Months after Donald Trump made ‘angry call’ to Jeff Bezos after learning Amazon plans to display added cost of tariffs; CEO Andy Jassy makes statement on Trump Tariffs
In April 2025, a pissed Donald Trump made a call to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos after learning that the company is planning to display the added cost of tariffs on certain items. Trump made the call to Bezos to complain about reports that Amazon was considering to highlight the cost of US tariffs next to prices for certain products on the company’s website. Trump later told reporters about the call to Amazon founder and said it was a “good call.” “Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific,” Trump told reporters. “He solved the problem very quickly. Good guy.”Punchbowl News first reported that Amazon will soon “display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs — right next to the product’s total listed price.” The move came after Trump slapped 145% tariffs on imports from China and a 10% minimum tax on all other countries.
Now months later, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC in an interview Jassy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Amazon.com is starting to see an uptick in product prices on its e-commerce platform as sellers respond to cost pressures stemming from the US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “We did a lot of pre-buying in the early part of 2025 to enable us to try and keep prices as low as possible for customers,” Jassy said. He added, “And a lot of our third-party sellers did a lot of forward-staging in our fulfillment network for the same reasons. And that supply is run out in the fall, so you start to see some of the tariffs creep in to some of the prices, some of the items.”“Some third-party sellers are raising prices in response while others are absorbing the costs in hopes of driving more demand,” Jassy went on to add. “Our priority is to try to figure out how to keep prices low as possible,” Jassy said. “At a certain point, because retail is a mid-single-digit operating margin business, if people’s costs go up by 10%, there aren’t a lot of places to absorb it.”The warning marks a shift from the Amazon leader’s commentary on tariffs last year. While he cautioned in April that third-party sellers could need to pass along tariff costs, he said on several occasions that Amazon had not seen selling prices appreciably rise from tariffs. “Amazon’s consumers overall have fared well. But we’ll have to see what happens in 2026,” CEO Jassy had said. The company has also maintained so far that over the past year it was seeing very little impact on consumer behavior and product prices from tariffs. It has doubled down on expanding product categories and speeding up delivery timelines to shield demand.
When White House called Amazon’s tariff plan an ‘hostile act’
In April 2025, at a briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the move a “hostile and political act,” adding that she had spoken about the matter with President Trump earlier. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick echoed Levitt’s comments, saying it’s a hostile act if a company goes out of its way to “make it seem” like tariffs have caused prices to change.“It’s nonsense,” he said Tuesday in a CNBC interview. “A 10% tariff is not going to change virtually any price,” he added, referring to the nearly universal baseline tariff on all countries. “The only price will change would be a product that we don’t make here, like a mango.” The 10% tariff, however, is hardly the only one in effect.
