Katie Drummond: Very exciting promise by Howard Lutnick. I can’t wait to talk about whether any of that is actually possible.
Michael Calore: Certainly not in the short term.
Lauren Goode: Was this the same moment where he talked about the army of millions using tiny screws?
Katie Drummond: Oh, yes. The teeny tiny screws? The teeny tiny screws? Yeah.
Lauren Goode: That was the one on CBS Face the Nation, I think we all saw it.
Howard Lutnick [Archival audio]: The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America.
Michael Calore: So Elon was tweeting through it. Tim Cook has probably also been sitting on Twitter and popping off some tweets calling various members of the White House advisory staff morons, right?
Lauren Goode: Tim Cook has not said anything publicly.
Katie Drummond: Let’s give that man a little credit. He is way too smart to do that. Apple is as savvy as they come, I expect to hear nothing from them about this. To Lauren’s point earlier, I mean, they are certainly working this behind the scenes, but I would expect they want this to be from a public optics point of view, no comment, smooth sailing, et cetera.
Lauren Goode: Katie, you mentioned at the time of the inauguration, when we saw that photo of the tech CEOs who were in attendance, I think your remark was Tim Cook looks like he wants to vomit?
Katie Drummond: He was not exactly beaming with enthusiasm like some of his colleagues, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, et cetera. He looked like someone had died, and maybe it’s his company based on what’s happening right now,
Michael Calore: Here’s hope for the future. Well, let’s talk about one of the other people in that photo, Mr. Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO. Now, Amazon is not a hardware company like Apple, but it deals in hard goods. So what do the tariffs mean for Amazon and its business?
Lauren Goode: Well, there’s also, we should just note, and our colleague, Zeyi Yang has been covering this at WIRED too, there’s something that’s been known as the de minimis exemption for e-commerce companies shipping goods from China, and part of this new tariffs package actually removes that exemption, which is not good for e-commerce companies.
Michael Calore: That’s if your goods cost less than $800?
Lauren Goode: I believe so, yes.
Michael Calore: You don’t have to pay the hefty import tax on it.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Exactly.
Katie Drummond: This one is a little bit less clear-cut to me, and I’m happy to argue about it or be told I’m wrong. This feels less dire for Amazon than it is for the Elons of the world and his companies and the Apples and the Tim Cooks. I mean the reliance that Amazon has on Chinese goods sold on their platform, I think it’s at least 50 percent. It’s more than 50 percent of what Amazon sells. But given Lauren what you just said, that these other Chinese commerce giants are going to be hit really hard by these tariffs, in some respects that feels like it sort of equalizes the playing field for Amazon. And then obviously Michael, to your point, they’re not a hardware company. Obviously they’re a massive commerce company, but they’ve also got Amazon Web Services, they have other facets to their company that feel much more insulated from the sort of immediate impacts of tariffs. I mean, how does that sit with both of you?
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