NEW YORK, December 30, 2025, 4:07 PM ET — After-hours
- Amazon shares closed up 0.18% at $232.49 on Tuesday.
- A U.S. appeals court said it could not hear Amazon’s bid to halt a labor board case, widening a split among circuits.
- Amazon also shelved plans for commercial drone deliveries in Italy, citing regulatory hurdles.
Amazon.com, Inc. shares ended slightly higher on Tuesday as investors digested a U.S. appeals court ruling that kept a labor-board case on the agency track. The stock closed up 0.18% at $232.49. 1
The legal backdrop matters for Amazon because labor rules can influence how it runs its delivery network and what it pays to keep packages moving on time. For investors, the key question is whether regulatory decisions add friction to a model built on scale and tight cost control.
The court decision also landed in holiday-thin trading, when smaller shifts in sentiment can produce outsized moves in megacap stocks. That has left many large technology names, including Amazon, churning in narrow ranges into year-end.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Amazon’s challenge to the National Labor Relations Board’s structure could not be heard in court because it grew out of a labor dispute involving drivers employed by a contractor, Battle Tested Strategies. The company sought to block an NLRB administrative case that argues Amazon should be treated as an employer because it allegedly controlled key working conditions, which would require bargaining with the drivers’ union. The judges pointed to the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which limits federal courts from issuing injunctions in labor disputes, and said the split with the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit—whose earlier ruling involved Elon Musk’s SpaceX—makes U.S. Supreme Court scrutiny more likely. 2
For the stock, the immediate market impact was muted, but the ruling keeps a high-profile dispute moving through the NLRB’s in-house process. That track can be slow, yet it can shape how companies litigate labor cases and when they can take constitutional challenges to federal court.
In a separate regulatory signal, Amazon said it will stop pursuing commercial drone delivery plans in Italy after a strategic review. The company said it made progress with aerospace regulators, but that broader business and regulatory conditions in the country did not support its longer-term goals for the program. 3
Amazon’s drone efforts have long been pitched as a way to speed last-mile delivery, but aviation approvals and local rules vary widely by market. For investors, the Italy decision adds to the list of operational initiatives that can be slowed by regulation even when the underlying technology is ready.
On Wall Street, broader conditions were also in focus. U.S. stocks were muted in choppy, thin trade, and “it’s just a healthy rebalancing of allocations,” said Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide, as investors repositioned after a tech-led run. Investors also parsed Federal Reserve minutes for rate-path clues after the central bank’s December cut, with the Fed’s next policy meeting scheduled for Jan. 27-28. 4
What investors watch next for Amazon is largely procedural in the near term: how quickly the NLRB case advances, and whether other appellate courts continue to disagree over when employers can challenge the agency in federal court. A sharper circuit split tends to pull the Supreme Court into the debate.
The labor issue is also a margin story. Any shift in bargaining obligations or the way contractors’ workers are treated under labor law can ripple through delivery economics, where Amazon spends heavily to keep shipping promises.
Competitive pressures remain a constant backdrop. In cloud computing, Amazon Web Services competes head-to-head with Microsoft and Alphabet for enterprise workloads, leaving AMZN sensitive to both corporate IT spending and interest-rate expectations that influence how investors value growth.
With the official session over and liquidity still light into the final stretch of the year, traders will watch whether megacap tech stabilizes or sees more rotation. Longer-term holders are looking ahead to Amazon’s next quarterly update for fresh signals on AWS momentum and retail profitability.
