almost closed. Getting them closed requires the lawyers to work forever and so on. And so getting them closed by yesterday was not quite going to happen. But yes, there's a big inventory of deals that are right close to the finish line. Yeah.

All right. That's interesting. Kevin, how much of the decision was was led by in terms of to pause yesterday was led by the bond market and what you were seeing there and anxiety on that front?

My view, and you know I've been on the show for 20 years, right, is always to just shoot straight. My view is that they're very, very close. It could well be that the announcement that came out yesterday was going to happen anyway because there were so many deals teed up. There was a discussion about whether a general pause or a few deals that are just about finalized are the way to move to the next step and to make it clear to markets that we're serious about the strategy that we're following. And I think in the end, everybody decided as a team, you know, all the way from, you know,

Peter Navarro, to whoever else you think is on the other side, agreed to do it this way. And I think, you know, the fact that the bond market was telling us, hey, it's probably time to move, certainly would have contributed at least a little bit to that thinking. But but it wasn't the bond market that made a panic move because there was a very systematic well-planned move that was just about to happen. It just turned out to be at the same time. Right.

The reason I ask about the bond market, Kevin, is as this plays out over the next 90 days and we all watch the bond market as well, and I imagine you folks will too, if we see a spike in the bond market in a similar way to what we saw in the last 48 hours prior to the pause,

how you think that changes the negotiations or if it does at all and also how our allies or folks who may not be our allies or negotiating against us on tariffs are going to be thinking about that bond market.

Well, I think that you can think about there being two phases. Phase one is going to be where we demonstrate the truth that with the guidance of Suzy Wiles, the chief of staff's office, that we've set up a process so that these negotiations can proceed in a very orderly, well thought out fashion with timelines and so on and priorities. And again, there's a big meeting about that with senior cabinet officials today here at the White House.

And then once we show you, well, here's how we're doing it, then I think that'll be very reassuring for markets because I understand not only are they serious, but we can even see the schedule and we can see the priorities. So the priorities make sense. And then I think that the second phase will be when you start to see the actual deals and see the characteristic of them and they say, oh, not only are they talking about it, but they're delivering. And oh, my, that thing they delivered is really great for American workers. That second phase is going to be much faster than you might think.

because basically we've got a few deals that we've been working on ahead of this that are really really well advanced

And Kevin, I think that's a big part of the question, what those deals look like. I mean, there have been questions asked because even renegotiating NAFTA took two years to do. Are these just kind of straight across the board? Bring tariffs down here, cut these non-tariff barriers? Is it a formula that's kind of working or is every country different? Well, in the end, the asks are going to be put forward by the president.

uh... guided by the same trade team that got us to this point and i think that the ass will be sometimes extremely clear to the public and sometimes they'll be quiet things uh... that involve things that people don't even talk very much about involving military matters or so on and so it's all of the above approach to make the relationships between our countries much stronger than they've ever been before and i'm really highly excited about it it's going to be a heck of a time and when you talk about timing

When I talked about, well, 60 days, 90 days, the book around the world in 80 days kind of ran into my mind. And I'm thinking, well, if we say 90 days, let's shoot for 80 days. And I think that when I look at the schedules that we're getting ready to debate and talk about, I think it's very doable, very doable.

Hey, Kevin, when we were still in negotiation mode, we were hearing that we could go to zero, zero, zero with a lot of these countries, but that doesn't cut it.

But there's so many other things in terms of currency manipulations and, you know, VATS and all these other protectionist things that went into that crazy measurement that the administration used to try to summarize all of them using, you know, trade deficits. That seems like no way you could get some of those deals done in 90 days. Are we going to accept much less than what we were promised?

in terms of getting rid of all the impediments to trade? I don't think there's any chance that if Secretary Besant or Secretary Lutnick, the two of the main negotiators for this, are going to go out and come up with a deal and then they show it to the president that if the president doesn't think that it satisfies his objectives for the American people, then those negotiators on our team are going to hear from it. And boy, I can tell you, I've seen what happens in the past to the previous administration.

when deals are negotiated that the president doesn't like. He sends them back to the drawing board until he's ready to strike a deal that he thinks is right for the American people. What are we doing with China? Are we isolating China to finally decouple, which is something that's a...

something that's been talked about, but I don't know in practice whether it's really possible, or do you expect them to come to the negotiating table? Because most pundits say that she is backed into a corner and there's no way--

He's going to come around at this point. You know, President Trump has a strong relationship with President Xi. They've had conversations in the past that have been very productive. Those conversations haven't begun yet. When they begin, I think, is a decision that President Trump will decide. And I don't have any clarity on whether that's going to be soon or later. But I know that the president has had a lot of progress, made a lot of progress in the past by speaking directly with President Xi. And I'd be shocked if at some point that doesn't happen.

We had Professor Jeremy Siegel on earlier this morning, and he brought up a few questions about this. He said, look, first of all, it takes the markets time to recover from the psychological damage that they've experienced the last eight days. He also said he did not think that the United States holds as many cards as we think we do when it comes to negotiating with China.

We're not out of the woods on the tariff. I mean, there's, you know, we'll see what gets negotiated. It definitely, you know, will have to be negotiation with China. I don't know whether Trump holds as many cards as

as he thinks. What would you respond to that? I think that given the massive trade deficit that we have, that there are really quite a few cards that are held that are very difficult for China to adjust to. So think about it right now that there are whole container ships filled with stuff

that might be sitting in port in China right now wondering what they're supposed to do. And then the factories that reload the incoming container ships, wondering whether they should shut down for a while because they don't know where they're going to be shipping the stuff. It's an absolute extreme disruption for the Chinese economy right now that's come because of repeated terrible behavior on their part, including aiding and abetting the fentanyl trade. And so I think

China's going to have to figure something out, and my guess is it's going to involve reaching out to us and setting up talks. But their economy is certainly right now going through the kind of shock that they probably never expected. Hey, Kevin, how does this whole pause change the timeline to the extent it does around the budget talks, around taxes? That's something that House Speaker Mike Johnson has talked about.

He thought completing in the month of May, given that I imagine these talks are now going to play out in a longer way in terms of the tariff piece and potentially the revenue that could come with that. And I know that was something that was important to the administration in terms of thinking about how to therefore construct the budget. I imagine we're now talking about sometime in the summer. Does this get pushed to the fall? Where are we?

I don't think the very ambitious timeline that the White House has signaled has been changed at all. If anything, things can even go faster.

What's, recall, happening is that the big six group, which includes Scott Besant and me and then the leadership of the House and the Senate, we've been meeting every week and negotiating the tough negotiating things so that both the House and the Senate, when they move forward, that they're moving forward in a kind of ratcheted way so they don't slip back. And I think that we're going to hopefully see that this week when the House passes the Senate.

budget instructions. And then from there, all of a sudden, the committees are going to start writing the stuff. And a lot of that stuff, the committee's been working on since last summer. And so I think that absolutely the big, beautiful tax bill is right on schedule. And then it is a technical matter that I know that market participants like to think about is that now that we've got, say, $2 billion a day in tariff revenue coming in, that's a lot of revenue that can help reduce budget deficits, should be good for bond markets. How does that influence the

the package. And the bottom line is that what will happen will be that the CBO, when it sees the revenue, will start to adjust the baseline for revenue to include the tariff revenue that comes in. And that will reduce the deficit. It'd be good for bond markets, but it won't affect the overall numbers that they agreed to. It won't count as a tax increase. It's just like a baseline adjustment. Kevin, I appreciate the perspective that it won't be part of the full CBO square.

SCORING, THAT'S SOMETHING THAT WE'VE TALKED TO SECRETARY BESSON ABOUT. BUT I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT THE ADMINISTRATION, AT LEAST SOME REPUBLICANS, WERE THINKING OF

you know, trying to include some of those numbers, at least in terms of how they were going to sell the plan to the public and to others when, you know, if we're talking about taking down, you know, taxes on tips and things like that. And part of it was creating some kind of permanence around those tariffs so that you knew that that revenue was also permanent. If that revenue is not permanent because there's still talks going on, that will therefore change the dynamic with which you would negotiate around the budget, no?

Well, what I mean to say is that the tariff revenue, if Congress decides to write into law the president's objectives, then we would, of course, celebrate that. But there's a plan right now that gets this tax bill done before we all go home for vacation in August and well before then, and that it doesn't require any tricky maneuvers with the tariffs.

the ball is on the tee and they can hit it. And the tariffs are going to be something that should make the budget hawks really happy because the deficit will be lower than they ever dreamed possible, but it won't affect the reconciliation process. So, Kevin, you add the 10%, the tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and you add in China, and these are still the highest tariffs rates I think we've had people say since

since Smoot-Hawley. So is that permanent? Is this now? We heard the other things are going to be permanent. It's hard to really gauge what's real and what is sort of more posturing. But do you expect this to be a permanent situation or this is fluid as well? I think everybody expects the 10 percent baseline tariff is going to be the baseline and that it's going to take some kind of extraordinary deal for the president to go below there.

And the way that, I don't know if history is ever going to really come down with sort of the administration spin on how it all happened. You've seen some of the articles that, you know, that the president was watching some TV yesterday and, you know, saw different things happening that finally forced his hand and that some of his closest advisors didn't find out.

you know, exactly what was happening. It just seems like a lot of this, if you're going to call it the art of the deal, should we just assume that it is an art, it's not a science, and you can get to this point and it was all deliberate when it's all said and done, or are you just sort of being buffeted by circumstance and finally arriving at a policy that affects the entire globe, frankly?

No, this policy was discussed at length with a whole bunch of trade advisors over many, many weeks. In the end, the president had multiple options to decide between, and he knew that he had to create leverage to get people to the table to begin negotiations. He did that before the final decision, and the negotiations lifted off

like really crazy, right? A couple days before markets started gyrating. And so then the question is, how do we start to show that we're genuinely

going to have these negotiations. And we had a couple of deals that are close to finished. And we also had the idea that we could have a pause. And the president decided to pick the latter approach, which was something that had been studied all along, all the way to the beginning, about like, how do we go from first, let them know we're serious, to second, getting negotiations that actually delivered for the American people. And the president chose this path that it was not something that he thought

thought up the last minute. Was it deliberate overkill on the original calculation used for those very high tariffs that allowed the United States to cut it in half and have very high tariffs? Was that all part of the plan?

The original IEPA was meant to address the trade deficit, which is viewed as a national emergency. And having the tariffs be a function of the trade deficit seemed like the logical thing to do for the lawyers at the USTR. And those numbers ended up being pretty high. And I think, you know, did the higher numbers help get people to the table, help people understand the urgency of what we're trying to accomplish? I'm sure they did. Okay, good. Kevin, thank you. Kevin Hassett. Thanks, guys. Great to be here. See you again soon. Thanks.

Tease will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, an exclusive interview with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. He runs the biggest retail name in the world. He'll join us on rising costs, tariffs, and how Amazon is spending billions on AI. If you sat in the meetings with the AWS team right now, they feel like it's their responsibility and their mission to make the cost of AI meaningfully less for customers than it is today.

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You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Today, our Andrew Ross Sorkin sits down with a special guest, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy released his annual shareholder letter just ahead of this discussion, predicting a rapid advancement in the mega cap tech's investment in artificial intelligence. Stand, Andrew, by in three, two, one. Cue Andrew. Here's Andrew.

We are in Seattle this morning at Amazon's campus in downtown Seattle. We have an exclusive interview with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy out with his annual letter today. And there's so much to talk to you about. Couldn't be more thrilled to talk to you, especially right now. So what is going on right now in terms of the way you're thinking about the tariff position? Obviously, the China piece of it is still on and a huge portion of your sellers and other and manufacturers that are selling through Amazon are

Manufactured in China. Well, it's it's hard to know what's really going to happen. You know this there's a lot of flux right now and

You know, we're going to spend time on where we spent all our cycles trying to figure out how we have the right customer experience. So we know customers care a ton about selection. We're going to try and do everything we can to keep prices as low as possible for customers. And we're going to ship things as quickly as possible as we can for our customers. And that's what we're going to spend our time focused on. There have been some reports that you've already started to cut back, though, in terms of buying certain product from China. Is that true?

Well, what I would tell you is whenever you have any threat of any kind of discontinuity as a team, you have to think about what are the things you can do to help customers. And so we're doing everything we can to try and keep prices the way they've been for customers, as low as possible. And, you know, so we'll do things like we've done some strategic forward inventory buys to be able to get as many items as makes sense for customers at lower prices, and

You know, there are some cases where we have deals we were negotiated that weren't done where we'll renegotiate terms to make it easier for customers to have lower prices. So we're going to do everything we can to keep prices as low as possible. Are you seeing, by the way, any pull forward in terms of folks saying, I need to buy? My son just yesterday, who's been desperate for a new laptop, said, Dad, maybe we got to buy the laptop now because it could cost a lot more later. You have a smart son.

How old is he? 14. Oh, my gosh. You know, I think, again, it's such little data at this point since, you know, the first set of tariffs came out and then yesterday there was a pause. But we have seen, you know, we see people, people have not stopped buying. And in certain categories, we do see a little bit of people buying ahead.

But it's hard to know if it's just an anomaly in the data because it's just a few days or how long it's going to last. But, you know, we're going to do, as I said, everything we possibly can to keep prices low for customers. Who is going to eat the cost, though? Because I think that's one of the big questions. How much can get passed on to the customer? How strong do you think the American consumer is right now? And how much of it gets eaten by Amazon? How much gets eaten effectively by potentially a third-party seller?

I think we'll have to see how it all plays out. But if you made me guess, you know, I'm guessing that that sellers will pass that cost on. Fully. I think they'll try. And I understand why. I mean.

depending on which country you're in, you don't have 50% extra margin that you can play with. So I think they'll try and pass the cost on. And, you know, as I said, it's so early right now, but we haven't seen any change in consumer behavior in a meaningful way yet. Is there any change in terms of your own behavior, meaning the company's behavior? One of the things you're doing is building data centers, for example, and having to invest heavily in that space.

Obviously, there are component parts that are coming in from China and all over the world. And how do you think about that, for example? Well, every, you know, every finished good that's got any degree of complexity in it has parts from all over the world. And that's been true for a while. And actually, in our AWS business, really starting about five years ago, we very significantly diversified our supply chain. And so we have components that are from everywhere. It's not just one country.

but we have such high demand right now for for aws and and the ai uh growth is so significant that we don't see any attenuation in demand and we're going to keep building and so there's it would be no depending on what happens with the tariffs there'd be no change to to that

I don't see us attenuating or building data centers right now. We have very high demand. Can I ask one related question in terms of data centers? One of the other sort of major shocks to the system, it was now a couple months ago, was the creation of DeepSeq, which was this new large language model that people thought was remarkably more efficient. And there was this view among some that said,

maybe we don't need all of these data centers. We're not going to need all of this processing, as much processing power and as much energy as some had forecast. Did it change your forecast, though, when you saw that? No. I mean, in some ways, I mean, we would like nothing better than to make the cost of AI meaningfully less expensive for customers. The cost of AI today is

because of the chips and because of the cost of inference still, even though the cost of inference has come down several times. But it's still more expensive than it should be and than it will be. And then what you need for companies to be able to deploy AI as expansively as they want. And so when DeepSea came out with this model, which people were excited about, it felt like it cost less, it felt like the inference was less,

You know, I think if you're building frontier models like we are as well, you're all working on a lot of the same types of problems and you're going to see all this leapfrogging. You have seen all this leapfrogging every month and you'll continue to see that. But for me...

The lower that we can make the cost of AI, the more customers are going to use it. And I think people get confused. I saw this in the beginning of AWS, too, which is customers love when you take the cost per unit of something down. It allows them to save money on what they're building, but they don't actually spend less. It actually unleashes them to do a lot more innovation. And in absolute, they spend more. It's the same thing when we started AWS. We pretty...

significantly changed the cost of compute and storage and database. Customers loved it, but they actually spent more on infrastructure because it allowed them to build more for their customers. That's something you talk about a lot in the letter, bringing down the cost of compute when it comes to AI. And obviously, you also make an allusion, I don't think you use the word NVIDIA, but I know there was maybe a frenemy partner and a competitor at the same time. They have controlled this marketplace for a very long time. What do you think has to happen to bring the price down? Because I assume...

that that's going to come from you and AMD and everybody else who's going to try to do this. But how quickly does that happen? It is going to happen. I mean, first, I would tell you that if you sat in the meetings with the AWS team right now, they feel like it's their responsibility and their mission to make the cost of AI meaningfully less for customers than it is today. And I think there are two big drivers of it. One is the chips.

And what's interesting is most of the spend today in AI has been on training, these giant training runs. But when you get to scale of the production applications for AI, it flips and the overwhelming majority of the spend is actually on the inference, which are the predictions from the model. And so the two things that have to happen is the price performance of chips has to be meaningfully less. And that's part of why we built our own chips. We have our own custom AI silicon called Tranium 2.

where the price performance is 30% to 40% better than what's out there in the current GPU instances. So we're working on trying to take the cost of chips down and you have to take the cost of inference down. And that has to do with a whole bunch of things, including techniques like distillation and prompt caching and how you handle different model architecture. So it's both the chips and the inference. They both need significant cost decreases, and we're working hard on that.

that. One related AI question, which is last time I think I talked to you maybe a year or two ago, there was a different administration in Washington. We were talking about the possibility that you would consider to buy a company like Anthropic or something like that. You were in the middle of the iRobot situation and it didn't seem like any deals could get done. In this new environment, do you say to yourself, maybe there's acquisitions that we could make and maybe buy an Anthropic?

You know, we never stopped trying to do acquisitions that we thought made sense for our customers and the business before. But I do think...

that it's possible this environment will be a little bit easier to start to acquire companies. We'll have to see. In the letter, you do talk a lot about the consumer. You talk a lot about the culture at Amazon, about trying to bring down prices. You just said you thought, and you talk about how optimistic you are. You've seen no change in the consumer at all in terms of what they're buying? I mean, we've had conversations over the years where you've said, you know what, actually, I see people going from bigger screen TVs to...

smaller TVs and other things like that. Is there no shift right now in terms of what the consumer is doing? I'd say not a lot in the last, I mean, over the last couple of years, off and on, as we've talked about, customers have gotten more careful. Whenever they can trade down a price, they do. Wherever they can find a bargain, they do. We've seen

significant growth on, you know, discretionary items, but not at the growth rate we typically see as people have just been careful. And so that trend has continued, but as I said,

You know, we haven't seen meaningful impact yet from all the noise around the tariffs. But are you thinking there is? I mean, we've heard from, you know, I think Walmart around guidance. You heard Delta talking about how they think that we're, I don't know if it's a slowdown, but, you know, not going to grow as fast. We've heard Warner Brothers, I think, is worried a little bit about advertising. I know you're in the advertising business. What does this feel like? By the way, I completely understand why they may, you know, companies are nervous right now. And you just...

It's so early, you don't know, but the worry, of course, when you have things like tariffs is that it'll create macro issues where it depresses demand or drives inflation. But we just haven't seen it yet. Have you either been in Washington yourself or had your team in Washington talking to this administration about all of this? We talk to the administration all the time. And what are you telling them?

You know, we talk about a broad number of issues with the administration all the time. And so, you know, we share with them different things that we think matter to consumers, things that we would think matter to enterprises.

You know, we have some conversations about tariffs as well, and we share what some of the concerns are, and they're aware of them. One of the things you talk about a lot in this letter is sort of the management and culture that you've instilled in this business over the years and how long you've actually been at this company. But one of the things that you've talked about is this idea of why.

That every every question starts with why why are we doing this and why it sounds like really the question? No, why are we doing this? Why can't we do something? Mm-hmm. Yeah, how what is the the new right now? Is there something that you're looking at where you're saying? Why can't we do something? Oh, well, I mean we have so many why questions all the time I mean we have this concept inside of Amazon of two one way and two way door decisions and

And a two-way door decision is when you make a decision, and if you get it wrong, you can walk back through that door with little harm. A one-way door decision is when you walk through that door, if you get it wrong, it's pretty tough to walk back through it. And so both those constructs, though, assume that the doors are unlocked. Right.

And when you're trying to invent, you're often trying to, you're actually trying to unlock a door that seems previously shut tight. And so a lot of times, why is the question that starts to open up that door? And we're constantly asking ourselves why questions. So today, we're constantly asking, why can't we ship items to customers even faster?

you know, why can't we ship items to people who live in rural parts of the country who don't have, you know, it's much harder to get items same day or next day in rural parts of the country. And most of the logistics providers are actually stopping investing in rural areas, whereas actually we're increasing our investment.

You know, why can't we give broadband connectivity to people in rural parts of this country and around the world? You know, why does AI matter so much and why do you have to invest the way that we think we should right now? We're asking lots of why questions. I'll give you a why question that some investors ask. They say, why necessarily go down some of these roads which might

eat into margin, right? So one of the questions is if you were to be able to get stuff faster in rural areas, I assume the cost goes up or do you think overall it makes the business better?

I think there's no question it makes the business better. And for us, what we're after, and we've talked a lot about this over the years, is we're trying to make customers' lives easier and better every day. And we're not trying to optimize how we do as a business in any one quarter or any one year. We're trying to build a business

that outlasts all of us. And when you're actually, what we learn, I get asked this all the time and we get asked this a lot, which is, haven't you reached the law of diminishing returns on speed? Like, isn't it enough at this point? And I can tell you definitively from the data that it's not, we have not reached that point. Every time we're able to show customers on a product detail page

a delivery time that's faster they actually choose to buy more frequently and they actually buy use you know they spend more of their purchasing power on amazon and make more of their purchases with us when they know they can get it reliably and quickly so

You know, I think that over the in any short period of time, as you're quickening the pace with which you deliver, you may have cost increases. But if you build if you innovate the right way and you build the right infrastructure and the right architecture, you actually can relentlessly take your cost to serve down, which we've done over the last several years. And we're very confident we'll be able to do that in rural areas as well. They deserve to get products same day. Question on cost to serve or maybe it's maybe.

cost of everything. When you think about

employment at Amazon. One of the things you talk about in your letter is this idea that you want everybody back in the office. You've been a big proponent of that and how successful that's been. I'm curious, though, with the advent of AI and everything that's going on, and you look at how many more people you want to hire in the future, or maybe how many you don't need to, what does that look like in this new world to you? I think, again, it's so early right now with respect to AI. You're starting to see companies employ it in a really broad way.

And they're going to, you know, like everything else, as technology evolves, certain jobs become more important. Other jobs that you used to do with people you do in an automated way. But we have found over many years that human beings find other jobs to do that are the ones that get automated by AI. So I think we'll have a lot of people for a long time, but they're just going to be working on different things.

I want to pivot back to the news, a different piece of news. You made it a couple of weeks ago, which is that you're bidding now for TikTok. Give me the why behind that. I don't think we said that.

Did you not say that you were one of the bidders for TikTok? It's just been reported that you're one of the bidders for TikTok. OK, well, can you give us the rationale for bidding for TikTok then? Oh, well, you know, we have a long policy, as you know, Andrew, and not commenting on M&A rumors. So I'm going to stick to that policy. Let me ask you a slightly different question. You don't need to comment on whether you're bidding for TikTok or not.

Do you think that TikTok should be part of the question, part of a chess piece in this tariff conversation or not? Because I think there's a TikTok has always been a question about national security, but it now is also being sort of brought into this tariff discussion. I don't know. I mean, it's I think the conversations that the administration is having probably was having before and more intensely is having now with each country is

are complicated. And I imagine they each have their set of variables. And I have read that this may be one of the pieces in that negotiation, but I'm not privy to it. JEFFREY BROWN: If this doesn't work out, being a politician might. So that's a good answer. JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you about a couple other pieces of the Amazon business. One of the sort of next legs of the stool for you, if you will, is Kuiper, which is the satellite business.

You're putting up a satellite, you believe, this year. Yeah. It's finally going to happen this year. Starting to put satellites in the air this year. What's that going to cost? And how quickly do you think that becomes competitive if it does with Starlink?

Well, I mean, I just start with the need. You know, there are 400 to 500 million households around the world who don't have broadband connectivity. So they can't do things that we all take for granted, like education online or shopping or watching entertainment or doing business. And then there are all these enterprises who have assets in remote locations that they need to communicate with. They can't. And governments need that visibility. And so there is a high need for it.

We will have our low Earth orbit satellite. We'll have the first set of satellites up in 2025 with more coming in 26 and 27. I think that people are going to really like the offering. I think that it will have an advantage price point for customers in those three segments. I think they'll like the flexibility and the price point of antennas. And then if you think about it, we have at Amazon, we have...

In the three segments that are going to consume this product, we have a lot of relationships with consumers, a lot of relationships with enterprises, a lot of relationships with governments.

all of whom are excited about this, and particularly the commercial customers, enterprises and governments are going to want that data to come down into the cloud. This is going to be the first real competitor to Starlink. Yeah, I think people are going to really like the offering, and I think they're going to like the connection between Kuiper and AWS to be able to analyze that data and do computing and AI ultimately, and so very optimistic about it. How many of the satellites end up going up on Blue Origin? How many end up going up on SpaceX?

And is that a concern for you, given that you have to rely to some degree on Elon Musk to get some of this in the air and then compete against him? Yeah, we have four rocket providers. And, you know, all those rocket providers, you know, they're very professional. You have contracts for a reason. And, you know, I would say that we have...

more in absolute going up on Blue Origin than we do maybe in SpaceX. But we have four providers and they're all going to be an important part about getting our constellation into orbit. Two other pieces I want to ask you about. Video Prime and I want to talk to you about pharmaceuticals for consumers because you mentioned that in your letter.

Is that the next big leg of your stool, meaning getting into healthcare in a big way? You've been talking about it forever. I just don't know if you think there's been some kind of unlock that's happened in the past year. I think if you look at our Amazon pharmacy business, it's really growing very substantially. And I think that there are a couple of reasons for it. You know, the first is

If you look, I don't know if you shop in the pharmacy, it's really, it's a pretty awesome experience, but the team has done an amazing job the last two years or so in changing that customer experience. It's so much easier. You have price transparency. A lot of times you go to the pharmacy, you don't know what something's going to cost. You get to the counter and you can't believe it. And so the experience is better. The delivery is much faster, you know, and then I think people,

People have gotten used to buying their pharmacy items online. If you don't feel well, if you can get it same day, we can deliver same day now in lots of cities around the US. If you can get it same day and you can get it actually in a few hours, it's a huge advantage if you don't feel well. What's going on in terms of Video for Prime? You've been investing heavily in sports.

Does that mean you're going to invest away from some of the drama and comedy? What does that look like over time to you? I think it'll be a mix. You know, I think what we've you know, there's a reason why something like 95 of the top 100 rated shows every year are sports. You know, it's kind of the last appointment only viewing.

And we've learned it with Thursday Night Football. It's been really successful for customers and for us. And we have the NBA coming in 2025. We have NASCAR coming in just a few months. And so sports has been very successful. I expect we'll continue to invest more there, but we'll continue to invest in shows.

You know, I love the new season of Fallout, you know, the new release and Reacher and the boys. I think the content continues to get meaningfully better. The economics of that on a standalone basis, would they work or does it only make sense in the context of...

uh the sort of larger prime package you know we we we started prime video as something that we thought customers would love and would be very attractive in prime and would help you know convince people to decide to pick up prime and then what we find is when people start prime via video or for video reasons they actually end up spending downstream in our in our commerce business our e-commerce business but what we have

Over the last few years with some of the changes we've made and as the business has matured, we actually think Prime Video will be a very good standalone business as well. Any shows that we need to watch? By the way, oh, First Lady. You have a documentary with the First Lady. How did that come about? Yeah, it was...

The people making it shared it with a number of folks. We thought the show was really interesting, and we were fortunate enough to earn it. Do you think you'll end up getting into the business of news? The reason I ask is you did that broadcast the night of the election. Yeah, it was an experiment. And actually, it was a really successful experiment. Customers really liked it. I don't know. It's something, you know, it is...

something that people watch very frequently, as you well know. And we'll have to see. Okay. Andy Jassy, it's great to have you. It's great to congratulate you on the letter and great to have you on a day like today when we're all trying to make sense of these tariffs. And we hope to talk to you again as all of this plays out. So thank you very, very much. Appreciate it.

That's it. That's the pod for today. Thanks for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern to get the smartest takes and analysis and sometimes a little extra from our TV show right into your ears. Follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. We are clear. Thanks, guys.

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