Good morning. For any CEO, one of the most consequential decisions you can make right now is which parts of the AI wave to leverage and which to exclude. So I was particularly interested to talk to eBay’s CEO Jamie Iannone recently. Under his leadership, eBay has recently banned autonomous AI shopping agents from its marketplace while encouraging sellers to use its own AI tool to create compelling listings. The battle: how to use AI to amplify commissions and the customer experience while addressing the risks it presents to both.
Iannone spoke to me from a trading‑card convention in Chicago, just as the company had closed a $50 million chapter from its past and launched a $1.4 billion bet on its future. The former resolves litigation involving former CEO Devin Wenig in which former employees targeted a couple with threats and bizarre deliveries in 2019 because their newsletter was critical of the site. The latter finalizes the acquisition of Depop, a fashion resale site popular with millennials and Gen Z.
For Iannone, who became CEO of eBay in 2020, the goal now is to double down on “non-new-in-season,” a term for the used and refurbished items that don’t compete head-on with e-commerce giants like Walmart and Amazon.
There’s strong evidence his approach is working: eBay (No. 353 on the Fortune 500) yesterday reported that revenue rose 15% in the second quarter to $3.1 billion while net income rose 51% to $552 million, raising its full-year guidance.
And though eBay sellers tend to be amateurs, thanks to AI they’re getting access to pro tools, such as the “magical” listing feature that extrapolates details from images. “You just basically hold your phone up to something and AI guides you” on how to describe it, price it, ship it and more, he told me. “When a user uses magical listings, we see 50% more listings per lister in the U.S. and the value of those customers using it is greater, meaning they’re selling more.”
With new technology, of course, also comes new challenges. “We’ve authenticated over 15 million items… to the best of my knowledge, we’ve never had a counterfeit get through,” said Iannone. Third-party AI agents that autonomously scrape sites and buy on behalf of customers could disrupt retail marketplaces like eBay, which may be why the site has banned them. Iannone’s goal is to focus on enhancing the human experience. “It’s why I love days like today where I’m interacting with top sellers.”
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Top leadership news
Google DeepMind shakeup
Demis Hassabis is giving up his CEO title to become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, with CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over daily operations and Gemini development. Hassabis wrote to staff that “now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture.”
1 billion SpaceX shares unlock
Roughly a billion SpaceX shares held by early employees and pre-IPO investors unlock on Thursday, but four index providers rushed the stock into 401(k)s within 25 days of listing, giving passive funds a head start before the supply hit. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria calls the accelerated index inclusion “a little bit of a bailout.”
Consumers await their tariff refund
About $100 billion in refunds from President Donald Trump’s struck-down tariffs have been disbursed to importers, while customers of companies like Five Below, Sony, and Nintendo have filed class actions demanding a cut of the windfall. Nintendo has responded that the money its customers paid “represents the purchase price of the goods they wanted and received.”
The markets
S&P 500 futures are up 0.13% this morning. The last session closed down 0.17%. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.44% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.31% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.93%. South Korea’s KOSPI was down 4.58%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.15%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.49%. India’s NIFTY 50 was up 0.06%. Bitcoin was up $65K.
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CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
