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Greetings! If you've planning on buying your significant other a Valentine's Day gift on Temu, Shein or Amazon's low-cost rival to those services, Haul, make sure you have a backup plan so you don't wind up in the doghouse. A (perhaps unintended) consequence of a Trump administration executive order issued over the weekend means packages from the e-commerce sites for cheap goods will almost certainly start piling up at American airports. Starting tonight at midnight, the Trump administration is effectively closing a loophole that has allowed Temu and the like to import individual packages worth less than $800 without paying import duties or tariffs. The new executive order bars companies from using the loophole—known in the industry as "de minimis"—for importing Chinese goods to the U.S. This will force Temu, Shein and Amazon Haul to pay tariffs on broad swaths of Chinese items including apparel and electronics already in place—tariffs companies had been avoiding, as my colleagues and I have reported—as well as Trump's new 10% tariff on China-made products. In addition to paying tariffs, which will almost certainly force the online discount stores to raise prices, companies will also be required to fork over a lot more information to U.S. Customs and Border Protection about what's inside their packages. While both companies and authorities should be able to figure out how to do so efficiently over time, they've had very little time to prepare. The government usually provides months of advance notice for these kinds of changes, but Trump used emergency powers to issue the order just three days before it's due to take effect. Logistics experts expect a logjam. Importal CEO Graham Anderson, a customs broker who works with apparel brands and others that are shifting away from de minimis, told me he's been telling clients to brace for delays at U.S. airports this week as importers redo their paperwork and authorities have to check more packages. Which is all to say: Expect your direct-from-China e-commerce orders to be slower to arrive in the short term and more expensive in the longer term. But your significant other deserves better than $7 Amazon Haul pajamas anyway. Why not get some flowers instead? They'll probably last longer. Most media firms sell ads by wining and dining marketers. Elon Musk's approach is a little different—litigation. On Saturday, Musk's X amended an existing lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers to add several new individual advertisers, including Nestlé, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Lego, Pinterest, Shell and Tyson Foods. Musk is complaining that the advertisers conspired to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter," now called X. Musk also complains that the conspiracy was "against the unilateral self-interest of the advertisers," an allegation that may be hard to prove. Why would any advertiser boycott a media platform if it was against their interest? That's the flaw in the entire case. The advertisers may have acted together to try to get Musk to improve X's content moderation standards. But surely that was aimed at making X a more acceptable place for them to advertise. It would be risky to predict how this lawsuit will play out. But suing your potential customers doesn't seem like a winning way of doing business.—Martin Peers - Elon Musk called for the removal of regulations from the federal government, saying regulations "should be default gone—not default there," and if some of that regulation was necessary, it could be added back (more here).
- Emily Stubbs, TikTok's global head of litigation since 2020, is leaving, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. It's the latest high-level departure amid the video app's struggle to stay in operation in the U.S.
- Stephen Yap, who spent nearly two decades at Google, is departing to join publicly traded ad tech firm Perion as chief revenue officer.
- President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to create a sovereign wealth fund for the U.S., telling reporters later that the fund could buy part of TikTok (more here).
- SoftBank said on Monday it would spend $3 billion per year on technology from OpenAI for itself and its subsidiaries, such as chip designer Arm and electronic payments service PayPal (more here).
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