her she will be in she will be in the space rocket. >> morgan space brennan. >> yes >> she will be in orbit as well. that will do it for us on "squawk on the street. "techcheck" with andy jassy, that interview, stay tuned it is coming up right now. our business is very different from apple's business. we feel like we experience probably two to three years of growth in 18 months. jeff called me and asked me if i was interested when you experience great voice apps, it makes tapping on an app so circa 2005. we won't compromise on it. happy tuesday, welcome to a special edition of "techcheck. i'm jon fortt with carl quintanilla and julia boorstin

today, the interview, our exclusive sit-down with andy jassy. the challenges, pressures and future for amazon on almost every topic you can think of and how he's approaching them as the new chief executive takes the reins from jeff bezos, carl. >> jon, we can't wait for it moments away we did open with a gain on the dow, triple digits, 120 or so. lost it and now down 200 despite the cooler than expected cpi number which did give futures a bit of a bounce. we got the apple event in a couple of hours and we continue to monitor garyies ay gensler oe hill. >> the perception of amazon as a monopoly and a persistent question about the structure of aws. okay, andy jassy here we are again. and now you're not the ceo of aws. you're the ceo of amazon

congratulations. and so is it any more likely than it's been the previous five or six times i've asked that you think it is a good idea to spin out aws from amazon? >> i knew you'd ask that question every year you ask that question i don't think it is any more likely no, i think all the same things we talked about in the past make it a long shot. >> yeah, okay. so, last week a judge ruled in the apple epic case. and i think in a way that has some broader implications for technology, for big tech i mean, similar to apple, customers love amazon, but there is all this government pressure these days to perhaps change business practices, so i wonder do you think amazon's focus continues to be on the customer solely and that ends up solving the other problems or is there a

different waynow as ceo that you need to adjust because of the government messages and pressures? >> i think that always our focus is going to be customers i think if you look at -- i've been at the company for 24 1/2 years now, jon, and the strategy is largely the same, which is, you know, we exist to help make customers lives' better and easier and we relentlessly invent to make it so that's always going to be our approach andlet lots of differet types of areas where we can help customers have a better customer experience that's always our focus. i think that when you look at efforts to look at larger companies that have been more successful, you got to always look at what you're trying to do and what you're trying to accomplish and make sure in the process you don't hurt some of the people that -- and some of the businesses that have made, you know, very good livings off of some of those properties and so when i think about amazon, we have over 550,000

small and medium size businesses that get access to amazon's hundreds of millions of customers in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise access. it is easy to have a website it is inexpensive to do so and most of the small businesses have that. but to get access to hundreds of millions of customers is hard. and we want to make sure whatever we do we don't hurt small and medium size businesses or consumers who have very broad choices, selection and prices and low prices because of all the sellers. i think that whenever you look at trying to address something like businesses get that have gotten larger, you got to make sure do so in a way that doesn't harm small and medium size businesses and consumers. >> i wonder about this divide in messaging that is coming on that very point four weeks before you officially became ceo in july, a group of lawmakers in the house antitrust subcommittee put forward five bills that specifically target four companies, apple, facebook, google, and you guys, amazon and in the press release, david

sicily and the congressman said right now unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy a judge just said, one of those companies is not a monopoly at least in the app store what is your response to that framing and that messaging of what is going on in the economy? >> well, again, each of these companies, each of these businesses are very different from one another so the term of big tech never really resonates for me because technology is a delivery mechanic mechanism. they're all different. and i think that when you look at whether a company is a monopoly or not, the first thing you look at is what kind of market segment share they have if you look in our retail business, our retail business is just about 1% of the worldwide retail market segment. so it is -- it is nowhere close to a majority share.

and usually monopolies are -- you kind of look at monopoly power when you have the power to increase prices in an unconstrained why there isn't compe competition. if you look in our businesses, i'll start with retail, we compete with very large companies. these are companies like walmart, target, and kroger and, you know, and some very successful digital companies like ebay and etsy and wayfair we don't have the ability to raise prices in any kind of unfettered way if you look at what we normally, we're constantly staying prices down because there is a lot of competition in the markets sometimes the rhetoric sounds good, but you got to look at reality and 1% of worldwide retail, it is hard to argue that's a monopoly. >> well, let's talk pandemic i think a lot of people experienced shopping through e-commerce during the pandemic and what is your take on how if at all that event that we're

still in has influenced both e-commerce, amazon's mission, the perception of amazon >> i think the pandemic, i mean, what a crazy period, i don't think any of us have lived through anything like that before and i hope we never live through anything like that after. and i think very early on in the pandemic we realized that whatever role amazon plays in the world typically, we were going to have to play an increasingly important role with so many establishments that were going to be shut down. and so, you know, i think more and more people were -- people had been using e-commerce for a long time, but always in combination with physical retail and the overwhelming majority of retail remains in physical retail, but because of the pandemic, more and more people had to try e-commerce and i think they realized it was convenient and broad selection and lower prices and i think that you'll see moving forward increasing amount of shares

moving to e-commerce over time >> did you feel like you guys even -- you got physical retail, whole foods were more ready or, you know, maybe taking plans for 23 and pulling them forward or anything like that >> yeah, i think that we have -- we feel like we experienced probably two to three years of growth in 18 months. and so i don't -- you couldn't probably have a responsible plan for a pandemic or the amount of capacity, just to give you an idea, jon, we spent the first 24, 25 years of amazon building a very broad fulfillment center network and over the last 18 months to two years we had to double that footprint. so it brought on unprecedented demand i think that there are plenty of things in the process that we know we could do better. but i think the way we were able to help so many people get the ppe they needed, the food they needed, the items they needed, both the function as well as to stay sane during the pandemic,

we're all at home and, you know, the aws side, just the ability to allow companies and governments to have business continuity, i think it was pretty remarkable and we're really proud of how we tried to help during the pandemic. >> yeah. another part of the pandemic, i think around 18-ish months before it hit us in the u.s., amazon announced hq-2, right physical space, virginia, buildout, now in the world of work that we're in, where there is more remote, more hybrid, if you were doing it all over again in a sense you're doing everything all over again every day, do you have to change the hq-2 plan? do you need an hq-2 in the same sense that you might have thought you needed one two years ago? >> it is a great question. i think so much is undetermined now as we start to have people come back to physical offices. and i think all of us are trying to sort out what that's going to look like. i think that people have much

more flexibility than they had in the past. they work for more places and locations than they did in the past it remains to be seen whether people are really back most of the days of the week or not. i think a lot of it will relate to the function you perform. there are certain jobs where you can just as easily in some cases more effectively work remotely if you take an engineer, for example, when they get into the mode of coding, being on their own where they're not distracted or interrupted is very helpful there are other jobs where you really need to be with the team physically to collaborate an event and build together and so i think we're sorting all that out like everybody else, i don't think we regret in any way, shape or fashion having hq-2 in arlington. i think we believe that the future while maybe more hybrid that we're going to often have people in the office together and we're going to want people to gather together and we wanted to have our teams and more distributive fashion than we were before. and arlington has been a

terrific partner for us. we hired many thousands of people on our way to 25,000 the next few years and i think that's a great partnership and we're really excited about it. >> do you have to rethink economic impact? because that's calculated based on assumptions about people being in offices and going down for lunch and small businesses getting that kind of impact where there is probably still an impact, but people are at home and ordering in. are there i was you got amazon ghost stores too and figuring out where to put them. is this causing you to think of not only the promises and obligations under different cultural circumstances prepandemic, but also how you do your own physical retail locations? >> i think that we're, like everybody, we're trying to figure out what the changes will actually be. we have belief that we're going to have a lot of people in the offices and as i said, i don't know if it will be every day, but we'll have i think people will be in a meaningful amount over time as we get more comfortable coming back to work. so, you know, we generate a lot

of jobs in the various cities in which we live and we also, i think, over the last few years have invested a lot more in being a good neighbor and giving back to the community and i think we're off to a good start with our partnership with our own and i expect that to continue. >> he doesn't like the term big tech we use it a lot. and he's got an argument that not only are they not a monopoly, but watch out for s & d and consumers as you put the pressure on the larger technology involved companies. >> yeah. fantastic interview, jon and i just found it fascinating the way he laid out the defense to that antitrust attack, arguing they can't raise prices, they don't have the power to do so and instead they normally put pressure on prices also the fact that they're all about the consumer helping individual consumers as well as small and medium businesses. carl, it really gives us some insight into how they're going to be addressing some of that critique. >> and the other advantage, of

course, is that jon talked to him in the past and i'm trying to decide whether directionally his comments about return to office are a little more to the hybrid side or not because he -- though he did say you got to be in the office depending on your job, maybe not every day. >> definitely hybrid the question seems to be how much and how soon, you know. we walked outside of amazon's day one building, after the sit-down interview and he pointed out how one restaurant right across the street had changed over during the pandemic and there was a sort of stop and start, but we also talked about labor issues, so there is a lot more of this interview still to come amazon employs nearly a million people in the u.s. andy jassy on the company's hiring spree, labor challenges, that's next. stay with us it's another day. and anything could happen. it could be the day you welcome 1,200 guests

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welcome back amazon is boosting its average starting wage to more than $18 an hour. they faced criticism of its employment practices from labor groups and politicians on both sides of the aisle let's get back to ceo andy jassy. let's talk about workers i was struck by jeff's statement in the last shareholder letter

he wrote, we're going to be earth's best employer and earth's safest place to work and later he wrote, we don't set unreasonable performance goals, we set achievable performance goals that take into account tenure and actual performance data two things are out there that push against that. many of us have heard about the pee bottles and delivery drivers. but there is a group of labor unions that said amazon's workplace injury rate between 2017 and 2020 was twice as high as walmart's, higher than u.p.s. and delivery is that the same data this you look at, or are there differences there and what's -- what do you do about it? >> you know, for us, employee safety is the priority number one for us in our fulfillment centers. we have over 6,000 people that are safety professionals, it is all they do. we spent -- we'll spend a little over $300 million alone this

year on safety and fulfillment centers and we won't compromise on it. we're working really hard at it. i think we made a lot of progress, but we -- there is no shortage of things we're working on, continually to help people with some of the injuries that they can sometimes encounter in a physical, manual job it is our first priority. >> what is the playbook, not to share the secrets, but the playbook to making progress? is it looking at the data in the amazon way and figuring out how to do training, which i know, you know, you got the videos and the practices about that is it dedicating a different kind of r&d effort to it >> i think it is everything. we look at the data. we -- just in covid in the covid time alone, in the pandemic, we redesigned 150 different processes to try and make sure that we keep people safe and healthy. there is a lot of training that goes into it we're working on all kinds of

muscular skeleton types of apparatus and inventions to help people to be safer in how they work it is a great thing -- we would be happy if you haven't been through a fulfillment center, happy to take you there and see some of the things we're working on there it is a number of those things over time, and also employees have the ability to also tell us when there are things they're doing that they think they could be safer or more healthy we're interested in that feedback they have that direct connection with our managers to do so. >> on the employee front, you were early in raising a minimum wage to 15 and even above. and you just announced this higher education benefit, you and i talked about education before and, you know, through aws, the work through community colleges. why make that freely available now? what is the message, the impact for employees, and just sort of what you think benefitswise that means in 2021?

>> well, you know, i think if you strive to be earth's best employer, and we have 1.2 million employees in lots of different roles and a number of people in our fulfillment centers, there are a number of things you got to work on to live up to that goal one of them we were talking about just now is the focus on investment, on safety. but we have known for a long time that we have to be competitive on compensation and benefits and it is why to your point that we pioneered living the minimum wage in our ful fulfillment centers above $15, continued to increase. today, the average hourly salary is $18.32, which is more than double the federal minimum wage, it is also more, jon, than 40 million american workers make. we need to raise the federal minimum wage i hope the government works on that it is not just the compensation. it is also the benefits. we have a set of benefits along with the compensation that are unusual you won't find

elsewhere. full health insurance, 401(k), 20 weeks of parental leave if you want to transfer that benefit to some of your -- to your partner or significant other, you can do so if you want to ramp back after the 20 weeks or eight weeks, working half the time, you can do so. and then the career choice you're talking about say program we had for ten years, but we made it very significant enhancement to it a few days ago where we pay for our fulfillment center employees' college tuition. and if they want to do upskilling and education every year to learn different skills, we'll support that we're hopeful that a lot of those folks use that to continue to grow their careers at amazon. but we also know some of them may be elsewhere and that's okay too. if you want to actually build a place that people can have great careers at and want to be at over a long period of time, you got to find ways to help people grow and to take on more skills and that's really what career choice is about. >> you had a career day coming up, do you have to pursue that

differently? execute it differently in this really tight labor environment >> the first thing is different, just everything is virtual and that's been true for the last 18 months we hired so many thousands of people over the last 18 months, completely virtual, where they don't come in for physical interviews, which is so different than the first 25, 26 years of amazon. >> why can you do that we talked about this on air, that all these other companies are having trouble finding people you just talked about benefits, about pay. i take it maybe you're getting feedback from new employees on why they're joining you and not something else how are you doing it >> the thing to remember is amazon is a very unusual place to work. if you are somebody who likes to start with a customer and build our your strategies and tactics backwards from there, looks at customer experiences and what is broken about them and gets excited about reinventing them, somebody who likes to build, somebody who likes to have a big impact on the world, i can't think of a place where you can

do that better than at amazon. i think it is very compelling. you mentioned career day, which starts in a couple of days, we announced we're hiring 55,000 new employees in technology and in corporate and then another 125,000 employees in fulfillment center network and they -- the jobs are pretty broad. they range from software development engineers to ai and machine learning practitioners to product managers to designers to research scientists, all kinds of opportunities and entertainment, and it is because our businesses are growing if you look at our retail and our aws and advertising and devices and entertainment and all together new businesses, look at kiper, where we're investing $10 billion over the next ten years, we have a lot of businesses growing really rapidly and where you have an opportunity to impact the world. and i think for the right type

of person, you know, and i think there are a lot of those right type of people out there, it is very inspiring to have a mission that starts with the customer and builds backwards from there and has an ability to make customers' lives better. >> he didn't push back against the data out there, suggesting injuries in amazon warehouses are relatively high. but he did focus on how they're trying to fix it and doing a lot on comp and benefits >> yeah, that's a fair amount of money, 3 00 million on safety and fulfillment. got to be fascinated by just the cultural discussion, just sort of the hints he gives you in answers about what he means when he says for the right type of person to work at a culture that we know is very unique >> yeah. julia, the brand also perhaps seems to be helping him. >> absolutely. and, jon, i thought it was so interesting when it came to this question of how do you attract workers in such a tight labor market, he laid out how they're playing defense, really working

all the new technologies to better protect workers in the warehouse and at the same time, prioritizing all these educational benefits that can help lure them we have seen it at target and walmart and so many other companies start to offer free college education to their workers and i think this whole idea of upscaling is going to be valuable to amazon, not only do they want to use that as a lure, but also they can hold on to those workers and help those workers grow with them because this company, it seems like, is going to keep getting bigger, jon. >> and he and i have talked in the past about the community college system and aws in particular how it was working with community colleges, carl, to train them in exactly the sorts of skills that amazon's cloud operations need people to have not everybody needs a four-year degree he said there is a big opportunity there and notable that he is questioning kind of the long-term viability of at least some of the four-year colleges out there i know the four-year colleges are starting to get very

concerned because parents are concerned about how actionable that education is going to be. >> yeah. for the money, jon, what kind of payoff are you getting on the back end and it is a comment of what, say, for example, germany has been able to do, where trade schools are a big part of their economy, a very efficient feeder into the labor force, and, again, it is just a reminder of amazon's power that they're weighing in on big mac row issues >> a lot more of that interview to come, including the phone call from jeff bezos, alerting jassy to a ceo opening that conversation is next. don't go anywhere. >> most decisions i made in my life i didn't consult my wife on but i was -- i was pretty quick in saying yes.

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stocks are lower but bouncing off the worst levels of the session. dow down 175 let's get to frank holland for a news update. >> here is the very latest the price consumers pay for an assortment of goods rose in august, a possible sign that inflation may be starting to cool inflation remains at a 13-year high on an annual basis. senator elizabeth warren is urging the federal reserve to split up the banking and financial services units at wells fargo. in a letter to the central bank, she argues that the bank's string of scandals harmed consumers and puts them at risk. dense coleman will take the helm starting in 2022, he serves as the co-head of the firm's global financing group. boeing is raising its long-term jet demand forecast despite the pandemic wiping out two years of growth for the planemaker they expect to deliver an extra 500 jets over the next 20 years. that's thanks to faster than expected travel recovery carl, back over to you >> frank, thanks.

news for another big tech name and that is apple the california streaming event kicks off at 1:00 p.m. eastern time today while nothing has been confirmed, investors are expecting a new slate of phones, alongside a number of product updates. get those details as they happen right here on cnbc in the mean time, a lot more from amazon's andy jassy next. stay with us what the world needs now... is people. people who see energy a little bit differently.

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one element of jeff bezos' legacy will be whether this handoff to andy jassy as the second ceo of amazon is seen as a success. jassy has long run the cloud operation, amazon web services, i asked him how he found out he was the pick to be amazon's next ceo and how he intends to run the broader company now. take a listen. >> jeff called me and asked me if i was interested and he told me he was contemplating doing something different, stepping away and asked me if i was interested it was very early in 2021 and i was obviously flattered and honored and i wanted to talk with my wife about it. most decisions i've made in my life that i didn't consult my wife on was a mistake and -- >> a big one -- >> yeah, but i was pretty quick in saying yes. >> so all this by phone? >> yeah. >> because we're in the

pandemic >> yeah. >> what, if anything, do you first think about that you need to do differently? were you -- in succession planning, it is pretty common, but you might have already had that in mind, but aws is your baby, right? what do you do about that? what if anything different do you do to prepare for the broader purview? >> well, you know, you're right, the first -- probably the first thing i thought about was how to make sure we had the right succession plan in aws and, you know, we were really lucky and fortunate in aws and it really was a big part of why the business has been successful so far that we had a very strong leadership team. and i think a lot of times the leader gets too much credit when things go well and the truth is that any significant size business, aws is a $60 billion revenue run business, growing 37% year over year, you have an operational

business that as large as that, you have to have great leaders and you have to have great directs of those leaders and great builders under all the way up through the business. and so the aws team was very strong, with a strong leadership and we were able to add somebody back who wasn't really an outsider adam helped build the business the first 11 years of aws and ran sales and marketing and support and so to add adam to an already really strong leadership team was really very beneficial and i'm excited about that and i think also when you think about the other things that i tried to do in getting prepared for the role is just i had some background, before aws i worked for half a dozen years in the consumer business. i co-ran marketing for a while and built our business plan for the music business and run it for a bit. i've been in our test team meetings, senior leadership team

meetings for 20 years where i got a chance to see a lot of the customer and consumer issues but i spent time trying to read all the business plans and trying to speak with all the leaders of those businesses. and we, again, we're just very fortunate, we have a really strong leadership team across the entire business and all the endeavors we're pursuing i had a couple of folks give me good counsel and, you know, you do as much as you can to prepare. but there is no substitute for being in the job and there is no substitute for having a great leadership team, which we have. >> i've seen ceos in the tech space and outside the tech space, oh, yeah, i know andy jassy. you've been a part of it i imagine, you know, closing some deals sometimes you might be useful. are you going to be involved in a different way than jeff was? >> we'll see i think adam will really run that business and he's the ceo of that business and, you know, you don't forget

about the relationships that you built over several years and i expect to maintain those relationships. i enjoy having those and, you know, there is an increasing number of partners that we have who are aws customers, but also work with amazon and other parts of our business, whether it is devices, or retail or ops or advertising and so i expect we'll have some of those relationships and however i can help the team, i'll try to do so. >> now, after the break, what is amazon going to do with mgm or the nfl for that matter. what is the long game for the new branded tvs? amazon ceo andy jassy on the company's media ambitions next stay with us >> i think all those experiences are in the process of being reinvented you'll see more of that moving forward. >> a little reinvent in there. >> why not >> yeah. i think you're going to like it here. umm, why is everyone... throwing things at me? look, as cfo it's my job to be ready for whatever's next.

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let's get to the last part of our interview with amazon's new ceo andy jassy two key areas for the company i wanted to hit on, one, its ambitions in media, streaming, mgm and nfl games. and, two, how it approaches artificial intelligence. facebook had to apologize after its ai labeled video including a group of black men as involving primates i asked jassy for his reaction

to that headline and amazon's role in influencing the guardrails and policies around ai >> ai machine learning has made -- they made incredible strides over the last -- really, something people have been working on for a few decades i think particularly over the last ten years the strides that we have made in that space are really substantial because the cost, cloud computing made the cost of computing and storage so much more accessible but it is still a science that requires a lot of data and a lot of honing and a lot of refining of algorithms all the time and there will be mistakes made. i think you don't want to throw the entire discipline out because there are mistakes i think you want to, in my opinion, the people that use machine learning have to use it as a really important input as one of several inputs you make in a decision. and i think people have been using machine learning very successfully across a lot of

dimensions and where it often gets the most amount scrutiny is in the law enforcement space and to me over time i think we, you know, machine learning and ai will get stronger and stronger, such that it will be important input in how we make some law enforcement decisions, but it will be just one input of a human driven decision. you have to make sure that you make a human decision and use the different inputs you have, like they do in other investigations, but i think machine learning and ai will keep getting better and we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water simply when you have mistakes. we talked about this for a few years, we have talked about this, we have talked about it as a company, that the federal governments should regulate what they want to see and what guardrails they want and how they're going to hold people responsible for using machine learning or ai in an irresponsible way. there is lots of technology we can all use all the time, where

you wouldn't want to ban that technology because it is enabled so many customer experiences, but when people are irresponsible with the technology, there should be ramifications. and i think the same should be true here and i hope that governments figure out the way they want to regulate it we want to do it in a smart way and we're interested in helping to participate and help. i think we could use some regulation there. >> especially when it comes to having a disparate impact on certain groups of people. >> yeah. >> right >> media mgm is a big deal. we were just talking with roger goodell few days ago on "techcheck" about the nfl and sunday ticket being available and talking to a broad array of companies and also they want a tech partnership on really maximizing what they do. so when you look at amazon, all of it across e-commerce, aws, whole foods for snacks during movies, and games, just all of

it, where does media fit in strategically? what is the importance of it and are you interested in sunday ticket >> well, you know, i would say, first of all, with respect to the nfl we have a very important partnership with them. and we have on the aws side for many years as you know we do the next gen stats with the nfl and also player health and safety efforts where they're trying to analyze hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of video to understand when you have head injuries or lower extremity injuries and trying to change rules and equipment to address that and, of course, we took a further step in our relationship with the nfl with thursday night football and we're very, very excited about that starting in '22 and we're going to try and be inventive in the experience we provide for fans. i think more generally, though, we have a lot of passion and optimism for what we're doing in the media space.

i think if you look at the success we had with prime video and amazon studios, we have hundreds of millions of people who are watching our original content. the people who subscribe to prime, you know, get all that content for free, turns out when they actually consume the video content, they also tend to engage in some of the other activities that are available through prime and prime is a very broad set of benefits that we're increasing all the time. it is early days for us in media. we're off to a great start we believe we have an opportunity to provide unique viewing experience for our customers with really original and creative content >> and finally, new tvs. just announced them coming out next month is that where it all comes together the advertising, the prime content, maybe even shopping on tv is that what we should perhaps look for there >> i think we're really excited

about the all new series smart fire tvs we just announced and i think they're going to be very capable, you know. it is integrated well with alexa, you'll be able to say, with alexis. you'll be able to say, alexa what should i watch. >> help me find something on netflix. alexa play tiktok. we were the first to integrate tiktok with fire tv. so i think for a long time people found a lot of value in the viewing experience but also the selection of content that you have available on fire tv and with what we have with our channels business and, you know, increasingly people will do commerce, you know, in the mechanism between what we do with alexa and in the living room, i think we have an opportunity to change what's possible for people and what's accessible to people. for those who want to use something tactile to manipulate

it they will for those wanting to use voice -- i remember so long ago, 15, 20 years ago it was so inventive to have an app, goog the tap on the app, get what you want when you experience great voice apps it makes tapping on app viqueira 2005. i think all the experiences are in the process of being reinvented you'll see more of that moving forward. >> how is that for a tease ahead to a.m., tapping so viqueira 2005 i guess apple has siri 2 netflix and tiktok, the tv works with that. sounds like he might be interested in the nfl a bit. and people will do commerce eventually on these tvs. >> oh, so much there, be jon, when hefers took over there were a lot of questions about whether jassy would be as enthusiastic about investing in the media space as bezos was but i think it's 100% clear now that it's full steam ahead it does sound he is interested in the nfl rights and sounds like they are interested in

spending even more on content, because any see a direct connection, carl, to the way that content gets people to spend more time on amazon and also spend more money. >> yeah, it's hard to ignore the -- the on coming collision between the two in the media space, jon i guess, cynically, you wonder if the timing of this particular interview was meant to take oxygen out of the room ahead of the apple event. >> i think it might have had more to do with career day for amazon being tomorrow. i mean, they are really on a hiring tare. there is a lot of focus on the warehouse issues we talked about, you know, the pe. bottles, the injuries. he addressed the injuries and safety stuff but people are working for amazon in part because of the brand, the vision. but also that pay that went up again today, because of the benefits some of which he outlined here the political implications are shoe huge.

he addressed at a some of that with monopoly talk and took that head on. this is a guy running the company, julia, no doubt about that. >> no doubt about that and also i think really getting out there ahead of some of the issues, making the point that they pay much more than minimum wage, calling to raise minimum wage, really wanting to show that he is trying to be on the side of employees, though, still complicated issues in the tight labor market but when it comes to things like offering educational services, talking about the benefits and paid leave, i mean, they're doing everything they can because they need workers, carl. >> yeah, julia, i wonder what you are you looking for in for clarity what amazon is doing with mgm clearly they don't seem to be going with a walled garden with media they called out netflix and tiktok right there with the tv

i don't think that was a mistake. >> i don't think that was a mistake. i think it will be interesting to see what other companies they want to buy. i don't think they've done yet mgm may have been the beginning. it wonder if they are looking for live sports rights beyond the nfl and also i think there is so much to be said here about the potential for advertising, interactive advertising and the fact that amazon is now number three in the digital ad space behind just facebook and google, guys >> fascinating and we'll hear just a touch more i hope on the other side of the break. still to come in intuit's 12 billion-dollar acquisition of mail chivrp. plus expecting more from apple as tech check is back after one last break we did it again. verizon has been named america's most reliable network by rootmetrics.

and our customers rated us #1 for network quality in america according to j.d. power. number one in reliability, 16 times in a row. most awarded for network quality, 27 times in a row. proving once again that nobody builds networks like verizon. that's why we're building 5g right, that's why there's only one best network. competition beat us again. how? they have a better finance system than we do. i feel like they might have a better finance system than we do. workday. how do they make better decisions faster? workday. it's got to be something workday. i think i got something. work... hey, rob, you're on mute. hello! hey, rob, there he is. workday. the finance, hr and planning system for a changing world.

got a pretty sizable deal in tech today intuit buying digital marketing company mail chimp, known for email and news letter management, $12 billion in cash and stock and the company's biggest acquisition ever last year the maker of turbo tax and bought for -- already the market cap $155 billion. and rising today

jon, we've talked to them in the past couple weeks about the ongoing transformation. >> this is a big move. i remember talking to ben chestnut of mail chimp years ago a key moment, julia, when they expanded from being just about email news letters to being about social media and helping small businesses to connect. and that's been an important part of the internet digital ecosystem. >> yeah, really important for customer -- customer service management and, guys, it seems like the trend towards consolidation in that space could continue and one more thing in an hour the apple event begins, full coverage all afternoon and cnbc, the focus as always on what new products will be announced, what the new iphone will be, what it will cost and now of course we have the new wrinkle of apple's lawsuit with epic and the relationship with the developers who are often featured throughout the presentation. so, guys, i wonder if we're getting one more thing i've been watching the tweets.

it looks like it's going too an unusual presentation california streaming anything different this time, jon. >> i think the most important thing is the iphone and pricing. lots of speculation about inflation's impact on apple. my take is generally apple has a lot of wiggle room, carl, in how they price and configure the high end if they can incentivize people, say through a terabyte of storage on the high end phone to buy the high end phone and get the revenue and profit targets without the value which might help in a pandemic -- i also want to mention my thanks of course to amazon ceo andy judgesy for the sit-down the full interview will be online shortly carl. >> yeah, that's fantastic work we learned so much about him, as the street's really trying to figure out who he is in some ways since he leads such a massive powerhouse in the markets and economy. remark bling how he can comment on huge macroissues, education,

ai, wages, it's just a testament to the tenticles that amazon has in the modern american economy as for apple we'll watch it. as to julia's and jon's point, goldman did suggest maybe an installment plan as we keep an eye on products and pricing. that will it do it for tech check. thanks, well to the "halftime report" i'm scott wapner front ant center bhaes riding on the apple event and whether a sell on the news reaction could be a catalyst for a broader correction we'll discuss and debate that with our investment committee joining me for the hour stood is stephanie lurching degas wright, joe terranova, pete najarian, the co-founder of market rebellion.com. what was a nice gain is no more. even after the better than expected read on inflation dow down 170, down by more than 200. s&p down 5 nasdaq a bit of a lift by 0.25%. did have the comments from comcasou