On a recent “All-In” podcast episode, David Sacks put a precise price on a New York City bill that would force Amazon (AMZN) to employ its delivery drivers directly rather than through subcontractors. “What we do know it will do is raise the cost of packages by about $5.20 per package. And it will cost families $664 more per year, and it puts something like 5,000 jobs at risk,” he said. Sacks ran AI and crypto policy for the Trump White House until March 2026, when he said his 130-day limit as a special government employee had run out. He now co-chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and the czar title is reportedly about to go to Jay Clayton.
Minutes earlier, co-host Jason Calacanis had priced the same change at a fraction of that. He said the drivers Amazon employees “would cost but 25 cents per delivery in New York,” adding that the company could “easily afford to pay 25 cents more per package delivery.” Sacks answered him directly: “And it's not 25, it's $5. $5.20 per package. $664 per household per year in New York.” Neither man said anything on air about where his respective number came from. Sacks came closest, referring to “a study that showed that the average household could pay hundreds of dollars extra.”
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The Delivery Protection Act
The bill is Intro 0518-2026, the Delivery Protection Act, introduced in February by Council Member Tiffany Cabán. It would license last-mile delivery warehouses through the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and bar operators from subcontracting core delivery work, with a two-year phase-in. Amazon told the Council at an April 9 hearing that its city network runs through more than 40 locally owned delivery service partners employing more than 5,000 people at an average of nearly $24 an hour. Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed the bill on Aug. 10, four days before the episode aired and six days after New Jersey's attorney general sued Amazon over the same model. As of early October, it had not come to a vote.
Sacks' figures match, to the dollar, a June 2026 report titled “Intro 518 Impact Assessment” by the consulting firm AKRF, released July 1 by a group called the Five Borough Jobs Campaign. The report projected up to $5.20 in added cost per package, about $664 a year per household, a 267% rise in per-package delivery cost for parcels handled by city facilities, and more than 10,000 jobs at risk. AKRF was paid $52,500 for the work. On July 23, the nonprofit newsroom New York Focus reported, based on state lobbying disclosures, that Amazon had given the campaign $5,001,377 in five payments between February and mid-May, while FedEx (FDX), Prologis (PLD) and the Trucking Association of New York contributed roughly $173,000 between them. Amazon cited the same analysis in a Sept. 2 statement to Fox Business, saying it was “evaluating all options to try and limit this impact, including the potential relocation of operations and delivery facilities outside of New York City.”
Murky Numbers All Around
None of that makes the AKRF numbers wrong, and industry-funded impact studies are routine in city politics. The point is narrower. Sacks presented the figures as “what we do know,” and a listener had no way to know the company the bill targets financed the knowledge almost entirely. Calacanis's number doesn't seem to have any public source we could find, however.
The arithmetic inside the funded figure is worth a look too. Dividing $664 by $5.20 implies about 128 packages per household per year, which is not outlandish: Pitney Bowes' Parcel Shipping Index counts 23.1 billion U.S. parcels in 2025, or 171 per household, with Amazon Logistics the largest carrier at 6.9 billion. But $5.20 is the top of AKRF's range, and its 267% figure applies only to deliveries routed through city facilities, which AKRF puts at about 36% of daily volume. The public summary does not show how the household figure was built. If it applies the maximum per-package cost to every package a household receives, $664 is a ceiling, not a forecast.
The company most exposed to the answer is Amazon, whose delivery service partner model is the target of both the bill and New Jersey's lawsuit. The mayor's office supplied the heat, saying that “corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting.” Amazon's position is that the network creates small businesses, flexes for holiday peaks, and would be pushed out of the city by a mandate. Its founder has a standing line for fights like this: Jeff Bezos has argued that policy should fix problems “at the root” rather than pick villains, a sentence both sides of Intro 518 would claim.
What remains is the gap. Two well-known investors sat at the same table in August and priced the same bill 20 times apart, and nothing has settled it since. Amazon financed the sourced number; the unsourced number remains unsourced, and the bill is still in committee, with the city's mayor behind it and the country's largest parcel carrier against it.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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