Today on squawk pot. Barry diller, media mogul on who's winning the streaming wars. Netflix won, get over it. Will other players be able to make money in streaming? No. Maybe on who's winning the 2022 midterms and the power of Zuckerberg. It's quite amazing that one person can decide to spend $30 billion to develop a market that does not exist. Plus, speaking of meta, large scale layoffs are hitting Silicon Valley. They've done this across the whole economy, meaning we keep talking about these technology companies as if they are some kind of special class. And the rest of the stories that got us squawking, like Twitter. Got a couple of past tweets that I might blame on. And impersonator. It wasn't me. The battle brewing against blue checkmark fakery. I think the Twitter creates an environment where people don't have self control. I know I don't. But you don't have self control in the real world either. It's Monday, November 7th, 2022, squawk pod begins right now. Stan Becky bye in three, two, one, Cuba, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to squawk box here on CNBC. We're live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Becky quick, along with Joe kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. My lead story today is that Facebook meta has 87,000 employees. Huge. Think of I don't know which college team has a stadium like that. Maybe Ohio State the Ohio State university. What is that 80? Think of that full. What do those people do? It's just being a metaverse. And I don't think it's 18 years. Has it ever had a down year in employment? Or has it just been they added what? Well, let's read this. Facebook parent meta could begin large scale layoffs as soon. As Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal is reporting this, expected to affect many thousands of employees, company officials have told employees to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week, a spokesperson declined to comment, referred CNBC to comments made last week on the earnings call by Mark Zuckerberg. He said some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or sink over the next year. Facebook had added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021. I'll call it to respond to increased demand during the pandemic and added an additional 15,000 in the first 9 months of this year. While adding all those employees of stocks down 70%. But just to put this in context for you, if you look at a Microsoft, has about a 160 3000 employees similar for alphabet. Now those I think are obviously bigger businesses, but by the way, market cap wise, just a year ago, not bigger businesses. And when you start to look through the revenue and everything else, you might not you might have you might have thought they were all comparable companies they were running. I'm not suggesting that they had the right number of employees. I'm just suggesting that maybe all of these companies are bloated, but they've got a lot, they've got a lot of people. That was part of the advantage though, is not having the cost structure being able to do this without the same cost structure as some of the other companies. You did compare traded up before. Yeah. If you did compare it to similar market caps, and now met us down 70%, then I mean, hopefully that's not what we're talking about in terms of rightsizing your employees to your market cap. You wouldn't want to employ truth is we've discovered and I don't know if we discovered it or not with Twitter, we'll find out whether they did it right. But Twitter it appears had too many employees, by the way, to tell anybody who works at one of these companies that there's too many employees. But it looks like there may have been Jack Dorsey apologizing, frankly, for what he said was over hiring at one point. It appears that these guys may have over hired. It's possible they over hired at Alphabet. It's possible they will provide a Microsoft. It's possible they've over hired all these places. Well, the question is whether they've done this across the whole economy, meaning we keep talking about these technology companies as if they are some kind of special class. I actually think that there's a possibility when it comes to the larger economy. We keep talking about what's going to happen in employment in this country. I think there's a recognition that you may be able to get away with less people. And then what happens? We'll see if that. And they could say that while we just things were going gangbusters and we just thought we'd need them and we never knew this day would come, but like you said, they over hired probably because always coming. They hired more than 40,000 people since the pandemic. This day is always. Look at 2020, 2021, and this year. They have hired meta more than 40,000 people since the pandemic started. Yes, it was ramping up in a very, very big way. It was based on these market caps, the kind of expanded. If you grew based on your market cap thinking that that was going to go to the store. You know how hard it is to diet. If you don't get fat in the first, isn't it a much better idea to always be thinking about things instead of that crazy one down if you just, but here's the thing, gorge, and then you gotta diet and I agree on the see you. If you are an example, you have never been fat. The physical dieting fund I totally understand. The other side of it though is that all of these companies are crazy growth companies. Look at a stripe. Stripe is reducing their workforce by 15%. It clearly over hired. Yeah. But when you're in a growth mode, the venture capitalist, the investors are saying grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. That's the most important thing you could possibly do. So what do you do? You hire people, you grow? I don't know, but that's no, I know. How this works. To the fat desk. What was that? Do you remember? And they don't reward you. They might want to do if you say, you know what? I'm going to have positive EBITDA, and I'm actually going to be this little conservative company, and maybe we're going to grow a little bit slower, but we're going to be stronger. That's not the mentality for better or worse. Elon Musk threatened permanent bands yesterday for people who impersonate others on Twitter without clearly labeling their account as parity that comes after several celebrity users change their accounts to mimic Musk. The account of one comedian who impersonated Musk over the weekend, Kathy Griffin, was suspended on Sunday. She had changed her display name to Elon Musk and her profile picture to look like his, and then she tweeted, after much spirited discussion with the females in my life, I've decided that voting blue for their choice is only right. Actress Valerie Bertinelli also changed her display name to Elon Musk and then posted tweets urging her followers to vote for democratic candidates, and that was just the beginning of it. I saw lots of people saying, all kinds of crazy things, changing their picture to look like kids. Oh my God, I saw one, and I actually thought was him, and it said, joined for the self promotion, staying for the anti semitism. And I literally, I had a double take. And it had a blue check mark. I had a boot check mark and it said Elon Musk on it. And I thought, is that I originally, when I saw this, I thought that he was telling a joke or in his own. This is the problem. This is a clever example showing the problems if being able to just buy your check mark for $8. Hopefully they will layer it with a verification process to make sure that this is not easily. Well, you saw him on Friday and I thought his whole point was that he was going to be verifying people so he could he could actually acknowledge who everybody was. There wasn't going to be people. To drown out the ball. You're drowning at the box, but also, you know, you wouldn't be anonymous. I thought there was a whole idea that you wouldn't be anonymous. Here, you effectively, not only could be anonymous, you could be somebody else. Hopefully they policed this because that is a problem. If you have people able to impersonate very quickly for 8 bucks, anybody they want. I mean, it's not the bots that are going to take advantage of that because this point was bots are created for a penny and then they flood, they were able to influence or advertise or do whatever they want with that. Hopefully it's not a case where anybody can walk in and say, for 8 bucks, I want to pretend I'm anybody I want and get