it's thursday, and it relates to thursday night, march 4th, 2021, "squawk box" begins right now. >> good morning, everybody, welcome to "squawk box" on cnbc. i'm becky quick along with joe kernen and andrew ross sorkin, and we're going to start with the markets this morning the tech stocks really got slammed once again yesterday dragged the dow down by about 121 points that was a decline of just 0.4%. the s&p was down by 1.3%, and the nasdaq was down by 2.7%, that's the second day in a row that you have seen the biggest hit taken on the nasdaq. in fact, the nasdaq over the last two days down 2.7%, down 1.7% the day before, and that's the biggest two-day loss we have seen in two months

among the big losers, you had netflix down by 5% apple, amazon, microsoft and alphabet each of those stocks down by more than 2% technology stocks have taken it on the chin. this morning, you're seeing some additional pressure across the board. if you take a look at the u.s. equity futures at this hour, you're going to see that the dow futures are down by about 120 points below fair value. s&p futures down by about 21 and the nasdaq down by 95 and guys, a big part of this has been this rapid acceleration that we have seen in treasury yields once again. yesterday, the ten high temperature year picked up about 8 bonasis points and that's whe you started to see the selloff in stocks, all the way to 1.47%. and this morning, the ten-year is sitting just above those levels, 1.476% watching this very closely obviously this is a vote of confidence in what's happening with reopening, hoping to get the economy reopened, but those quick moves in treasuries, that does have some concern about what that means for the

valuation of stocks, and we have certainly see that play out recently andrew oh, joe. >> it hit 165, and then, you know, it allayed some fears, but now i see it just as people front running the eventual move higher do you really think it's going back below 1.4 it might go to 1.3 it might do any of those things. the notion is, hey, we got to -- we're not permanently staying back down below. maybe we will. but i think there's just the idea that, look, it's just a matter of time why not, if it's going to hit these high fliers and momentum players and all that stuff, you want to get out in front of it that's what it looks like to me. >> sure. >> 1.47 today, who knows how long that lasts. nobody knows, who knows with the strains and everything else, but. >> you don't know. >> it seems like it makes sense, doesn't it, to maybe take something off the table. if rates are headed higher,

maybe it makes sense that's what they're thinking. meantime, we're going to get you a quick round up of news out of washington the house representatives passing a sweeping bill that would change campaign finance, voting and ethics loss and create an automatic voter registration across the country, restore voting rights for people who were formerly incarcerated and modernize u.s. voting systems, and strengthen oversight of political lobbying and campaign finance, and prevent members of congress from serving on corporate boards, and require presidents to release their tax returns. senate republicans are expected to use their filibuster to try to block that bill and we will see what happens there in the senate. separately, the house passing a police reform bill that would ban choke holds and overhaul immunity protections for police officers the biden administration throwing its support behind the bill earlier this week it heads to the senate where a similar bill stalled last year when the chamber was controlled by republicans the business round table put out a statement, urging lawmakers to work together to resolve policy

differences and pass policing reform legislation this year, so a seeming effort to support this or at least something like it. meantime, the house won't be in session today. here's what's happening, chamber cancelling its session due to security concerns at the capital. an intelligence bulletin warning that some domestic groups could present a security risk. some qanon conspiracy theorists believe today is the day that former president trump will walk back into the white house and control the government once again. capital police have now upgraded security to prepare for any potential attack or attacks i should say today and in the future but some scary stuff, joe. >> i have a hard time taking that seriously the walk back, but we'll see >> what qanon is saying is not to be taken seriously. >> you're a thinking, rational human. they still have the razor wire

up around the capitol at this point. it's nuts but they have the razor wire around the capitol because there are people who actually believe this. >> i have no idea whether anything's really brewing or not. i don't know but i doubt whether trump's anywhere near. i don't think he's anywhere near washington he probably won't be watching. >> he's not doing much to tamp down any of the rumors when he goes to cpac, and still thinks he won the election. not doing much to help things. >> texas making headlines for eliminating the mask mandate, and opening businesses 100%. but not all businesses are on board. starbucks, target, hyatt hotel, cvs, all among the major companies that say they have no plans to drop mask requirements. other companies, including gym operator lifetime, name's familiar, been a while albertson's grocery stores, and a number of local restaurants

plan to ease restrictions. some school districts are now debating whether to drop mask requirements yesterday, president biden said leaders in texas and mississippi were making a big mistake. >> being able to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because of the way in which we're able to get vaccines in people's arms we have been able to move that all the way up to the end of may to get every adult american to get a shot, and the last thing, the last thing we need is neanderthal thinking in the meantime, everything is fine, take off your mask forget it. it still matters. >> and texas governor greg abbott is going to respond he will join us at 8:40 a.m. eastern. he looks more, than really going all the way back i don't know

i thought we -- our view of neanderthal has been elevated recently they were more sophisticated than we thought. i think some of that news has come out recently. but neanderthal, nomagnun and modern man do you remember? >> it's been a while since i looked at that chart. >> if they call you neanderthal, it's not a good thing. >> not a compliment. >> i don't think it's a good thing. >> andrew, i saw you bring up an interesting question on twitter about this, being on a phone call last night, and the question you said came up. go ahead, explain. >> i was on the phone with somebody who said to me, you know, in a state that perhaps prematurely and they were referring to texas, but others who decide to effectively open up prior to the cdc guidance, whether if, in fact, later, as a result of that they run into

trouble and people get sick and they need federal help, should they get federal help if they do something that's effectively against the cdc guidance, and i just, i posted on twitter, and i don't know, thousands of people had all sorts of responses it was actually fascinating to hear the sort of various views across the spectrum. >> i'm sure that would bring -- >> we can ask greg abbott today. >> we can ask greg abbott. >> you can ask him that early on or i'll ask him, whatever you want to do >> no, it's fascinating. it will be fascinating to see. i think the thing that's concerning is going to be two issues, one is, and i was talking to some executives yesterday who have retail outlets and other things in texas where they plan to continue masking, just how much harder it may be to require, even if they require it, to enforce it may be difficult. some of them said that it's already hard to enforce it so it

may be even harder still airlines, as you know, and going to the airport federally, you know, if you show up at the airport in austin, put a tweet out and some of the other big airports put a tweet out, if you show up at the airport in texas, you're still going to have to wear a mask. it makes it complicated because if there is more sickness in texas as a result. and really, we're like two months away from this hopefully landing the plane, if you will, and getting rid of this and really reducing it, if you have people who are -- if texas is sicker and people start getting on planes and going to other places, it makes the whole thing that much more complicated. >> right the people are still going to wear them. it finally happened to me the other day, and i walked into -- you know, i was kind of cheating on my diet i had to wait to pick someone up, there's like a pizza place that sells slices, okay, so i

admit this, and i walked in and hey, you know, and everybody was kind of giving me a weird look the guys behind the counter. >> did you forget your mask? >> i forgot my mask, and i went, just like home alone >> sorry >> right and i went oh, my god. >> it was weird. you feel naked and i went out in my car and got it, and came back. >> people give you the side eye. >> first time ever have you guys ever forgotten or slipped your mind? >> yesterday i started to walk into a doctor's office, i had to turn around and go back. i realized before i opened the door, and turned around and got the mask it does make it much more complicated to andrew's point, retailers who are asking their front line employees to be the ones who are enforcing these things you have seen it here with school districts or anywhere, a lot of times governors don't want to make this call because it's a politically loaded call you're going to have people mad at you no matter what you

decide, so they stand back and say, okay, it's up to everybody else to figure it out. the stores can figure it out the restaurants can figure it out. the school boards, the mayors, and that puts a lot of undue pressure on everybody down the line this has been something that's happened since the beginning of the pandemic if you don't want to make a decision, you stand back because you want to get out of the line of fire, but it increases the complications on everybody else who is then responsible for enforcing these things because there's not a federal mandate, you probably couldn't do one because of state's rights, but if a governor doesn't take a stand, it makes it far more complicated for everybody else involved and whistle're going to see hows plays out. >> a lot of questions. i'm glad he's on today. >> will be a great conversation. >> pose all of these questions >> right >> he's, you know, he's got, i'm sure he's got some pretty good answers. we'll see whether, you know, it holds up under withering cross-examination, but we'll see. i don't want to square him away.

let's talk about another story. spacex's starship prototype landed for the first time. previous test versions of that prototype exploded during the landing attempts this version actually landed successfully, but a few minutes after the landing, it exploded as it stood on the concrete pad. nasa used elon musk's terms for this explosion, a rapid unplanned disassembly. the cause of the explosion wasn't immediately clear but this is pretty complicated and difficult stuff, obviously >> wow what is it, rapid, yeah, that's -- >> unplanned -- >> i've gotten used to preowned cars, i guess, they were preowned but the people didn't really use them at all so they're not used. that's a good one. >> rapid unplanned disassembly. >> it was just so amazing to watch it stick the landing, though, and you know, i don't know if you guys were watching it when it was happening and when it landed there was such a sense of excitement, even though

you did see the fire plumes as it was coming down a little bit. it looked like a cgi movie originally, and then of course, i don't think most people were paying attention because this was literally minutes later when it then, i mean, i don't know if we're going to have the full clip because it takes actually a while for it to turn around there or things to turn around >> they're getting closer. they're getting closer and closer and by the way, we're going to have ron baron on a little later this morning he's obviously a big investor in tesla, but owns part of spacex too i think. we can ask him about that. >> it's an amazing thing amazing thing. whether he see >> there it goes. >> but they're getting closer. meantime, we're going to continue our conversation about the tech wreck, the reopening trade and potential portfolio moves as we head to a break. check out shares of rocket companies. the stock falling back to earth yesterday dropping by 32% after a 70% jump on tuesday. fueled by reddit traders we'll be right back after this

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♪ i'm so ♪ >> we're going to talk about something that looks a little more ugly right now, the close for the broader markets yesterday, particularly for the nasdaq and big tech stocks which got crushed and faded hard into the close. tesla has lost more than 27% from its all time high, facebook, apple and amazon, all tanking more than 15% from their highs. for more we want to bring j.j., could be k.k., or j.j., strategist at td ameritrade it's early in the morning, you know and of course, the portfolio manager at douglas tulane and associates, cnbc contributor as well good morning to both of you. you know, i think becky nailed it earlier i think this is a trade based on where the ten-year is going. the question is which way you think the ten-year is going after this and which way you think the market and some of these tech stocks are going, j.j. >> well, you know, as you guys also said, if you look at the

ten-year yield right now, andrew, we're trading about 1.47 it's 1.5, we're having trouble getting through overall. maybe we'll get clarity when chairman powell speaks today, and it will be one of the last times we hear from them before the blackout period begins i think the speech today is certainly going to be perhaps more heavily watched than you would think for sort of a one off occasion, if you would with that, andrew, we're also, if we look at the s&p 500 future, which is down again this morning, this 3780, 3785 area is where we found support and a few different times so far this year so we're trading right above that, as you know, we came on the air, we're at 37.90. with both of those things going on, it would be really interesting to see if this area holds once more, and you know, i have to believe in the shorter term if there's a good probability that there will. i don't see what drives rates that much higher in the short-term, and therefore we may

be able to find some support in the market. >> are you doing repositioning as a result of all of this right now. >> not directly andrew if you remember about six months to a year ago, we positioned into financials, probably north of 15% of our portfolio in there. you know, 3, 4% in energy. so really what we're doing is looking to add to some stocks, stocks likemorgan stanley, which i think are going to benefit even more with their wealth management business and m and a, and then some of the reopening plays that, you know, if we have new cash, the ubers of the world that have really restructured our business and look at some of the other reopening stocks, look at diagio, as soon as you see more restaurants and hotels and people traveling there are pockets to add to, but i think fundamentally, we are in a position where we want to be and really look for opportunities as the market kind of pulls back because, you know, as this ten-year moves back and forth, i think you are going to

get opportunities to buy high quality companies that a year ago you didn't want to touch because we didn't have clarity. >> let me ask you, sarat, would you buy. i don't know if we're calling it a dip righthere. some of these big tech names which really are getting hurt, i mean, really pushed down is that an opportunity >> i think for high quality tech, i think this is a time, andrew, that we really have to kind of separate technology into companies that are trading on real cash flow and earnings as opposed to price-to-sales, companies that trade on, i would add to companies like facebook at this point. i think they've come back nicely, google, real cash flow companies that have growth forward, but i would be very careful to look at kind of what people had poured a lot of money into a year ago, and some of those stocks that flew to the moon i think are the ones that could come back very easily, just because they don't have fundamental support behind them. >> jj what's the retail investor

doing now, and we obviously watched rocket go up frankly and down literally in the past 72 hours. what do you make of that >> well, actually, our clients were yesterday net sellers of rocket overall so i think that, you know, we continue to see so many times these meme stocks, et cetera, andrew, it's very interesting talking about the reopening trade. we have a tool like folio that measures social data stocks like peloton are getting a lot of positive mentions heading into the summer, so i'm interested to see what happens with this reopening trade overall. we also saw that, you know, our clients the last few days have been selling airline stocks, but in times where, you know, you talk about -- times when things get a little bit crazy, buying the dip, let's face it, has paid off very well over the last ten years, and so i think just like, you know, in football when you want a play that can't be

stopped, people run the same play until it is stopped, and during those times, the faang stocks are exactly the ones that tend to look attractive to our clients during times of turbulence that's why i'm so interested to see if we find the support here. >> jj when you see a meme stock fly, and you guys have access to the data, right, do you think it's your clients, it's the retail clients that are pushing it up and down or do you think that the professional investor, the hedge funds are surfing on top of this and looking through this data themselves, effectively or looking through social media, and then sumjumpi on top of these trades, how do you think it's actually happening. >> i think it's a combination thereof, to be honest with you, andrew our clients are participating, and as i'm sure many retail clients are participating, i do think that, you know, if i look back to amc and gamestop, our clients were not just in with both hands as buyers it was actually fairly balanced in terms of buying and selling

so i do think in order to drive these stocks to the level they have been driven, you have to have some other participation that can do some size and, you know, move very very quickly, which the retail trade, moves so quickly, compared to where they were, but certainly not in the micro seconds that some of these stocks are moving. >> okay. fair enough, jj and sarat, thank you both >> joe coming up, in light of what we just talked about with tesla, an interesting interview at 7:00, an extended conversation with investor ron baron. first, though, leaving las vegas, a major casino operator selling assets in sin city to focus on gaming in asia. eunice yoon has a special report futures indicated lower right now. here's a look at the biggest premarket drags, a drag on the dow. "squawk box" will be right back.

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so with every turn, we'll keep building a world that works. las vegas sands leaving las vegas as we reported yesterday it's selling its sin city properties to focus on faster growing asian marketings eunice yoon joins us now with more good morning, eunice, saw you earlier talking to frank good to see you. >> hi, joe yeah, the sands already has a very strong presence here in asia with most of its properties in the chinese territory and gambling capital of macao. it has the marina based sands in singapore which happened to be the most profitable during the pandemic s singapore and macao has kept their infections down and that's

allowed more visitors to the casino macao lifted requirements to show negative test results at the properties, and saw gambling revenues spike in february by 137% this is coming off a low base. longer term, the company is betting big on what the late founder, sheldon adelson had envisioned long ago, that people in asia would grow wealthier and wealthier and want to travel, shop and be entertained. investors today have been speculati speculating whether or not the sands would want to use money to enter new markets. there is a lot of chatter whether it would buy the troubled resorts in australia, a new market there or potentially bid on a license in japan. guys >> there's -- las vegas sands, leaving las vegas. that's where it's been,

obviously, though, eunice. we know where the lion's share of activity is should we be sad the sands, remember the rat pack and dino, and everything else, but everything is changing, a lot of online stuff, too online sports might be important to this company, too, eventually, right, eunice? >> reporter: well, i think the company is following the money there was an interesting study that came out of a macao research center which showed that during the pandemic, most of the people who did go to macao ended up spending on average 11,000 u.s. dollars about for a seven-day stay just on gambling, and then another $6,000, about $5,700 on dining or shopping and hospitality. the fact that there are so many people who are still interested in spending a lot of money, even during the pandemic, might be one of the reasons why the sands sees this region as very important. >> wait a minute, they lost,

they didn't win $11,000 gambling you mean these people were losing money gambling, eunice? >> what? >> that's the amount they wagered. >> yeah, that's the amount they wagered, but one thing about macao that people are looking at longer term is june 2022, if you are in gaming, this is an important date because the sands license it holds is going to expire, and so people are won b dering what's going to happen there, especially since sheldon adelson is no longer in charge, and able to negotiate a new deal for the company. >> eunice, thank you becky. thanks, joe. when we come back, getting back to the office, we're going to bring you new data on work force trends during the pandemic that's next. also, a programming note for you, at 3:00 p.m. today, you can turn into cnbc's evolve live stream on innovativing energy.

brian sullivan will lead two critical conversations, the ceo of occidental, and presidential climate envoy, john kerry. right now, as we head to a break, let's take a look at yesterday's s&p 500 winners and losers ♪ when things go wrong as they sometimes will ♪ ♪ as the road to travel l'set work together ♪ ♪ come on come on let's work together ♪ i made a business out of my passion. i mean, who doesn't love obsessing over network security? all our techs are pros. they know exactly which parking lots have the strongest signal. i just don't have the bandwidth for more business. seriously, i don't have the bandwidth. glitchy video calls with regional offices? yeah, that's my thing. with at&t business, you do the things you love. our people and network will help do the things you don't. let's take care of business.

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♪ work hard play harder get lou go farther ♪ ♪ than any country boy has gone before ♪ here are the futures down about 150 points now on the dow jones, nasdaq down about 102 and change after the 2.7% loss yesterday and the s&p indicated down about 25. becky. >> thanks, joe a new report this morning on the future of work by emphasis and the milken institute finds while the pandemic has widened the gap, let's welcome emphasis

president ravi kumar thanks for being here. what are the silver linings? >> thank you, becky, for the opportunity to talk to you, and thank you for the question you know, the infosys set up a study, and surveyed a thousand plus executives across enterprises across industries. i would highlight three or four important things, first of all, the order of work, workplaces, and work flows, which was set up way way back in the industrial revolution, that's going to change permanently we will draw from the past, the physical past, the best things for the physical past. we will draw the best things from the current, and we're going to build a hybrid model, a productive and more productive hybrid model i know many of my clients are talking about how that hybrid

model is going to be much more productive than ever before. the second is the work is going to become very modular it's going to get disconnected from enterprises enterprises are going to become flat farms, and jobs that farm work are going to get disconnected from work, and you're going to have more democratization from work, which essentially means gig workers are going to come in the picture, and they're going to transition from full-time workers. i know of one of our clients, electronics retailer which had 125,000 people, you know, full-time workers before the health crisis, and after the pandemic, they actually are preparing for almost 100,000 full-time workers with 50 to 70,000 gig workers supporting customers virtually by a digital platform work and education are going to get intertwined and they're going to get intertwined like

never before you know, we are used to the first 30 years of our life educating and the next 50 plus years working and actually drawing from the education within the first 30 years. i call it just in case education. we have just in time education, which essentially means you're going to educate and work intertwined on a lifelong business, and we call it lifelong learning. more opportunities for educational institutions and enterprises to partner together in that journey, so these are the top three things i'm actually seeing, and these are exciting big switches, exciting big switches, and these are the three hypotheses we have built from the study which we just institutionalized. >> if you're talking about new jobs being created that don't require a degree, are these good

jobs how do they pay? >> absolutely. you know, with the life of skills getting shrunk, the future is going to be about skills and not about degrees i spoke about lifelong learning. lifelong learning is also one of the reasons why i would believe that skills is going to be more important than degrees we want to buildlifelong learners in capable schools, and then we are going to learn to learn, learn to unlearn, learn to relearn that's going to be the future, which essentially means it's going to bridge the divide education has actually created a divide in the society because education has been very expensive. higher secondary education in the united states has gone up by 150% in the last 20 years, while inflation has gone up only by 50%. what that really means is that education could be the divide, it would actually blitz the

divide route, and therefore i believe that moving to scales with degrees is going to be a very important bridge for actually reducing the divide which education would have created in the past. >> so ravi, it sound like there's still going to be two classes of people, those who go through college, whose parents pushing them, paying for these things to get through college, those who don't have the opportunities, maybe you bring them to work side by side, but i would anticipate there would be a big gap what you're paying someone who has gotten a degree, and what you're paying someone who has. >> what's going to happen, that specific thing when you said, which is about people who go to schools get more opportunities, and people who don't go to schools get less opportunities is the world we are all living in that line is going to blur, and that line is going to blur

because education is not going to be worthwhile because you're going to have short lived schools. i'm not saying 4-year education is not going it get you jobs but having a degree is not necessarily the reason why you would get a job. you would have access to any job as long as you have skills and employers are going to invest in skills, and to me, this is an inflection point for us to bridge the divide and create a more inclusive, kind of diverse workplace for the future. >> i mean, it makes a lot of sense to offer opportunities to people who can't get into this, i'm still trying to get at the idea that there would still be a divide maybe you can work your way up through the organization, but you would be starting at a significantly lower wage, i would anticipate if you didn't have a degree than if you did. that's why people are willing to pay for college degrees, they know not only will they make a higher starting salary, but over the life of their career, they

will make more money you're saying na that goes away >> here is where we are. we go to educational institutions in our lives, and all our life we are in one profession we draw from what we studied in the educational institutions that's going to change life skills are going to be so short lived, we have an opportunity for employers to build immersive pathways for people who do not have degrees, and have the same level of opportunities as somebody who has a degree we have never had that before ever in enterprises, and that's because impressingly, digital transformation that has happened across all businesses has shrunk the skill gap, and more importantly, it's reduced the life of skills whatever you do in the first few years is going to go any ways.

if you have the learnability, if you have the ability and the aptitude to actually drive working in a workplace, you're going to find as many opportunities as somebody who has a degree you know, we already bring that emphasis we are actually giving them a path and an apprenticeship to do the same things which we actually do when we hire people with a degree, and that's going to change pretty much in every industry it's going to take time, but we're going to get there we have the opportunity to define the future for ourself s >> ravi thank you for your time this morning. >> thank you so much, becky. >> andrew. a big interview at 8:00 a.m., exxon mobil ceo darren woods is going to join us on top of the big investor day first, shares of okta are sharply lower. we're going to tell you about

the deal news that sparked the selling. as we head to a break, shares of online car retailer vroom is plunging. fourth quarter revenue better than expected but a fourth quarter loss worse than wall street expected. the average selling price of a car decreased from $6,000 from a year ago, to about $25,000, we're back after this. ♪ ♪ ♪ oh, my goodness, it's the mos beautiful thing i have seen in my life ♪

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o autho. okta said auth 0 will continue to operate independently this is an all stock deal so i don't know how the value of the deal drops as the stock price drops. andrew. >> you know, it was fascinating to see i think there was lots of questions about why they were buying it at that price, but i wonder whether you're going to see a lot more stock for stock deals like this given the fact that i think there are executives out there i don't want to say that they think their own shares are inflated but i think they look and say to themselves, these shares have gone up remarkably, let's use them for something so it's going to be very interesting to see more transactions like that. >> shorthand, yes, they think their shares are over inflated quick, spend it before they drop. >> exactly >> they're both over inflated, so what good is it. >> that's true >> that's the 5 over valued dogs you're exchanging, well, they would have to be a lot of cats

to exchange a decent dog. >> no, no, no. could be one of my cats. >> okay. >> the thing that i'm -- the deal i'm waiting for, though, is the time warner/aol deal where you find one of the new tech companies that thinks their stock is over inflated and they basically use it to buy an older traditional company that has not benefitted during this period, so lots of space for that. i don't know what deal that will be. >> such a sad, sad part of wall street history jerry levine ended up with an aroma therapy outfit out in l.a. somewhere, i think, and steve case ended up owning the entire state of hawaii, so anyway basically that's a little bit of hyperbole. amazon trying to work its way into the nfl market.

just a few minutes, legendary investor, major tesla bull ron baron will be with us don't want to miss his latest thoughts and trades and biblical quotes, you never know, with the slsle,nductea id a mh more, stay with us.

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the buzz surrounding new right deals for the national football league has grown in past week. latest report says amazon would carry a number of thursday night games. here's the word. the exclusively. "wall street journal" says that reporting tv networks could pay double their current rate. most of them are like a billion dollars and could go to two. co-founder and partner is joining us

i that was your number two prediction on your top 2021 prediction i'll start by asking you, do you think you should start advising companies from investment banking viewpoint or was this so clear and so obvious that that was what a, amazon would likely do and b, what the nfl needs to do at this point with all of the issues its facing? its a no brainer and it probably will happen, i guess, at this point. >> joe, i would go back to 1994, and it was really a seminal moment for the television industry if you remember, murdoch and fox came in and sacked cbs and took rights away from cbs and really that moment was the birth of what is today the fox network but more importantly for the sports rights industry, when you have more bidders than you have packages, it set off what's now

30 plus year kind of war for media rights in the sports industry i think if you're looking -- if you're the nfl, players, teams, et cetera and you're looking at the current state of the industry, we've talked about on this show many times, cord cutting, the challenges of lineartv viewership, they need new players to come in to stimulate demand current bidders are facing a lot of pressures we've seen in europe, your parent company owns sky, media rights over in europe are starting to fall because there isn't as much demand from new players. so i think if you're the nfl it's obvious that you need new bidders. that's why we thought amazon would come in and bid for rights i think thursday night is an obvious place to start a little bit cheaper half the price of what nbc will pay for sunday night football. thursday night football is a great package. it's the number two most watched

show on all of broadcast tv is moving to amazon >> rich, the way you say it, it sounds like, you know, the nfl hat in hand, gosh things are going so poorly, we got to look for other places this and i also am not sure that they need to do long term deals because in the future things are going to get even worse in terms of who they used to deal with, with the guys you mentioned, cord cutting and everything else. seems like it always goes up the other packages are doubling because amazon is getting a couple ofgames exclusively on thursday >> well it's more than a couple of games you'll have probably i think 11, 11 plus games that are exclusive to amazon. even the word "exclusive" is not exclusive like you see in monday night football with espn you still have to show the game on two local markets on broadcast tv but this is still a

major shift. the fact you can get thursday night games without having any local television you don't need the tv affiliate, you don't need a tv station, no antenna will work if you're outside of the home markets. this is a pretty watershed event for the tv industry especially on the heels of paramount plus last week announcing paramount plus will include the nfl even without linea rr tv it's bad for sinclair, and others if you're in the tv station business this is your worst nightmare. >> rich, this situation where a lot of big players, you know, like comcast with peacock now have their own streaming service too. when they pay for this they want the digital rights as well brian rockets was talking about this yesterday at a conference

but it's much more important -- you can't say okay i'll take just the linear rights. >> i agree the question is look what paramount is doing they are put into paramount plus, 4.99 tier, lower earned base tier will have nfl games but no linear tv will people like nbc, peacock, comcast, will they follow suit and do something similar for nbc. obviously fox doesn't have a peacock or paramount plus so with fox it's less obvious his comment last week or monday night said we will not buy media rights for espn unless it has a major digital component. >> we got to go. real think you think broadcasters what thursday night

you think they were interested in it, yes or no >> not at this price not at a billion dollars that's why it was amazon's to win. thanks for having me guys. >> yeah. when we come back a huge lineup still on the way including exxonmobil ceo, darren woods and texas governor greg abbott ♪♪ dad, i'm scared. ♪♪ it's only human to care for those we love. and also help light their way. ♪♪ it's why last year chevron invested billions of dollars

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his investing strategy and why he says the biand hold strategy is still king. gamestop saga to the next target crowd former president tom farley will join us for an interview another huge news making interview. exxonmobil ceo will join us live for the plans of the energy giant. "squawk box" starts now. good morning and welcome to box right here on cnbc i'm andrew ross sorkin along with becky quick and joe kernen. two big hours ahead.

u.s. equity futures at this hour before the market set to open, we open down dow off by 66 points nasdaq off 42 points s&p 500 off about 12 points after that tech wreck yesterday as we've seen the 10 year note, the yield on the 10 year inch steadily higher. becky. >> andrew, thanks. let's get right to our big guest. ron baron, chairman and ceo of baron capital is with us this morning. as you know he's a major investor in tesla. tesla has a market cap of more than $600 billion at this point and is up over 300% over the last year but it's down nearly 25% over the last month. so, ron, welcome it's great to see you this morning. >> good to see you too thank you for inviting me. >> why don't we start off talking about the tesla because there's been a lot of changes at the company just in terms what they are doing with bitcoin and

other things we've seen that stock skyrocket before coming back a little bit. what do you think? >> so we've been in tesla since 2014 we started working on it in 2012, '14 and '16 we bought stock, invested $387 billion that was 1.6% of our assets. now it's worth $4.5 billion. in past six months we've sold about $1.7 1.7 million shares o 8 million. and so we still own 75% of our stock. i'm hopeful we hold that for a very long -- actually more than 75%. i'm hopeful we can hold that for a number of years. i think that in ten years, our target is $2,000 a share and i

think that can be at least by $500 a share when we started talking to you about this in 2014 when we were buying stock i told you that i thought that we would make at least 20 times our money we have made 20 times. we now made 15 or 16 times our money. i think there's another trip to go when we were doing that you were telling me you were skeptical. most of my friends were skeptical. everyone was skeptical so, we persisted and at the time we invested it was unlikely in most people's minds electric cars would dominate. now of course general motors says by 2035 they are going to have all electric. it's going in this direction and tesla is the leader. what's interesting -- >> ron, real quickly -- i

definitely hear that i think the headline here is that you sold southeast stock. that probably comes as a surprise to many people especially if you think the stock is still going to continue to rise from here. why did you sell it? >> because it was up 20 times. and became a very large percentage of some accounts so i happen to own a million and 115,000 shares i haven't sold a single share. for clients i sold 27% of their stock, 25% of their stock, and i said -- i told elon that i was the last in, put all my clients in first, in 2016 when i was totally filled on the accounts i could buy for our firm and i couldn't convince other people to buy more, then i invested for my firm in this company, and i think i'm going to hold it another 10 years at least. i told elon i would be the last out and the reason we sold was

risk management idea where it became a very large percentage of two funds that i managed, two focus funds i managed became over 50% of those fund assets and i thought that risk mitigation was appropriate and at the same time one of those funds, baron partner fund 2 billion eight two years ago in assets, i have a billiondollar line of credit when it went up sharply i thought it was appropriate to reduce the risk of this portfolio to bring down that as a percentage of the fund and at the same time to pay off all the debt so we went from $750 million bore roger to less than 100 million and reduced the position in account for 5 million shares with 4.1. it was painful selling every single share my hurdle is to buy a stock,

trying to invest and make 50% over three or four years and double in five or six years, and i think we'll make a triple in this company over the next ten years, and so it needs a hurdle rate and you pay taxes when you sell, so the prospects are brighter than ever been. they will go up to 20 million a cars a year. it's easier to do that than zero to 5,000 cars. i think elon has said the autonomous driving which he thinks will be effective by the end of the year will be worth a trillion dollars it's a subscription business right now you beltway car cost you $10,000 to have autonomous driving. and at some point i think you'll

probably pay $100 a month and there will be 20 million cars a year sold, i hope, and of course it won't be 10 years, could be a $40 billion a year revenue business you have a big runway in front of him and this will be a highly valued business. that alone is worth the price of the stock in ten years in addition to that you'll get a business in tesla that i think could be doing $600 billion a year in revenues and making $200 billion a year in gross profit battery business, could be doing just about in revenues and less in profits you get that for free. insurance business you get that for free you get a ride share business, you get that for free. the solar roof business, you get

that for free. so the opportunity here when i'm describing $2,000 as a target price in two years i think it can be more than that. >> ron, i thought this was an opportunity just quickly, just to quickly ask you i was hoping to get a chance to ask you during the interview and that was that you said you have to pay taxes when you sell not necessarily the only time you might be paying taxes my friend what do you think of the idea of you having to, and i guess you would be in that upper range for the ultramillion injury tax, i don't know i don't know if you would but if you have a million shares of tesla would you like to pay 3% on that every year, have to value that and pay that as a wealth tax because you've been so successful? >> not particularly. i think there are better ways to raise capital. it didn't work in europe i don't want to talk politics. >> i know, but it would be

something -- you're a guy that we're talking about, that would be targeted at the high end of things, even with the additional amounts. it's a fair question andrew, you want to -- >> i have been unbelievably lucky in my life i had a cool business with this $50 billion that we manage we made our clients $48 billion of profits in past we had $100 billion in 1992. our business had a chance to grow significantly over the next ten years. and so, you know, i don't give any money to politicians i don't contribute at all to try to sway their opinions i fear that whatever they decide upon, if it works, they will just keep doing it if it doesn't work, the wealth tax didn't work in europe, if it doesn't work they will abandon

it i'm not going to get anyone to change their mind and i have to, whatever taxes are implemented and imposed, i'll have to pay. i'm not going to try to do anything differently the bitcoin, one of the reasons they talked about bitcoin started was to avoid taxes drug deals, money laundering that's what, i guess, the treasury secretary was talking about as a problem with it we don't invest in bitcoin we don't invest in gold. we invest in growth stocks for the long term on behalf of our clients to help them be able to retire, afford a life, pay for their children's education >> ron, you don't invest in bitcoin but one of your shareholders does, tesla, one of your companies does. tesla made a massive investment in bitcoin what did you think of that >> it was billion and a half

dollars and 20 billion in cash i think maybe it was for platform people have been telling me about it and i had people come and talk to me about bitcoin for two or three, four years and every time they come in they explain to it me i'm relatively sophisticated investor and i still don't get it but, you know, it's speculative investment i'll make one comment. my doorman told me about two or three years ago that he had invested in bitcoin, my doorman at $800. went to 23,000 i told him to sell it and buy the tesla. 15,000 -- >> but ron, that's a question i would ask you, though. which is philosophically do you want the managers and ceos of companies you invest in betting on something like a bitcoin or betting on their own stock either buying back their own stock and investing it or investing it in in other stocks.

you can decide to invest in bitcoin or put money in apple technically. how would you as an investor feel about ceos or managers doing that >> if it was speculating about that bitcoin i wouldn't feel favorable about it if he thinks its helpful to him as far as doing transactions for his business he's managing his business, using it, okay i don't care i don't manage businesses. i invest if they go out and buy apple stock, i wouldn't care for that. but that's not what he's doing he's investing his business and trying to manage his cash flow you know -- >> why is it different ron, why is it different to invest in apple versus bitcoin why do you see a distinction he didn't say he was investing -- he didn't say he was taking some of the treasury and putting it in bitcoin because he needed to transact in

bitcoin. that rent the rationale. >> he didn't give a rationale. the people the at the company told me the explanation. i'm not going to manage someone else's money i'm investing in someone and betting on them to figure out how to run their business the best it's not my job to tell him how to manage his cash so i have a big picture. the big picture is growth stocks are a way we invest and protect our assets and our client's investments. when i started my first job on wall street in 1970 my salary was $15,000 a year that is $7.50. basically i was, you know, then, that was a highly paid job then. $7.50 an hour. and so now, haven't had a raise

in minimum wage since 2009, 2008, people getting 7.25 an hour and everything has gone up since the last 10, 11 years, 30%, 40% years in price and you look out 17 years everything doubles in price the way i think about it is you have to protect yourself against inflation. what we do is we invest in these great companies that can grow fast and if you just invest in stock. i tell people it's very hard to find someone to invest and make more than the stock market rate of return. what you should do is buy an index fund if you are able to find that rare enterprise or people that have competed against the market and beaten it, that's rare then you can invest. so it happens for us that we beat the stock market 400, 500 basis points for 50 years or 40 years. whatever >> i want to talk about some of

those other growth stocks that you believe in because when i was looking through your holdings at this time they changed. some new ones popped up. you mentioned ev is the place to be not just tesla you recently invested in gm's cruz you bought 1.2 million shares in january. first time you ventured into that why? >> it's a private investment it's $10 million it's a san francisco business. they asked us to invest. and so it's not a very large investment it helps us understand this business better and plus the president of that company, i love this guy. he's fantastic it's a bet on him. i like the strategy he has but let me talk about -- so what they do is they map every single street corner in san francisco, every single intersection, every single stop sign, stoplight,

driveway cars drive around, pick you up and drop you off. waymo does the same thing in phoenix. they map every single square inch of that city. what tesla does is they want to have a software which will be introduced by the end of this year which will be able to take a car and drop it in tulsa and san francisco and san diego and asbury mark in jersey anywhere better that's what they want to do. they want to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive just like you do but better. when they do that, everyone thinks -- everyone is skeptical they will ever be able to do it. we'll see. if they can do it that business is going be this giant home run. that's what elon is projecting the other idea, we've invested

in rivion as a private company we invested in them when it was a 10 billion market cap a year ago. and there was an article speculating they are going to go public at 50 billion and trade at 100 billion rivion will make it. that's a neat company. i'm excited about that one amazon was 20 puerto rico of the company. the other company one after another, people are crazy. i'm thinking about investing in these companies. you saw me invest in tesla for eight years, and how hard it was and had a ceo that was, you know, on the verge of financial, you know, armageddon and sleeping on the floor of the factory and when he's met mechanicsizing and not working properly everyone else when they sell

cars they spend a couple thousand dollars a car it's so well known so basically he has by creating this brand and there are 300 car companies in early 1900s virtually every one failed in the 1950s there were i guess, we talked about this once when i was on before there were 50 of them and they all failed people think that these new companies coming on -- in 1880s or 1990s there was a steam engine car how many car companies transitioned from steam engines to gas line engines how many of those cars made it the answer is none so if you see all these companies starting up and make it, it's a dream it's astonishing to get so much capital. >> definitely. put your money where your mouth is with tesla and as a long term investor let me ask you about one more stock. we're almost out of time i noticed in this latest

holdings you sent us, buyon tech you built up a stake between december and february of this year obviously that's been in headlines a lot because it's come up with a covid vaccine along with pfizer. why are you jumping in i guess it's more than just the covid vaccine that's got you interested >> so we are investing in companies and people great people competitively advantaged businesses, big opportunities. and when we invest in tesla it wasn't clear what would happen for us invests in bioon tech they built a business and sold it and the warm who is on our board used to be the head of mergers

and acquisitions at novaris and she helped bhe this. when i think about the brothers, two billionaire twins in germany who each are 71, a couple of days ago, they were the backers of this and each worth 5 or 10 billion a piece and they backed this the people who are the genius here, this immigrant and his dream and with the backing that he's had and he was chosen with his biewife as people of the yer people of the year what his dream is to cure cancer so he has developed this m and a and with pharma you had pills you used to take that's how you got better then they came up with biotech, large molecules.

m and a, messenger m and a teaches your body with these injections to make the drugs itself to fight the disease. and so they happen to be working on this for a number of years and the only way they can get it off the ground is if there was something -- there are viruses, there are anti-virusal anti-v i anything it wouldn't be profitable to make this stuff unless there was a pandemic so there wasn't any need all of a sudden the president gives $2 billion checks to a bunch of people, former president, and they build these factories and they sequence the gene within a week, two weeks. it took polio 10 years to get a vaccine. they do this very quickly. now they have a factory that can make this and there's 6,000

diseases that we know about, you have cures to present. they will use this to go out there and cure all sorts of other cancer, heart disease. they will do a lot of, you know -- this is the very beginning. when i talk about this company, this is about right now it's being valued for what it's going to do with the vaccine we're not investing for that we're investing for what will happen in ten years where they make ten times the money we're working on it now. this is something, moderna is interesting to us that we're also invested in >> ron baron, thank you for your time we had the ceo on with us. very impressive guy. he came up with this could provide vaccine in a matter of hours. >> it's amazing. amazing. >> ron, thanks for being with us today. we always appreciate talking to you and hope to see you again

soon >> thank you >> coming up snowflake announcing elimination of its dual class share giving all shareholders one vote per share. will the move for the company to give the cold shoulder after it doubles. we'll find out before we head to break. we'll check on the markets "squawbo ik x"s coming right back ♪ it doesn't show signs of stopping ♪ y joe esposito] [music: “you're the best” by joe esposito] [triumphantly yells] [ding] don't get mad. get e*trade and take charge of your finances today. we see harnessing natural gas unleashing the promise of cleaner energy. at emerson, we advance the safety and efficiency

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aflac trivia question. in 1837 this inventor and businessman developed the first steel plow and later became mayor of moline, illinois. who is he? the answer john deere deere and company's headquarters has been located in moline since the invention of the plow. a chilling reception for snowflake despite the company beating expectations does this show the growth trade is out of gas? that's the question. >> reporter: yes sure we're in this era of low interest rates and that's tempting everybody to take crazy risks. now the wind is shifting snowflake tanked 9% he yesterday ahead of earnings, beat on the top and bottom line and still didn't recover now trading where it closed on

its ipo day. zoom spiked us the and then belly flopped. door dash strong growth. stocks lost almost a third of its value since last month's highs. i'm not talking about problems with companies just stock prices not saying these companies growth is out of gas, growth trade is out of gas. the you're an investor not just a trader, you shrug this off >> just so i understand you feel that it's over, the party is over >> reporter: well, on the other hand the nasdaq peaked three weeks ago. it's a bit early to call closing time the growth trade just might have more in tank because, look, remember back in october, looked like the run was over then march a year ago growth trade wasn't out of gas then those were buying opportunities. this is probably more of the same did you feel like a churmp you

didn't buy snowflake we can see that the road to a pandemic recovery will be tough. fed will keep rates low. companies like snowflake and cloud zoom door dash are keeping the economy growing while we see what kind of stimulus we get growth trade probably not over >> hold on final question what are the ceos of these companies saying about the results and expectations is there enough optimism to fuel another rally? >> reporter: it does seem to me that the optimism is the there listen to snowflake last night take the stock out of it for q1 the product revenue they are projecting up is between 92 and 96%. 81 to 84 for the full year door dash also building infrastructure yeah, if you're down on door dash because they are building out infrastructure and you

forgot what amazon did a generation ago and where it got them so, these ceos not only do they still have strong growth but they are executing a plan. >> okay. jon, great to see you. appreciate it. thanks, andrew still to come on "squawk box" this came morning, former president of the new york stock exchange, tom farley will join us for his take on investing he's in the house. plus don't miss our first on cnbc interview with darren woods coming up in the next hour "squawk box" will be right back.

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♪ welcome back to "squawk box" in this new york minute for market and what's moving check out some themes developing right now in the wake of yesterday's big selloff. nasdaq composite up 44% over the last year but the pull back has now taken us down 8% from our record high. so approaching some levels where maybe some investors have stepped in, in past bust we'll see what happens here. take a look at some big etfs that have been exposed to the technology pull back first of all the arc knives etf up 120% over the last year has fallen around 21% over the

course of this pull back and then the first trust internet fund is down 11%. keep an eye on those big tech and heavy etfs one other place to watch big mega cap technology stores specifically apple, microsoft and amazon as you can see over the last one month, amazon down 10% microsoft down 6%. apple down 11% the reason why it's important s&p 500 is very heavily weighted here and by the way, andrew these three stocks make up nearly a third of the nasdaq 100. so keep an eye on those big mega tech names back to you. >> coming up when we return a man who knows his way around the boardroom and markets tom farley joins us look at him there. he'll join us in just a minute we'll talk about the internet market and what it means at the top of the other exxonmobil chairman darren woods

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first gamestop and amc now rocket companies retail traders are still making headlines for more on the reddit rebellion let's bring in our special guest this morning, tom farley, former

president of the new york stock exchange, current chairman and ceo of faupiq. this is the new model, tom, you're upstairs, we're closer than we have been in the last year so, in a lot of ways but anyway welcome it's good to see you and thanks for coming in this morning you're with us to comment on a few things throughout the course of the rest of the show. but i think we spoke to you a little bit about, you know, wosb and, you know, what's the kiddy guy's name and all this stuff. now moved on to rocket companies. it's here to stay isn't it >> i don't know exactly what will happen. first of all i've never been so happy to come to the nasdaq in my life. the last time i was here was 15 months ago what a long 15 months.

it's great to be back here and see you in person. i don't know what will happen with the reddit traders but something will happen, something will change because gary is the regulator. he was my regulator when i was managing future exchanges. he's the most effective. when he gets an idea in his mind he's going to see it all the way through. i don't think you're going to see confetti blasting out from trading apps for trades on stocks that are valued at 87 times fictional 2026 revenue that's an easy change. that one is obvious. some of the other changes are less obvious and i think that's a good thing. i think having a little bit more oversight will be good but i wouldn't kill the golden goose it's great to have these participants in equity markets it's a fabulous thing. in particular if you take a long the term view you just can't

beat the returns you can get from text market my hope he can strike that right balance. >> yeah. you just described two totally different things rocket went to x, it's now at x minus whatever it is, 40%. yes. someone maybe made some money on the way up, but i would say someone obviously someone got hurt on the way back down. what is it, caveat emptor. if you want to do it go ahead. will it happen again and again, they decide in the chat room okay now let's do this stock and then it happens again. so this is the way it is these days it's not investing is it >> i can live in a world of caveat emptor as long as everyone knows the rules but what i'm about to say i'll get negative feedback. if you are at home and you are

day trading and you're moving in and out of stocks you may win today you may win tomorrow or for a month but overall you'll lose and the numbers are stark here it reminds me of the hamilton song you're out manned, out gunned, out planned, competing with renaissance they are spending literally billions of dollars to do what you're doing and do it quicker and more of an informed way. if you're sitting at home and researching stocks and research on reddit is amazing you read some of the original pieces on gamestop is amazing. i read through it. if you're doing that sort of trading and taking a long term view you can win you can get 8% returns on a long term view. >> you've seen whether it's public opinion polls or focus groups about wall street, new york stock exchange, guys like you, suits, if you will, what

needs to be done to try to reverse the, what is really probably a majority opinion of the way wall street operates to get to it where -- are they wrong for having that opinion or are there serious structural issues that need to be addressed to level the playing field >> well, i'll give you another example. you had cooperman on yesterday he's one of the wiseiest guests. i'm a total "squawk box" fan i love free enterprise you know what that makes me? that makes me up 3% of americans. i listen to cooperman. i was nodding my head when he gave an example of his billionaire friend who did smart buy backs and made billions and i was nodding my head when he was talking about how the wealth tax is problematic economically and 97% of americans are looking at that interview to the extent that they saw it and just not

sympathic. billion injuries and corporations the message has to be about how is this lifting up everyone. why is it that latino voters surged for republicans wealth tax is a step towards socialism. we've seen the socialist experiment why did mexican-american voters supported republicans? so some of it is message people like me and i've been guilty of it many times we get caught up in high and mighty five syllable words. >> you need to explain it often. i saw some comments yesterday about buy backs saying look the at the 30 billion that general electric spent and wastes on buy backs and couldn't that have been used for something else look how much it hurt

shareholders awful. same person is writing, when a buy back works look at how that helps shareholders like make up your mind if the manager does the right thing by having the right balance sheet composition of debt and equity and there are times where you either want more shares or less shares and eventually puts the company in a better position so that shareholders make more money and pension plans that own it make more money and anybody, you know, retirement plans, the states make more money, public employee, whatever you want to say. we need to explain buy backs and the first person we need to explain it to is senator warren. i don't think she understands exactly what we're talking about. >> her interview the other day if it was a sporting event she would have been kicked out of the game she's just plain wrong it wasn't impressive at all. i go back to what i was just saying, joe. it's not that sympathic.

buy backs see so high falutent instead of buy backs, one is more advantageous thanner to you took it downtown that interview. making money for shareholders. you know who the shareholders are, they are you, every day american if it's not you, we want you in. >> tom, two questions because you said two things that -- one is, i love you but factually inaccurate and the other we have a division of opinion on as much as the stock market is for all americans it's really is for 44% of americans not really for all americans at all. >> andrew you miss my point when you cut me off i said if you're not involved in the stock market let's get you involved let's make sure financial literacy is animportant thing for people who aren't involved >> but we're all trying to do that i'm suggesting to you that everybody is not a beneficiary

of this at all >> i didn't say they were. andrew i didn't say that they were >> the second piece of this, those and i'm not a fan of the wealth tax but i think we need to have a conversation in this country about the wealthiest americans in country and whether they should pay more taxes given that they are paying frankly less than i'm paying and less than you're paying and for reasons that are inexplicable, at least to me we have not grappled with that as a country at all and as a result we need -- we do need to find new revenue. to say we don't and the question is how do you get there. the question is how do we engaging that conversation >> i'll make a deal with you andrew i'll engaging that conversation if you agree to spend an equal amount of time as how we lift up every day americans. what are we doing for people in prince george's county to get them a better job, make them

entrepreneurs and do those sort of things. >> i'm 100% with you i need some revenue. i need some revenue to do it that's part of the problem there's a bit of a chicken and egg issue here >> first of all you need revenue jumps over there's way to run the government more efficiently. you're absolutely right. things like the carried interest i'll call it loophole infuriates people let's look at that the ability not pay real estate taxes. let's look at ways people are able to avoid taxes that have been passed by congress like estate taxes those are reasonable things, andrew >> tom, good morning good to see you. i'm glad you're here >> great to be with you. >> i'm glad you're staying with us we have a lot more to come from tom. when we come back, congresswoman pramila jayapal co-sponsor of the ultramillion injury's wealth

tax will join us at the top of the hour darren woods joins us after the company's investor day xater lifting the mask mandate tes governor greg abbott on re-opening the lonestar state. "squawk box" will be right back. you alright? [sigh] [ding] never settle with power e*trade. it has powerful, easy-to-use tools to help you find opportunities, 24/7 support when you need answers plus some of the lowest options and futures contract prices around. don't get mad. get e*trade and start trading today. we see homes staying cooler, without the planet getting warmer.

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...and learn how much you can save at xfinitymobile.com/mysavings. we've been talking about a bill in congress that would levi a 2% tax on 100,000 richest households in the u.s. called the ultramillion injury's

tax. it has hopes of bringing 3 trillion in revenue. joining us now pramila jayapal co-sponsor of the bill along with senator warren, serves as the democratic senior whip tom farley is still with us and he has questions as well congresswoman the question i have, 2% on an annual basis sounds tiny but over the period of 20 years or rather ten years even we're talking about 20% of wealth, in some cases 30% of wealth, and there is a question of whether that unto itself is fiscals the tory >> i don't see how you can say two cents on every dollar is fiscaltory you got 97 cents left on every dollar over a billion. what we're talking about is the very, very top number of families, 100,000 families where

wealth has been concentrated and because in this country we've taxed income, we tax property as you know to some extent, but property for working families is a much, much bigger share of their total net worth than it is for the people at the very, very top of the scale so all we're talking about the leveling the playing field here and there's nothing fiscaltory about it >> just real quick you don't think there's unintended consequences, individuals who ultimately sell stock, sell their companies, sell businesses to pay for some of this because over time if you're taking 20, 30%, potentially even more, 40% of somebody's company from them they are probably going to have to sell. >> i really don't because i think if you look he at the unintended consequences right now they are substantial which is that 130,000 families in united states have the same

wealth as 117 million families that is 50% of all americans if you want to talk about unintended consequences let's talk about what's happening right now. let's talk about the fact that in the last year during the covid crisis as people have been standing up and, you know, lining up around food banks we got a situation here -- >> there's no question we have to deal with it. the question of course is how. tom, i think, has a question for you. >> i have a question for you good morning congresswoman i have a question on the minimum wage, your support for raising the federal minimum wage i was spending time last night looking at the state minimum wages. so for example higher cost states like new york but lower cost states like nebraska which is reasonable because you don't want to reduce the number of jobs by having a rate that's the high why should the federal government be setting a minimum wage why isn't that something you let states and other localities do

based on their own economic environment? >> i wonder if you would be happy with $2.13 minimum wage. the reality is we're setting the floor across the country of course minimum wages will differ we're already at $15 in seattle because we were the first major city in the country to pass $15 minimum wage back in 2014. everybody run their hands and said our economy would fall to pieces in 2018 and 2019 forbes ranked us a as the best city to do business and careers for work people this is something where the federal minimum wage has not been raised in 12 years. it's time to lift the floor. that doesn't mean it's still not going to differ across the country. remember we're talking about a minimum wage range over five years. so 15 for another five years >> congresswoman we would very much thereof have you back

it's a longer conversation deserves more time and i hope you'll engage with us because it's important it's an important discussion >> i would love to >> thank you we'll see you very, very soon. joe i know we have another big hour ahead >> coming up, one of our squawk news makers, exxonmobil ceo darren woods joins us straight ahead. plus futures, they have improved bust still in the red. a little on the dow. nasdaq is coming back too. keep you up to speed we needed to make sure that, if they couldn't get to the food, the food would come to them. we can deliver for food banks and schools. amazon knows how to do that. i helped deliver 12 million meals to families in need. that's the power of having a company like amazon behind me. ♪ if your money is working toward the same goals,

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. good morning tech wreck the nasdaq just had its worst two day stretch in six months and futures are lower again. investors focused on interest rates. paying close attention when jerome powell speaks this afternoon. meanwhile board and changes at exxonmobil we have first interview with ceo darren woods and then the governor of texas is here to explain his decision to roll back that state's mask mandate. a big interview with governor greg abbott is coming up as the final hour of "squawk box" begins right now. ♪ good morning welcome to "squawk box" here on cnbc i'm joe kernen along with becky quick, like to welcome you all

back and andrew ross sorkin, u.s. equity futures, am i right, becky? >> yes welcome back >> welcome back. welcome back and, you know what futures have gotten better as the morning has gone on. we're no longer down as much as we were although still in the red. nasdaq lost 2.7% yesterday and down over 100 points earlier this morning now down just 21. and i don't know whether it's moving on the ten year the ten year, it's been kind of quiet. 1.46 you never know too quiet. i always like to say it's quiet, too quiet because you never know seems like the trend is higher maybe if it goes one basis point per day instead of like eight or nine on certain days >> eight >> yeah, eight such a small -- still a low level but certainly is the

differential, first dividend or whatever some integral calculus >> it moves and people pay attention. we watch it very closely we're watching shares of exxonmobil after the company met with wall street yesterday the company's annual investor day was held and focused on plans to keep production flat. and reduce debt. joining us right now is darren woods, exxonmobil ace ch-- exxonmobil's chairman and ceo. >> it was about a year ago we met at your last investor day and what you were telling wall street obviously the pandemic really severely cure tailed a lot of plans you had. since then you've held back and said production will be flat we're talking about cap x not being anywhere near what you imagined a year ago and looking

at layoffs for up to 15% of your staff. where do you think we go from here big focus on carbon too. >> yeah. 2020 was a very transformative year pandemic impacted all of us and put constraints on the business. worst environment our industry ever even, worst environment our company has ever faced with all three of our businesses at the very bottom of the cycle conditions we made a really big change through 2018 and 2019 in re-organizing, had over 16,000 job moves. so as we went into 2020 and the pandemic we had a new organization with a better line of sight to the markets. and a more streamlined process which allowed us to start the work to reduce our cost, get more efficient and that combined with the response of the pandemic led to some significant efficiencies we talk about in our infuriate

quart -- fourth quarter call. so a plan to get more efficient and i see more opportunities as we continue to take synergies across the businesses that are all aligned along their value change we see a big opportunity there of course as we went through twos, we had to strike that balance and don't invest for the future continue to pay dividend and we used our balance sheet to draw down through these very low periods of time which is why we historically kept a strong balance sheet. as we've come out of that and economies are returning our focus is on continuing to invest for the future because with our business, depleting as we produce so we have to have a good healthy pipeline. we'll continue to return cash to shareholders through a strong dividend and strong focus on rebuilding the balance sheet and deleveraging which is why we have constrained our capital

spending the projects we had in portfolio, last year i told it was the best we've seen since mob merged for 20 years the best portfolio the company has seen that remains true. all the projects have been preserved and polished and deferring a lot of that spend. but eventually those projects will come back into the pipeline and bring those online in total that portfolio of investments that generated a return of 30%. it's pretty critical for the long term growth for our earnings an cash flow. yesterday we talked a lot about the work we're doing help society transition to a lower carbon economy we're focused on helping solve the gaps that exist today in these carbonized sectors we talked aboutcarbon capturin storage and hydrogen where we have significant advantages in helping the world advance those technologies to solve these tough problems >> you recent lie brought an

activist investor into the fold. you are bringing on two new board members. what were you initial conversations with these two and what role do you expect the they will play on the board >> i'll step back and put it in context. we've been in a continuum of refreshing the board in last six years we brought eight directors on two-thirds of our board has been refreshed. average tenure on our board is five years it's a continuous process. one as we brought folks on and from the feedback we got from our shareholders, and the first director i brought on was susan avery where there was a desire for our investors to see more science expertise in climate and that was brought on. we brought on a man in response

from people in the financial community. one areas we've been looking for quite some time is a representative from the industries to help the board, the different perspective outside of exxonmobil but with the same kind of understanding of the businesses that we're in and the challenges of this industry and we recently brought on a man who has an experience that's very relevant to the businesses that we're in as we look at the transition, recognizing the changes that were happening in society and the work we had to do to evolve the business we saw a bigger opportunity to bring some some competencies on the board to allow us to think about how we allocate capital and transition in a business. we were looking for people that have experience and a successful track record in allocating capital, finding value and opportunities and helping businesses transition and i think jeff and michael really fit that bill. >> you do have other activists

still out there. engine number one is still pushing for four seats on the board. they want to see more science behind carbon capture and what happens behind that. what do you tell engine number one? >> well, i think what we focus on is one of the key things we have to do, where can we contribute uniquely to help society reach this ambition of net zero in 2050 one of the challenges that we face and we're focused on is how do you do that in a way that addresses this broader societal need while at the same time delivers value for the shareholders so for our shareholder so that's been the challenge is finding the space where exxonmobil can uniquely contribute that's the challenge we've been on for quite some time one of the reasons why we're focused on carbon capture we've been doing research in this space for over the ten years

just about any third-party study that you look at, the i pc c, iea, the bodies out there that have been tasked to overlook this space would tell you that carbon capture and storage will play a very important role particularly in these industry sectors that have a hard time decarbonizing. we've been doing a lot of work to lower the cost of that. one of the big challenges today deploying that technology is the cost it becomes uneconomic as you get more and mr. dilute straemgs of co-2 we've been doing work to make those economics work and to make the cost come down and we've had some pretty good success we're still very early in the technologies we're in the process of putting a project in place to deploy a prototype of a fuel cell that will concentrate co-2 and at the same time generate hydrogen. getting low cost, low hy hydrocarbon while building a

co-2 >> we've been watching crude oil prices and the decimation of te crude oil price after the pandemic where do you see prices over the next year or so. >> that's the million dollar question we gave up we never started to predict price. we try to look longer term at some fundamentals and where we think those prices will be set we generally have a price basis that's consistent with long term third-party probably on the conservative side of the third-party estimates that are out there and that's how we think about the business in terms of the investments happen we're making, the approach we're taking for that long term investment cycle then at the same time making sure that the business that we're build is robust in these price cycles as you said last year i mean

crude went negative for a while which i think nobody would have anticipated. but trying to be in a position to ride those waves and make sure we're the at the bottom of the cycle, a business robust to that when you're at the top of the cycle fill the coffers and make sure you're in position for the next bottom of the cycle when prices are higher than we anticipated in this environment we'll use to it deleverage and we'll be ready for the next down cycle which i'm sure is somewhere out there just not sure at which point in time it will manifest itself >> opec has a meeting coming up. saudis has been holding back on trying to get oil pries back up but there's this thought they are very worried about shale production if shale producers come back in and the turn on the spickets if that brings prices back down you moved your move and not invested as much as you thought. how quickly would you move back

into that and push that back up if oil prices to were remain at this level or go higher? >> plans we have today are ones we built last year the message we gave yesterday we plan to stick pretty much in line with the numbers we put out there. frankly because if those prices are higher than we had envisioned we would use that extra revenue in cash to pay down our debt and deleverage the balance sheet so we can get back to position so we got a strong balance sheet to weather the next down cycle. i wouldn't certainly see this year making any changes and frankly as we go forward we feel good about the capital level that we've put in place and one of the points we made yesterday, spent quite a bit of time taking the investment community through is the progress we've been making today we're able to get to more resource and produce more barrels at a much lower cost because of the organization changes we made in 2019 as well

as technology advances that we're make my expectation and certainly what i challenge our organization to do is drive production and increase barrels with the same if not lower capital. >> darren i know you know tom farley former president of nycs. he has a question for you as well >> great to see you, darren. >> hey, tom, nice hearing from you. >> investors are paying more for renewable forms of energy than they are for a dollar of cash flow from traditional oil and gas and you're moving in the direction of more emphasis and reliance on renewable fuels. but i'm curious, i know your reputation for discipline planning as well as exxon generally. is there like a marshal plan that you have that would include a massive shift. to miami not saying you decided to implement it. but is there one where you would

make a radical shift to renewable forms of energy and use that talent at exxon to move in that direction at a more warped speed >> i think the challenge in this pace, tom, frankly i've been encouraged by what i would say is the deeper conversation that we're now having in this space the if you go back six months to a year the thinking in terms of responding to the challenges of climate change and the risk to climate change is to transition to wind and solar. there's no doubt that wind and solar play a very important role in transition as do electric vehicles but the challenges they don't solve the problem in and of themselves and i think bill gates has done a great job of laying out the challenges of decarbonizing the economy and there's still a lot of hard problems stofl if society will successfully transition to this lower carbon economy so as we look at this space, we have evaluated wind and solar.

don't evaluate opportunities as they come to us but the key question we ask ourselves is what can we bring to this space. to help advance those technologies and at the same time grow value for the shareholders and frankly up to now the opportunities we looked at and thought about in terms of how they fit with our core come pen ten isis and capabilities can't find a space to generate an advantage and returns that our shareholder would expect of us having said that there are spaces that draw on our experience, our technical capabilities, the competencies we built over the last 135 years that do lend themselves to solving those harder challenges which society will need and where we think there's a bigger value opportunity. that's where we're focused i would just say that's matter of time. i think people are looking at this on different time scales. certainly if they want to see something happen now the investment opportunities in solar and wind our perspective on that is we need more solutions in addition to those

that will take longer time take some technology innovation and breakthroughs. that's what we're focused on we can scale those up. you'll see that transition for exxonmobil but it will happen later in the cycle as those technologies develop and we start to deploy them at scale. darren, you mentioned that nobody expected oil prices to actually turn negative last year it led to all kinds of weird things including reports that exxonmobil and chevron getting together to potentially talk about merger talks would that make sense with oil prices back where they are now >> yeah. i won't comment on the rumors there. i would just say we have since i've been in this job certainly before that we have a pretty active group that tends to look for opportunities. again to find potential mergers or acquisitions where we can fine synergies, take advantage of some strengths that we have and some opportunities that another company might have, see if we can put those together and

between the two create more value that either one of us could do separately. given where the industry is going those opportunities will continue to present themselves the question sunday what context do they make sense frankly when you're in an up market it's harder to justify those than in a down market. >> darren, i want to thank you for your time today. great seeing you >> nice talking with you, becky. thank you. >> folks we want to tell you about a couple of other interviews coming up later today on our cnbc evolve live stream brian sullivan will be talking to vicki hollub and a conversation with john kerry you can go to cnbc events.com/evolve live stream if you want to register joe? >> okay. coming up, texas governor greg

abbott will join us. we'll ask him about his state's controversial decision to roll back the state's maverick mandate. you're watching "squawk box" on cnbc

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square announcing plans to buy majority stake of title. it's a streaming music service it will may $270 million in cash and stock. it will become the second largest group of shareholders. the title board member and shareholder sean carter would be joining square's board of directors when the transaction closes so a little bit of interesting news those are the shots of the two of them on the boat in the hamptons over the summer what are they talking about. now maybe we know. they have been putting together what i think -- we'll see what investors think about it unusual deal given the two businesses meantime when we come back we'll talk to texas governor greg abbott right here live on "squawk box" the move texans to get rid of its statewide mandate.

bideisotap autn n hpybo it. you don't want to miss that conversation "squawk" returns right after this

we saw a bigger opportunity to bring competencies on the board to allow us to think about how we allocate capital and transition in a business we were looking for people that have experience and successful track record in allocating capital, finding value and opportunities and helping businesses transition and i think jeff and michael really fit that bill. that was exxonmobil ceo darren woods a couple of minutes ago with us speaking about jeff and michael joining exxon's board. i want to get some more thoughts from tom farley. tom former president of the new york stock exchange, current

chairman and ceo curious of what you made of that conversation and what you make of the idea that exxonmobil is now trying to become an esg labelled company of sorts. >> darren has a very hard job that's what i make of it he's been at exxon for 28 years. he's brilliant he's a person of significant integrity. but, you know, he'll have to be more than the old darren woods going forward. this business needs to change dramatically very challenging to deal with activists. they don't all agree they don't agree if the dividend should be kept and if it didn't, excess cash what should we do with it? he absolutely needs move this business aggressively in the direction of more renewable forms of energy and the reason for that is simple the market is paying for it. this struck me a couple of months ago i'm on a university board and the inendowment came out said we're not doing any

investments in fossil fuel companies. so you have a lower multiple on the cash flow generated from those businesses and higher multiple on those renewable forms of energy. when darien said it's not as economic to do development in those areas it isn't more economic if you factor in a higher term multiple >> so, tom, you asked the question to him and we were talking about wind and solar he's effectively saying look that's not our sweet spot. we don't have expertise in this. in that case what do you do? >> look, i asked him a difficult question i basically asked him tell us more about your internal board deliberations. i understand he couldn't give a full answer. i have no doubt they have a marshal plan for transforming this business. and now with these new directors on the board it's going to gate more full and fair hearing and i expect -- i would just say stay tuned because what they've done so far is baby steps carbon cap the you're the

project he discussed i think it's a $3 billion total spend. it may sound like a lot of money but forex on it's not. simply not i expect to see pretty considerable change here and, you know, what does he have. engine number one. now has jeffrey. i believe there's actually a fourth these are big tough firms and man he's got a tough job >> do you think strategically putting jeff in was effective lui an effort to shut down jeff or give him more air >> clearly it was kind of a play to co-opt all the activists at once because jeff ubben is universally respected in that community and darien said i'll go ahead and pick my partner here and that will help quell some of the activist fur eor

the stock since he became ceo is down, i think it's around 50%, 45%. that's not because of darren's decisions but because of a very tough environment for petro chemicals but down far more their number one competitor chevron. no matter how many activists are on his board he's under significant pressure the strategy is clear but turning this battleship on a dime is not going to be simple >> ubben is well-respected >> absolutely. >> when you put people like mike angelakis on the board it does speak to people. >> i wouldn't expect engine number one to send in a letter today and say we take it all back, thanks for doing that, we don't have any special requests of you that's not how they operate. >> tom, thank you for your

perspective. great to see you great to see you at the nasdaq >> great to be back here it's been 15 months. what's happened in the last 15 months >> you're not going anywhere i'll send you over to joe and look at the futures real quick >> did you the like 12 spats. that's what happened they all have foreign in name. that's so cool to be named farley futures as you can see right now, they are up they turned positive rick santelli is standing by rick, the numbers please >> yes the numbers are slowly trickling out. let's look at fourth quarter final productivity minus 4.8 our last look. worst going back to 1947 a bit of improvement but not much on the final look minus 4.2. of course the associated unit labor cost 6%. that follows the 6.8 so both moderate ad bit.

definitely these aren't the types of numbers we're looking for in the bigger scheme of things initial jobless claims we're expecting around 750,000 boy, analysts in the economy, 745,000. to put a face on that 7/eleven,000 was in november first week of november that's the post-covid low, the cycle low and now if you look at continuing claims expecting roughly 4.3 million. also nailed it again 4.295 million and if you look in rear view mirror our last look and still isn't revised, those revisions will trickle in but last week if you recall, joe, 4.419 million was, of course, the cycle on continuing claims and that was a big drop last week, about 100,000. so these numbers are not where we want to go but they are going in right direction and we know that at 10:00 eastern we'll be having a bit

more fun with the economic releases in the form of durable goods and, of course, when we monitor what's going on with interest rates, the new buzz seems to be are we going back to operation twist because the current thumb on the scale don't seem to be heavy enough to get the outcomes or at least keep rates at a spot where the fed feels comfortable. joe, back to you okay, rick, thanks steve liesman joins us now with more hi, steve. >> reporter: hey, joe. yeah this is a better number last week's number, the claims declined was probably as a result hey you got the texas governor coming up but there was probably some distortion as a result of the storms down in texas and so this number being lower, again, echoing what rick said way too high still above the numbers that we had back even in the worst week of the financial crisis. this is something of an improvement we have to watch

still 18 million people receiving some form of benefits as of the week of february 13th. just real quick, joe, i want to tell you i'm watching this high frequency data we've been following. may suggest somewhat better jobs number tomorrow than the regular data that we follow. depends a little bit on when it all happened because you have the storms that are going to affect the jobs numbers and could affect the job numbers in the second half. looks around the middle of february there was some pick up in job creation, according to the high frequency data. the number look tomorrow for another unit, jobs number but might be better than expected. joe >> okay. steve, thank you toss it over to you becky. what's going on. >> thanks, joe when we come back as steve just mentioned we got texas governor greg abbott. he'll join us to talk about his decision to roll back his state's mask mandate "squawk box" will be right back. ?

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if you see wires down, treat them all as if they're hot and energized. stay away from any downed wire, call 911, and call pg&e right after so we can both respond out and keep the public safe. still to come this morning texas governor greg be a won't his state's controversial decision to rescind the mask mandate and open businesses 100% we'll ask him how his state is faring after the winter storms

atatntview is next box will be right back.

>> we are on the cusp of being able to fundamentally change the nature of this disease because the way in which we were able to get vaccines in people's arms. we've been able to move that all the way up to the end of may to have enough for every american to get a shot. and the last thing, the thing we need is a nean denver rthal thinking, everything is fine take off your mask it still matters >> that was biden yesterday criticizing the decision made by texas and mississippi to move ahead with roll backs of their

mask mandates. we're joined by texas governor greg abbott and tom farley and chairman governor, it's great to have you on this morning. i know you've probably heard that mentioned, i don't know how many times since the president used the term neanderthal. >> it's not the type of word a president should be using but he couldn't have used it on a worst day. the day he used that word his administration has been releasing in south texas immigrants who came across the border that they refused to test and it turned out more than 100 of them that had covid my point is the biden administration has been leasing immigrants in south texas exposing texans to covid some have been put on buses, taking covid to other states in the united states. the biden administration must stop importing covid into our country.

that's ne anderthal approach another thing that's very important these changes we've seen in texas are not that transformative maybe to people in new york. in texas, 75% to 100% occupancy on the mask requirement before now actually has not been any enforcement of the mask requirement. mask suggestion which we continue to make wearing a mask as a suggestion and we urge all texans to wear a maverick when they are out however this is an important factor if you look at the spikes and spread in texas as well as elsewhere the last spike occurred during incriminate and new year's at a time when people were not transmitting when they went to restaurants or businesses the leading area of transmission was in home setting where people weren't wearing masks and nobody mandated wearing masks in the home setting changes we're talking about in texas really are not that much different from where we've been.

at the same time if i can added our numbers are at loss, four month lows in hospitiza hospita. we're vaccinating. yesterday was a record number. our seniors, most vulnerable to being hospitalized and losing their life, about 50% of our seniors vaccinated things are looking very good in texas. >> governor, like so many things currently in this country, there's major divides about everything that we're doing, and to sum up this one, it's lives versus livelihood, different states, i mean even goes blue and red some people would even say on the response of different states to covid. but one thing is certain and that is what one state does won't stay within its borders and that's a criticism that you're going to get that texas making this decision, if there would be a flare up because of

the relaxed rules, not just going affect texas and that's what you're going hear how do you answer that criticism you're not in a position to make this move when you've got 49 other states of how many are there now, 49 others we don't count puerto rico >> very importantly the answer is math and the math is this that is, you could have said that last year because the fact of the matter is last year there really weren't any effective medical and scientific tools to deal with this other than people making behavioral decisions. since then the small this and is that when you look at the down trends and all of the metrics such as the down trends in hospitalizations and et cetera, the down trends in the positivity rate the reason for those down trends is because of the fact we have something now that we didn't have before and that's the vaccines. so put it this way according to cdc standards, more

than 10 million texans have recovered from covid and have the dna ability to be able to defeat covid and then on top of that we're administering more than a million vaccines per week the vaccines is what will slow the spread of covid as we continue to maintain the vaccination process, that's what contains it. >> governor, i just want to ask you, it appears to be dozens of health care professionals, leaders in texas denouncing this decision if for no other reason than sending a signal to texans that they can take off their masks and business leaders telling me and i seen others say this is going make it harder to enforce to begin with in places where they intend to continue masking. what do you tell those people and what kind of advice do you get from the health care community? >> so, as a concerns the mask

mandate, what we wanted to make sure is that businesses do have the right and ability just as any private property own would have the right and ability to establish rules on their property if they want to require a maverick mandate they can. if not they don't have to. secondly more important is when i made that presentation rolling out the program, i repeatedly said that it is very important for texans to don't wear a mask. our health care providers and leaders in the state of texas are sending the same message i'm sending that message right now that texans should don't wear a mask. the difference is that for a year now texans as well as americans have learned that the safe standard among other things is to wear a mask because they know that standard, do they really need the state to tell them what they already know for their own personal behavior? then i throw this in before i had this maverick

mandate there were no enforcement mechanisms for this mask mandate because it is now personal responsibility, it pretty much is similar to the way it was before i issued this order >> governor, tom farley. your old friend. great to see you again >> good to see you again, also >> you know from our past interactions i'm a big supporter. everybody is notifying texas and the economy is doing well. i under why you chose to re-open the economy. on the mask mandate i don't fully get the timing of it i watched your press conference and as usual was very thoughtful and you laid out the arguments but just why now we're so close why wouldn't you have waited at least on the mask mandate. i worry about somebody who has to go work at the supermarket and some knuckle head comes in with a blazing case of covid with no mask aren't you potentially putting them at risk i under what you said you want to see people wear those masks provide more air cover for

another two months seemed prudent. >> so the important thing here is to ask almost a rhetorical question and that is, exactly when would be the right time? would it be when everybody gets a vaccine? when covid is completely over and the answer to those, of course, is no. remember where we were at this time last year we were at a time when it was like 16 days to slow the spread. now it seems the goal post has been moved to lockdown and mask requirements forever here are the metrics the metrics are the most important thing. from the beginning the goal was to make sure that we did all we do reduce hospitalizations and deaths and my tricks in texas is by the time my order goes into effect more than 50% of the senior population being aged 65 and older will have been vaccinated and there's going to be a decreased possibility that people of that age group will be

hospitalized or losing their life and beyond that other people that have co-morbidities ales with as teachers getting vaccinations the time is right when we begin to contain this disease and allow information go back to work and go back normal. in tell you this also which is also very important as you know. texas is a very large place. there are parts in amarillo, texas that are closer to four other state capitals than austin, texas. we need the latitude to have differentiation across the state of texas along those lines i did put into my executive order that if there were spikes in local areas, that local officials do have the authority re-institute some of these safety protocols to make sure they take care of their citizens in their specific area. snoonk you governor.

>> governor, you mentioned right at the top the southern border depending on current administration officials, previous administration officials, there is a crisis, there's not a crisis, can you fill us in on exactly in your view what's happening down there? >> sure. according to the information that's been provided there has been an increase in the number of people coming across the border and we're expecting to see that continue whether it be those coming in right now or could it be the larger caravans that are coming. the signals sent by the biden administration does nothing but encourage that to happen more. but let's put aside the whole immigration issue and focus on this health care crisis. that is we're dealing with a world pandemic and bringing in people from across the entire world that the biden administration is not adequately testing, not quarantining, not doing anything to prevent the spread of a pandemic in texas but also putting these people on

buses and sending them to places that could be near you or atlanta or wherever. so this is a very irresponsible and reckless approach by the biden administration if they really are trying to contain the spread of a pandemic >> in hindsight on what we've all been talking about for the past two, three, four weeks, and that is the grid, in texas, steps that have been taken to ensure this doesn't happen again? >> absolutely. so the good news here is we were able to make a quick diagnosis of exactly what happened and we've already begun to implement measures to make sure that it never happens again. first, i will tell you, the quick diagnosis is there were two forms of operational error, of ercot running the grid where for one, they didn't respond adequately to the winter storm that was coming. they didn't prepare. they told all of us they were prepared and in fact it turned out they were not prepared

and second is the spread between available power and power demand got closer, they should have tapped on the brakes and began rolling blackouts which they didn't do and they didn't do that and instead they slammed on the brakes like slamming on the brakes of a car on an interstate highway on an icy road, they're going to crash which is exactly what they did they shut down 12,000 megawatts and in doing so, they shut down other power-generating facilities through that, correcting operational error, imposing things like a winterization to make sure it doesn't happen again in the state of texas, and increasing the power capacity that's going to be needed simply because of the population and business growth in the state of texas, and improving communications with the public, simple strategies like that, will make sure things like this never happen again. >> governor, thanks. appreciate you having you on

today. i think from cromagnon and then modern human behavior. we appreciate you. >> take care we will. and you do, and we'll see you again soon we also want to thank tom farley for hanging out with us part of the morning. good to see you. >> he's like the advanced man, he's like the next step of human evolution, i think you're like already beyond all of these other - >> i just want to say, i have more respect for you guys hosting every day remote, like it's kind of hard to pull my weight here sitting up here in the studio and not being able to see you guys, you guys do a great job every day. thanks for having me back. >> it already is better in l.a. >> i'm glad andrew and i got to get in a little spat as usual. feels like old times.

>> don't feel like you're unique there, tom >> tom, come back. we'll see you soon. >> thanks. >> and when we come back, we will check to jim cramer and get his first take on the trading day ahead, plus stocks twah we get closer to the opening bell stay tuned you're watching "squawk" on cnbc

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we want to get to cnbc headquarters, jim cramer joins us right now jim, we've been watching this tech wreck trying to figure out what to do about it, and those investors out there thinking, am i supposed to, is this the dip to buy or is this the dip to sell >> well, look, we're gripped by the bond market. it's the bond market that is in tune entirely, and the bond market, it was down and now reversing again, and you can't have a rally in these high mobile stocks unless you reverse. so 50 basis points increase that we've had in bonds, in the treasuries, since the year started, and so what's happening, andrew, i don't think you have to look at the stock, all you have to do is look at the bond, and obviously this morning, devastating to some, but not others, tesla's sale by ron baron, ron baron, it doesn't

make sense, with the selling, but people are freaking out and i think that's a amazing -- that's a mistake, and cathie wood came in and bought shares yesterday. and looking at the bond market is telling you everything. >> therefore, you would put your money where as a result? >> you just wait you got to wait. >> you got to wait >> i don't want to sell -- >> sit on cash >> yes take up some cash and i think you can pick at things that are really being thrown away i mean snowflake's really interesting, unbelievable growth, let's watch zoom, and then snowflake, snowflake crushed it, they crushed the stock and see if there is any turn and people thought that was a weak guide or inline guide, forget it, their revenue was extraordinary. frank saluteman had the best quarter and watch snowflake and that will tell you how things go and watch the 10-year and that

will tell you how things go. >> that's it no controversy >> i don't know, what do you think about texas, my man? >> well, i mean, you know, alex gorsky says why don'tyou wait, you don't want to be the last but i'm been saying you don't want to be the last person to die in a war but texas, obviously, he comes in no masks, but masks, masks but no masks, masks, buses from mexico. >> jim cramer, we'll see you in a couple of minutes. >> becky, quick. >> thanks, andrew. dominic chu is with us with a look at some top stocks making moves in the premarket what are you seeing? >> a mix in the different types of catalysts moving things around starting in the earnings front, we have bj's wholesale, down 4%, roughly 40,000 shares of volume pre-market, the big box retailer posting quarterly profits and sales that both topped analyst estimates as did a measure for sales growth at established store locations that strips out fuel sales. bj's did not provide financial

guidance for the year. they cited of course the ongoing pandemic related to uncertainty, and the shares 85% over the last 12 months. so a little bit off pre-market next up is curevac, 35,000 shares of pre-market volume, and announced an agreement with novato novartis, and the initial preparations are already in progress novartis plans to make 50 million doses of the vaccine by the end of this year and 200 million doses by 2022, then we will end on general electric, you can see they're up about 3.5% pre-market, nearly a million shares of volume, the industrial conglomerate gets a price target hike at morgan stanley to a street high $17 a share and keep the overweight rating and cited among other things, becky, a stronger than expected growth trajectory for ge's aviation business so two greens and a red for the pre-market back to you. >> tom, i don't understand investors selling off stock, because the company says we

can't give you guidance because we don't know what's coming. that's kind of like a dui, no kidding. >> it is a duh, no kidding >> it's a pandemic winner, right so these warehouse stores have been 85% over the last year, maybe a bit of profit taking at this point. >> dom, good to see you. >> likewise. joe, andrew, i guess that does it for us today we will see everybody back here tomorrow right now, it's time for "squawk on the street. see ya good thursday morning, welcome to "squawk on the street." i'm carl quintanilla with jim cramer and david faber, coming off two straight days where we closed near the lows we'll see if today is any different. ten year as jim said still 1.5, and jobless claims 745 k, powell speaks at noon, earnings in snowflake and more and the road map begins with the tech sell-off futures mixed and inflation fears continue to rattle some investors. plus, tesla bull ron