Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand, has stepped down from the company he started 47 years ago citing a retreat from its campaigning spirit under parent company Unilever.

Greenfield wrote in an open letter late Tuesday night — shared on X by his co-founder Ben Cohen — that he could no longer ‘in good conscience’ remain an employee of the company and said the company had been ‘silenced.’

He said the company’s values and campaigning work on ‘peace, justice, and human rights’ allowed it to be ‘more than just an ice cream company’ and said the independence to pursue this was guaranteed when Anglo-Dutch packaged food giant Unilever bought the brand in 2000 for $326 million.

Cohen’s statement didn’t mention Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza, but Ben & Jerry’s has been outspoken on the treatment of Palestinians for years and in 2021 withdrew sales from Israeli settlements in what it called ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory.’

Greenfield’s resignation comes five months after Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit accusing Unilever of firing its chief executive, David Stever, over his support for the brand’s political activism. In November last year Ben & Jerry’s filed another lawsuit accusing Unilever of silencing its public statements in support of Palestinian refugees.

‘It’s profoundly disappointing to come to the conclusion that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone,’ Greenfield said.

‘And it’s happening at a time when our country’s current administration is attacking civil rights, voting rights, the rights of immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ community,’ he added.

Richard Goldstein, the then president of Unilever Foods North America, said in a statement after the sale in 2000 that Unilever was ‘in an ideal position to bring the Ben & Jerry’s brand, values and socially responsible message to consumers worldwide.’

But now Greenfield claims Ben & Jerry’s ‘has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.’ He said he would carry on campaigning on social justice issues outside the company.

The financial performance of the Ben & Jerry’s brand isn’t made public but Unilever’s ice cream division made 8.3 billion Euros ($9.8 billion) in revenue in 2024. Unilever is in the process of spinning off its ice cream division, however, into a separate entity which involves cutting some 7,500 jobs across its brands globally.

Cohen and Greenfield founded the business in 1978 in Burlington, Vermont, where it is still based.

NBC News has contacted Unilever for comment overnight but had not received any at the time of publication.

LimeWire, the filesharing service that set the internet ablaze in the 2000s before being shut down for copyright infringement, said Tuesday that is acquiring the rights to Fyre Festival.

And it appreciates the irony.

‘LimeWire Acquires Fyre Festival Brand — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ the company titled its news release.

LimeWire said it would “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre — one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise.” The company offered no additional details about how the Fyre brand will be relaunched.

For years, LimeWire operated as a competitor to fellow file-sharing platform Napster before being effectively shut down by a court ruling in 2010 after a judge ruled it had facilitated large-scale copyright violations. In 2022, Austrian brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr bought LimeWire’s intellectual property and turned it into an NFT service.

Fyre Festival was a 2017 music festival that saw ticket buyers spend thousands of dollars for a weekend in the Bahamas only to be met with a logistics debacle that included portable bathrooms taking the place of regular toilets, and low-budget food options that betrayed promises of celebrity chef fare. Organizer Billy McFarland was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison.

“Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history,” LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr said. “We’re not bringing the festival back — we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”

LimeWire said its bid was backed by Maximum Effort, the creative agency co-founded by the actor and entrepreneur Ryan Reynolds.

“Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest,” Reynolds said in the release. “I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette of water.”

Fast-food restaurants are losing breakfast customers to convenience stores.

Morning meal traffic to fast-food chains rose 1% in the three months ended in July, while visits to food-forward convenience stores climbed 9% in the same period, according to market research firm Circana.

“Over the long run, convenience stores have taken share, really at foodservice overall, but the morning meal has been their strong suit,” David Portalatin, Circana senior vice president and foodservice industry advisor, told CNBC, noting the trend has largely been driven by what the group calls “food-forward convenience stores.”

For decades, McDonald’s and its rivals have tried to lure consumers away from home to eat their early morning offerings, betting that convenience and unique items will win over diners.

While fast-food chains have made some inroads, 87% of what consumers eat and drink in the morning comes from their own refrigerators or pantries, according to Portalatin. That leaves plenty of opportunity for fast-food chains — and anyone else who wants a slice of the breakfast pie.

Before the pandemic, fast-food chains started seeing a new rival for their breakfast customers: convenience stores. Regional chains like Wawa in the Northeast and Casey’s General Store in the Midwest were expanding their reach and investing in their foodservice options, taking pages from the fast-food companies’ own playbooks.

For a time, lockdowns and the shift to hybrid work reversed those market share gains. But in the three months ended in July, food-forward convenience stores once again gained the upper hand in the battle to serve consumers breakfast, according to Portalatin.

Circana separates food-forward convenience stores like Buc-ee’s and Sheetz from the broader industry, although more chains may soon fit under that umbrella. 7-Eleven, the biggest convenience, or c-store, in the U.S., is planning to invest more in its prepared foods business, inspired by the success of its Japanese business. C-store chain RaceTrac on Wednesday announced that it’s buying Potbelly for about $566 million, although it’s unclear what its plans for the sandwich chain include beyond expanding its footprint.

In recent years, more diners have been watching their budgets, conscious of rising menu prices and a tight job market.

Year-over-year morning traffic to fast-food chains has fallen every quarter for the last three years, according to data from Revenue Management Solutions, which advises restaurants on how to increase sales and profits. In the second quarter, fast-food breakfast visits fell 8.7%.

To see the struggles, look no further than McDonald’s, which dominates the quick-service breakfast category.

″The breakfast daypart is the most economically sensitive daypart, because it’s the easiest daypart of a stressed consumer to either skip breakfast or choose to eat breakfast at home,” McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call in late July. “And we, as well as the rest of the industry, are seeing that the breakfast daypart is absolutely the weakest daypart in the day.”

McDonald’s morning visits accounted for 33.5% of its traffic in the first half of 2019 but fell to 29.9% in the first half of 2025, according to Placer.ai data. To try to drum up traffic, the chain has included breakfast items in its new Extra Value Meals, including a deal for a Sausage McMuffin with Egg with a hash brown and a small coffee for $5.

To reverse breakfast’s slide, fast-food chains are taking hints from their competition. After years of convenience stores looking to fast-food chains for ideas on how to grow prepared food sales, from installing ordering kiosks to new menu items, the dynamic has flipped.

″[Quick-service restaurants] are looking at late-night sales and early morning sales, and they are directly looking at convenience stores and saying, ‘What is working? How can we bring that to our stores?’” National Association of Convenience Stores spokesperson Jeff Lenard told CNBC.

Prepared foods have offered a lifeline for convenience stores as demand for gasoline, tobacco and lottery tickets has fallen over time. The industry’s overall foodservice sales reached $121 billion in 2024, according to data from the NACS.

Most customers visit the gas pump during the morning and evening rush hours, on their way to and from work, presenting the perfect opportunity for c-stores to sell them breakfast or dinner. This year, 72% of consumers surveyed by InTouch Insight said they saw c-stores as a real alternative to fast-food chains, up from 56% a year ago and 45% two years ago.

Broadly, the c-stores that have focused on fresh food have been winning over more customers.

For example, Wawa has seen its customer base grow by 11.5% since 2022, while fast-food chains McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s have seen their combined customer base shrink 3.5% in the same time, according to data from Indagari, a transaction data analytics firm.

The majority of 1,170 respondents to an InTouch Insight survey for CNBC said that they have purchased made-to-order breakfast from a c-store in the morning in the past three months. Forty-eight percent of respondents said that when they choose breakfast from a convenience store, they are replacing a visit that they might otherwise make to a fast-food restaurant like McDonald’s or Dunkin’.

Buying coffee and breakfast from a c-store likely won’t be cheaper than making it at home. But consumers perceive it as “good bang for their buck,” according to Sarah Beckett, vice president of sales and marketing for InTouch Insight.

Plus, c-store customers get a wider breadth of options. In addition to coffee, gas stations sell energy drinks, protein shakes and yogurt smoothies. And customers can pick up a granola bar or banana to accompany their breakfast sandwich. Fast-food chains lack that kind of variety.

But above all, what matters to consumers is the food itself.

“While [a] convenience store broadly does have some tailwind from being a lower price point, the ultimate differentiator, and what’s really going to set apart the winners from losers, is that quality aspect of it,” Circana’s Portalatin said.

Brady Caviness, a 33-year-old account executive at Bailiwick who lives in Minneapolis, told CNBC that he indulges in a breakfast pizza from Casey’s General Store when he’s traveling. If he’s back home, where there isn’t a Casey’s nearby, he’ll stop by McDonald’s, Dunkin’ or Starbucks if he’s in the mood to buy his breakfast.

The Iowa-based chain is the country’s third-largest c-store chain and claims to be the fifth-largest pizza concept based on its number of locations. Casey’s reported same-store sales growth of 5.6% for its prepared food and dispensed beverages for the three months ended July 31.

Like Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza, Casey’s breakfast pizza, topped with cheese, scrambled eggs and a choice of bacon, sausage or vegetables, has grown a cult following since its launch in 2001.

“I think Casey’s is kind of a unique thing,” Caviness said. “My whole life, I’ve had the Egg McMuffins.”

The Labor Department has announced an inquiry into the Bureau of Labor Statistics over recent changes to its data practices.

In a letter published Wednesday, the office of the inspector general for the Labor Department cited the BLS’ recent decision to reduce data collection activities for two key inflation reports, as well as the large downward revision in employment estimates it announced Tuesday. It said it is reviewing the ‘challenges’ the agency has faced ‘in collecting and reporting closely watched economic data.’

The probe comes one month after President Donald Trump fired the head of the BLS as part of a broader pressure campaign that critics say has risked politicizing a part of the government that has long played a crucial role in the business world. The BLS, which is tasked with collecting data on economic indicators such as jobs and inflation, had generally been left alone by previous administrations.

But Trump began zeroing in on the BLS as his frustrations with the Federal Reserve mounted, coinciding with economic numbers that started to warn about a broader U.S. slowdown.

Since then, the labor market has slowed considerably. Just before the head of the BLS was fired, the department released a weaker-than-expected jobs report, citing claims of data manipulation that critics say are unfounded.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, another frequent target of Trump’s, has said Fed policymakers are ‘getting the data that we need to do our jobs’ and stressed the importance of the federal statistical agencies.

‘The government data is really the gold standard in data,’ he added. ‘We need it to be good and to be able to rely on it.’

Trump then nominated E.J. Antoni, an economist with the far-right Heritage Foundation, as the new head of the BLS, a move many economists have criticized.

Trump and other BLS critics have focused on the department’s revisions to its reports, a practice that dates back decades and has been generally seen as a necessary part of the challenge of collecting near-term economic data. It has also faced other challenges in data collection, including budget challenges and low response rates to its collection efforts.

The BLS previously said the decision to reduce inflation data surveys was necessary given existing budget constraints. Meanwhile, mainstream economists say the latest downward revisions — while large — are part of a routine annual process known as benchmarking.

While response rates to the bureau’s surveys have been declining, researchers recently found that revisions and falling response rates did not reduce the reliability of the jobs and inflation reports.

Shares of Kenvue fell more than 10% on Friday after a report that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will likely link autism to the use of the company’s pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women.

HHS will release the report that could draw that link this month, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

That report will also suggest a medicine derived from folate — a water-soluble vitamin — can be used to treat symptoms of the developmental disorder in some people, according to the Journal.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said, “We are using gold-standard science to get to the bottom of America’s unprecedented rise in autism rates.”

“Until we release the final report, any claims about its contents are nothing more than speculation,” they added.

Tylenol could be the latest widely used and accepted treatment that Kennedy has undermined at the helm of HHS, which oversees federal health agencies that regulate drugs and other therapies. Kennedy has also taken steps to change vaccine policy in the U.S., and has amplified false claims about safe and effective shots that use mRNA technology.

Kennedy has made the disorder a key focus of HHS, pledging in April that the agency will “know what has caused the autism epidemic” by September and eliminate exposures. He also said that month that the agency has launched a “massive testing and research effort” involving hundreds of scientists worldwide that will determine the cause.

In a statement, Kenvue said it has “continuously evaluated the science and [continues] to believe there is no causal link” between the use of acetaminophen, the generic name for Tylenol, during pregnancy and autism.

The company added that the Food and Drug Administration and leading medical organizations “agree on the safety” of the drug, its use during pregnancy and the information provided on the Tylenol label.

The FDA website says the agency has not found “clear evidence” that appropriate use of acetaminophen during pregnancy causes “adverse pregnancy, birth, neurobehavioral, or developmental outcomes.” But the FDA said it advises pregnant women to speak with their health-care providers before using over-the-counter drugs.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists maintains that acetaminophen is safe during pregnancy when taken as directed and after consulting a health-care provider.

Some previous studies have suggested the drug poses risks to fetal development, and some parents have brought lawsuits claiming that they gave birth to children with autism after using it.

But a federal judge in Manhattan ruled in 2023 that some of those lawsuits lacked scientific evidence and later ended the litigation in 2024. Some research has also found no association between acetaminophen use and autism.

In a note on Friday, BNP Paribas analyst Navann Ty said the firm believes the “hurdle to proving causation [between the drug and autism] is high, particularly given that the litigation previously concluded in Kenvue’s favor.”

The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage dropped 16 basis points to 6.29% Friday, according to Mortgage News Daily, following the release of a weaker-than-expected August employment report.

It’s the lowest rate since Oct. 3 and the biggest one-day drop since August 2024. Rates are finally breaking out of the high 6% range, where they’ve been stuck for months.

“This was a pretty straightforward reaction to a hotly anticipated jobs report,” said Mortgage News Daily Chief Operating Officer Matt Graham. “It’s a good reminder that the market gets to decide what matters in terms of economic data, and the bond market has a clear voting record that suggests the jobs report is always the biggest potential source of volatility for rates.”

Graham said in a post on X that many lenders are “priced better” than Oct. 3 and would be quoting in the high 5% range.

The drop is a major change from May, when the rate on the 30-year fixed peaked at 7.08%. It’s big for buyers out shopping for a home today, especially given high home prices.

Take, for example, someone purchasing a $450,000 home, which is just above August’s national median price, using a 30-year fixed mortgage with a 20% down payment. Not including taxes or insurance, the monthly payment at 7% would be $2,395. At 6.29%, that payment would be $2,226, a difference of $169 per month.

That might not sound like a lot to some, but it can mean the difference in not just affording a home, but qualifying for a mortgage.

Homebuilder stocks reacted favorably Friday, with names like Lennar, DR Horton and Pulte all up roughly 3% midday. Homebuilding ETF ITB has been running hot for the last month as rates slowly moved lower. It’s up close to 13% in the past month.

The big question is whether the drop in rates will be enough to get homebuyers back in the market.

Mortgage demand from homebuyers, an early indicator, have yet to respond to gradually improving rates. Applications for a mortgage to purchase a home last week were 6.6% lower from four weeks before, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

“Homebuyers grapple with a lack of affordability, sellers contend with more competition, and builders deal with lower buyer demand,” Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, said Friday in a statement after the release of the August employment report. “These conditions haven’t spelled catastrophe, but have created a cruel summer for the housing market.”

Some analysts have argued that buyers need to see mortgage rates in the 5% range before it really makes a difference. Home prices remain stubbornly high, and while the gains have definitely cooled, they are not yet coming down on a national level. In addition, uncertainty about the state of the economy and the job market has left many would-be buyers on the sidelines.

Shares in the Trump family’s latest cryptocurrency made its stock market debut Wednesday, triggering more ethical concerns as the Trumps look to cash in on crypto as the president’s administration weakens regulations for the nascent industry.

American Bitcoin, a firm co-founded this spring by Eric Trump, the president’s son, saw its share price climb as much as 39% by early afternoon to about $9.60.

It ended the day at $8.04, lower than its opening price of $9.22.

According to a release, the company is set up to accumulate bitcoin through computer “mining” of the cryptocurrency, as well as “opportunistic bitcoin purchases.” By owning a share of American Bitcoin, investors are betting that the company will be able to grow its bitcoin holdings faster than competitors. It also assumes bitcoin’s price will keep going up.

American Bitcoin’s stock debut is renewing ethics concerns about the Trump family’s ability to benefit from the president’s influence on the crypto industry, where it is increasingly seeing windfalls.

On Monday, the first public sales of a digital token minted by World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm co-founded by the Trump family, created as much as $5 billion in paper wealth for them and other insiders based on existing holdings. Last week, Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform, announced it had struck a deal with Crypto.com to accumulate Crypto.com’s native token Cronos, or CRO. Since the announcement, the value of CRO has climbed about 69%.

Shortly before 1 p.m, the value of Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin stake had climbed to as much as $600 million, according to calculations by Bloomberg News. Donald Trump Jr. also owns a stake, though its extent was not immediately clear. A representative for Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s no question there’s a conflict of interest here,” said Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and anticorruption with the Democracy Defenders Action group, a bipartisan advocacy group that seeks to oppose authoritarianism. Canter served as a legal adviser in four different presidential administrations. Beyond having the ability to appoint regulators charged with overseeing the crypto industry, Trump can also create an uneven playing field for other crypto market participants who might believe they may pay a price for competing with his entities — or failing to engage with them, Canter said.

In a post on X last night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said of the start of American Bitcoin’s stock trading: “it’s corruption, plain and simple.”

A representative for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment about the ethics concerns.

Estimates about how much President Trump and his family have earned from their crypto ventures vary. Reuters calculated that they made as much $500 million from the World Liberty decentralized finance platform, which debuted last year.

The figure is a moving target. In May, Zach Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder and the son of White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, announced that an Abu Dhabi-based firm had purchased $2 billion-worth of World Liberty’s stablecoin as part of an investment in the Binance crypto exchange. In July, Trump Media announced it had accumulated roughly $2 billion in bitcoin and related assets, accounting for about two-thirds of Trump Media’s total liquid assets. The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, a financial instrument Trump created in advance of returning to the Oval Office, owns 52% of Trump Media.

The group that created Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, earned $350 million from initial sales, the Financial Times reported in March, though its ownership structure and Trump family members’ direct stakes are unclear.

The White House has maintained that the president is not involved in the day-to-day affairs of Trump family businesses. Some ethics experts have argued that presidents are exempt from conflict-of-interest laws because they oversee too many areas to make enforcement practical.

In a statement, the White House blasted any insinuation of a conflict of interest.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” She said the administration “is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

At a conference last week, Eric Trump said the bitcoin community had embraced his father “unlike anything I had ever seen before.” Since then, the crypto industry has become one of the most influential players in politics: Its super PAC, Fairshake, was the largest-single donor group during the 2024 election and has already accumulated $140 million in advance of next year’s midterms, Politico reported.

The Trump brothers have announced a flurry of business moves since their father took office that parallel the president’s policies and agenda. Last month, they announced they would serve as advisers to New America, a firm that aims to buy businesses that “play a meaningful role in revitalizing domestic manufacturing, expanding innovation ecosystems, and strengthening critical supply chains.”

The brothers are receiving a combined 5 million shares in the company, which seeks to raise $300 million from investors in advance of going public.

When Tim Cook gifted President Donald Trump a gold and glass plaque last month, the Apple CEO was hailed by Wall Street for his job managing the iPhone-maker’s relationship with the White House.

Cook, Wall Street commentators said, had largely navigated the threat of tariffs on Apple’s business successfully by offering Trump an additional $100 billion U.S. investment, a win the president could tout on American manufacturing. But despite the 24-carat trophy Cook handed Trump, the true costs of those tariffs may finally show up for Apple customers later this month.

“Thank you all, and thank you President Trump for putting American innovation and American jobs front and center,” Cook said at the event, which brought Apple’s total planned spend to $600 billion in the U.S. over the next five years. Trump, at the event, said that Apple would be exempt from forthcoming tariffs on chips that could double their price.

But as Apple prepares to announce new iPhones on Tuesday, some analysts are forecasting the company to raise prices on its devices even after all Cook has done to avoid the worst of the tariffs.

“A lot of the chatter is: Will the iPhone go up in price?” said CounterPoint research director Jeff Fieldhack.

Although smartphones haven’t seen significant price increases yet, other consumer products are seeing price increases driven by tariffs costs, including apparel, footwear, and coffee. And the tariffs have hit some electronics, notably video games — Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, have raised console prices this year in the U.S.

Some Wall Street analysts are counting on Apple to follow. Jeffries analyst Edison Lee baked in a $50 price increase into his iPhone 17 average selling price projections in a note in July. He’s got a hold rating on Apple stock.

Goldman Sachs analysts say that the potential for price increases could increase the average selling price of Apple’s devices over time, and the company’s mix of phones have been skewing toward more expensive prices.

Analysts expect Apple to release four new iPhone models this month, which will likely be named the “iPhone 17” series. Last year, Apple released four iPhone 16 models: the base iPhone 16 for $829, the iPhone 16 Plus at $899, the iPhone 16 Pro at $999 and the iPhone 16 Pro Max at $1,199.

This year, many supply chain watchers expect Apple to replace the Plus model, which has lagged the rest of the lineup, with a new, slimmer device that trades extra cameras and features for a thinner, lighter body.

The “thinner, lighter form factor may drive some demand interest,” wrote Goldman analysts, but tradeoffs like battery life may make it hard to compete with Apple’s entry-level models.

Analysts have said they expect the slim device to cost about $899, similar to how much the iPhone 16 Plus costs, but they haven’t ruled out a price bump. That would still undercut Samsung’s thin Galaxy Edge, which debuted earlier this year at $1,099.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

When Trump announced sweeping tariffs on China and the rest of the world in February, it seemed like Apple was in the crosshairs.

Apple famously makes the majority of its iPhones and other products in China, and Trump was threatening to place tariffs that could double Apple’s costs or more. Some of Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs would hit countries like Vietnam and India where Apple had hedged its production bets.

But seven months later, Apple has weathered the tariffs better than many had imagined.

The U.S. government has paused the most draconian Chinese tariffs several times, smartphones got an exemption from tariffs and Cook in May told investors that the company was able to rearrange its supply chain to import iPhones to the U.S. from India, where tariffs are lower.

Cook also successfully leaned on his relationship with Trump, visiting him in White House and taking his side in August, when Cook presented the shiny keepsake to Trump. That commitment bolstered Trump’s push to bring more high-tech manufacturing to the U.S. In exchange, Trump said he would exempt Apple from a forthcoming semiconductor tariff, too. And Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were ruled illegal in late August, although they are still in effect.

Apple hasn’t completely missed the tariff consequences. Cook said the company spent $800 million on tariff costs in the June quarter, mainly due to the IEEPA-based tariffs on China. That was less than 4% of the company’s profit, but Apple warned it could spend $1.1 billion in the current quarter on tariff expenses.

After months of eating the tariff costs itself, Apple may finally pass those costs to consumers with this month’s launch of the iPhone 17 models.

Apple has been judicious about hardware price increases in the U.S. The smaller Pro phone, for example, hasn’t gotten a price increase since its debut in 2017, holding at $999. But Apple has made some price changes.

The company raised the price of its entry level phones from $699 to $829 in 2020. And in 2022 when Apple eliminated the smaller iPhone Mini that started at $699, the company replaced it with the bigger-screen Plus that costs $899. The Pro Max also got a hike in 2023 when Apple bumped it from $1,099 to its current price of $1,199.

If Apple does increase prices on its phones this year, don’t expect management to blame tariffs.

The average selling price of smartphones around the world is rising, according to IDC. The price of smartphone components, such as the camera module and chips, have been increasing in recent years.

Apple is much more likely to focus on highlighting its phones’ new features and quietly note the new price. Analysts expect the new iPhones to have larger screens, increased memory and new, faster chips for AI.

“No one’s going to come out and say it’s related to tariffs,” said IDC analyst Nabila Popal.

One way that Apple could subtly raise prices is by eliminating the entry-level version of its phones, forcing users to upgrade to get more storage at a higher starting price. Apple typically charges $100 to double the amount of the iPhone’s storage from 128GB to 256GB.

That’s what JPMorgan analysts expect Apple to announce next week.

They forecast that Apple will leave the prices of the entry level and high-end Pro Max models alone, but they wrote that they expect the company to eliminate the entry-level version of the Pro, meaning that users will have to pay $1,099 for an iPhone 17 Pro that has more starting-level storage than its predecessor. That’s how Apple raised the price of the entry-level Pro Max in 2023.

“However, with Apple’s recent announcements relative to investments in US, the assumption is that the company will largely be shielded from tariffs, driving expectations for limited pricing changes except for those associated with changes in the base storage configuration for the Pro model,” wrote JP Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee.

When Cook was asked about potential Apple price increases on an earnings call in May, he said there was “nothing to announce.”

“I’ll just say that the operational team has done an incredible job around optimizing the supply chain and the inventory,” Cook said.

David Ellison continues to put his stamp on Paramount after its acquisition by Skydance.

The CEO and chairman told employees Thursday that they will be expected to work in the office five days a week starting Jan. 5, 2026, according to a memo obtained by CNBC. Employees who do not wish to make the transition can seek a buyout starting Thursday and until Sept. 15.

“To achieve what we’ve set out to do — and to truly unlock Paramount’s full potential — we must make meaningful changes that position us for long-term success,” Ellison wrote to staffers. “These changes are about building a stronger, more connected, and agile organization that can deliver on our goals and compete at the highest level. We have a lot to accomplish and we’re moving fast. We need to all be rowing in the same direction. And especially when you’re dealing with a creative business like ours, that begins with being together in person.”

The move could help Paramount thin the herd ahead of looming staffing cuts.

Variety reported last month that the company is expected to lay off between 2,000 and 3,000 employees as part of its postmerger cost-cutting measures. These cuts are slated for early November, Variety reported.

Paramount is looking to take $2 billion in costs out of the conglomerate amid advertising losses and industrywide struggles with traditional cable networks.

Phase one of Ellison’s back-to-work plan will see employees in Los Angeles and New York returning to a full five-day workweek in the new year.

Phase two will focus on offices outside LA and New York, including international locations. A similar buyout program will be offered in 2026 for those who operate in these locations.

“We recognize this represents a significant change for many, and we’re committed to supporting you throughout this transition,” Ellison wrote. “We will work closely with managers to ensure you have the time and flexibility to make the necessary adjustments.”

Amazon is eliminating a program that allows members of its Prime subscription program to share free shipping benefits with people outside their household.

The company began notifying users in recent days that it plans to end the Prime Invitee Program on Oct. 1, according to a notice viewed by CNBC.

“We are writing to inform you that the Prime Invitee Program, which allowed sharing Prime’s fast, free delivery with others, will end on October 1, 2025,” the notice states. “Your invited guests will be notified directly about this change by September 5, 2025.”

Amazon previously let Prime members share free, two-day shipping with one other adult in their household, even if they used a different address.

Starting next month, the company will require invitees who don’t live with the account holder to sign up for their own Prime membership.

It’s phasing out the program in favor of Amazon Family, which lets Prime members share free shipping and other benefits with one other adult, four children and up to four teens added before April 7, 2025.

All users must share the same primary residential address, or the “address you consider to be your home and where you spend the majority of your time,” Amazon said.

The change comes as Reuters reported Monday that Amazon’s Prime signups in the U.S. fell short of last year’s total and its own targets, citing internal company documents. Amazon told the outlet that Prime membership continues to grow in the U.S. and internationally.