In a move that has ignited fury from workers and scrutiny from lawmakers, Amazon MGM Studios has finalized a deal worth roughly $40 million to license a documentary and follow-up series about First Lady Melania Trump, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The agreement, which grants Mrs. Trump an executive producer role and a significant majority of the licensing fee, was struck as Amazon initiated another brutal round of layoffs, eliminating approximately 16,000 corporate and retail roles this week.
This cut follows 14,000 job losses announced just three months ago, bringing the total to 30,000 positions eliminated in a single quarter.
The timing presents a stark contrast: a nine-figure expenditure on a single, politically adjacent media project against a backdrop of severed livelihoods and a corporate culture recently lambasted in a U.S. Senate report as putting profits ahead of worker safety.
“It’s a choice,” said an Amazon corporate employee who learned on Wednesday that her role was eliminated and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “They choose what to value. Right now, it seems they value a vanity project with a former first lady more than they value thousands of their own people.”
The documentary deal, reportedly involving director Brett Ratner, includes an additional $35 million for marketing, bringing Amazon’s total investment to an estimated $75 million.
A person with knowledge of the terms said Melania Trump is set to receive more than 70% of the licensing fee, an amount surpassing $28 million. The project is slated for release in early 2026.
Meanwhile, the human toll of Amazon’s “organizational changes” is mounting.
The latest cuts affect nearly 10% of Amazon’s corporate workforce and shutter dozens of Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores.
Senior Vice President Beth Galetti said the company is “working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers,” echoing CEO Andy Jassy’s previous claims that such cuts are “about culture” rather than financial necessity or artificial intelligence.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tells a different story.
A damning 160-page December 2024 report alleged that Amazon operates warehouses with injury rates over 30% higher than the industry average, deliberately choosing not to implement safety improvements that might dent productivity.
“Amazon cannot continue to treat its workers as disposable,” Sanders said.
“Donald Trump made a lot of big promises to struggling Americans, but his record is one of betrayal,” said Lisa McCormick. “While the stock market soars for billionaires, his policies have supercharged the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and launched a brutal assault on healthcare.”
“The so-called ‘Working Families Tax Cut’ is a cruel scam that will strip coverage from 16 million people and throw over 20 million more into premium shock after Republicans slashed over a trillion dollars from Medicaid and ACA subsidies,” said McCormick, who said Trump’s proposed military spending increase is not justified.
The job losses are rippling far beyond Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. United Parcel Service, once a major delivery partner, announced Tuesday it expects to cut up to 30,000 jobs in 2026 through attrition and buyouts.
This follows 48,000 positions eliminated in 2025. UPS directly attributed the restructuring to its shrunken delivery deal with Amazon, a strategic retreat that will save the shipper $3 billion.
“We’ll continue to partner with them,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said of UPS.
The collective cuts arrive as long-term unemployment hits a four-year high and 2025 marked the second-worst year for job creation since the Great Recession.
Yet, Amazon’s financial engine hums. In its most recent quarter, the company reported net sales up 13% to $180.2 billion and net income of $21.2 billion, buoyed by a $9.5 billion gain from its investment in AI firm Anthropic.
The company has also secured billions in federal contracts, including a share of the Pentagon’s $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration to provide AI and cloud services.
“They have a bottomless pit of money for AI, for government contracts, for projects about famous people,” said Christine Manno, an Amazon warehouse worker from Missouri cited in the Senate report. “But when it comes to making sure I don’t get injured lifting packages or keeping someone’s job, suddenly the well is dry.”
The juxtaposition has crystallized a bitter narrative: a corporation simultaneously investing unprecedented sums in speculative technology and high-profile entertainment while treating its foundational human workforce as a cost to be ruthlessly optimized.
As one laid-off software engineer put it, “They’re building an empire of robots and celebrities. The rest of us are just the debris.”
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