within the next hour. and andy jazzy joins us live it is april 14th not to worry you have until monday if that date scares you. "squawk box" begins right now. good morning welcome to "squawk box" here on cnbc live from the nasdaq market site in times square. i'm rebecca quick along with joe kernen and andrew ross sorkin live from the amazon headquarters in seattle. >> good morning. 3:00 here? >> oh, that's right. >> 6:00 a.m. where you are bright and sunny. >> it looks bright and sunny >> we are at amazon headquarters i know we will talk markets and

come back and talk about why we're here we have andy jazzy here. >> let's look quickly at the u.s. equity futures. you will see green arrows. this is the holiday short week the last trading day of the week tomorrow is good friday. markets are closed you have green arrows this morning. dow futures up 42. s&p up fractionally. nasdaq up 23 points. all of this comes after significant gains yesterday. the dow was up 344 points for a gain of 1% s&p up 1.1%. it was the nasdaq that was really the out performer up 2%. all of this coming despite the fact we got hotter than expected price inflation numbers on hotter consumer prices the day before let's look at treasury yields. that has been the story. watching what happens with

yields 2.7% for 10-year note. the 2-year is at 2.347%. again, big story this morning, andrew at headquarters in seattle for amazon give us a clue thank you, becky we are at amazon headquarters. to give you context of the room we are in. behind me are signed posters of every amazon product launch. echo we will talk about how they create products here at amazon you will go inside some of the warehouse facilities and hear from some of the leaders inside amazon on projects like a fascinating project that is in play right now

satellites in the sky to bring internet access across the world. we will talk about aws and supply chain and labor issues. so many things going on and then ceo andy jassy he is joining us at 8:30 a.m. eastern time then news at amazon this morning. you might have seen it it cross the wires overnight. amazon deciding to charge 5% more to third-party sellers on the platform this is a fuel surcharge i know, becky, we debated a day or two ago the charges for third-party sellers on etsy. it had gone from 5% to 6.5%. amazon addressing the additional costs. >> that's a big difference 5% increase versus 30% increase. if you are going from 5% to 6.5% that is a bigger increase.

>> third-party sellers on amazon and walmart and e-bay are typically paying first order commission rates if you will somewhere between 10% and 15%. in terms of the context of all this we're also catching up with a few other leaders today at amazon david is joining us in a little bit. i want to get to breaking news happening right now. that is really one of the other reasons we wanted to be here this morning andy jassy's first shareholder letter is out. he reflects on the pandemic and aws business he spearheaded, by the way, we will talk about that and consumer business which he calls different demand during the pandemic aws revenue back to the 2019 levels at 37% year over year

growth on the consumer side, he writes amazon realized equal of three years forecasted growth in 15 months amazon doubled and this is fascinating. he talks about how amazon spent 25 years building the ful fulfillment centers that we come to know and effectively to deal with demand up until two years ago and doubled it in the last 24 months to meet customer demand you can understand the massive growth that's been going on in that business. the number of fulfillment centers in the last month jumping in large part because of that growth. jassy saying amazon was able to meet a lot of the moment because of what he describes and this is interesting how he thinks of innovation constant innovation. in every business, we pursue we are experimenting and inventing

and divinely discontented with customer experiences whether they are our own or not. the beauty of this mission is you never run out of runway. jassy's message coming at a time where amazon is facing pressure at fulfillment centers with the unionization efforts and issue of safety. he said our injury rates are misunderstood. operations jobs that fit the warehousing and courier and delivery categories. the numbers recordable were higher than the average of our warehousing at 6.4 lower than the average of the courier at 7.6 this makes us average relative to pieers we don't seek to be average.

we will speak with andy jassy later in the broadcast we will go on an amazon journey during the show. great simple of american success, joe crown businesses in america. >> crown jewel like apple. >> a mic microcosm >> online book sellers 25 years ago maybe zappos or pets.com they didn't do it. >> zappos is owned ed by amazon >> yes aws. this is -- i had nothing to do with it. my chest wells up with pride that this is an american success story. it is staggering it continues the runway doesn't end

books, online books. now they put captain kirk into space. well, jeff did you take the guy on "star trek" and give him his dream it doesn't get any better of the stuff. >> we spend time with andy and the other thing and people should read the letter the letter is almost bezosian. he talks about his management philosophy and how to innovate that is instructive of what the future of amazon may be. it is funny. i think people think jeff is a big idea guy and andy is an operational guy. the artistry of the way andy describes innovation with terms of operations is what may actually made amazon what it is.

i wanted to highlight two things in the letter that i thought were fascinating for those who are business geeks one, he says, when you launch a product, you need to define what he calls a minimum level product. then be able to iterate fast most people don't want to start a product because they are worried it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles the minimum level and then do it just a fascinating idea. the other one and we work at a big corporation, becky and joe, it is interesting. i think it is true organized builders into teams that are separate and autonomous as possible. if you have a big company and everybody thinking of the whole company, it doesn't work you want small teams that are focused solely on the only thing

they do. we'll get into all of this with andy and more throughout the broadcast. >> i'm looking forward to a long weekend. there are things on amazon tv that they developed content that i want to watch. >> we'll talk tv football, by the way you will want to watch football on thursday nights that's the next leg. >> it reminds me of the movie where there was one company finally. >> it's world domination >> it is world domination. i started to get a little worried with bezosian. these guys arenot walking around with quarters in their pockets? it is a corporate culture like amazon >> it is what bezos built from the beginning. jeff bezos was driving to the

fedex or u.p.s he was driving to the station every night with the books to say here they are. he got to know those guys well because he was showing up and doing these things he built that culture. he built it. jeff bezos wrote his first shareholder letter with the idea that this is what this company is going to be if you want to make earnings now, don't we will grow and grow big. his point you get the shareholders you deserve they have been on for a long ride >> one of the things that is face fascinating is the big company and the start-up feel to the whole thing. even now this actually goes to the autonomous groups. they all feel small. it is hard to describe and articulate on television all of the groups, even to themselves, we actually -- our

business, we don't have market share as we could. we are 1% of this or 5% of this. collectively, we all look and go it is amazon >> good luck telling that to the legislators and regulators saying you have a bigger reach i have been an amazon customer since 1999 they have a huge part of my monthly shopping. >> the good tv shows that's when it got me. the evolution of jeff. he looked like a guy who would sell books on line now he is like the terminator. the vest on and the glasses. we'll be back. he has totally turned into the buff guy headed to the $500 million yacht. it is all pretty cool. only in america. only in america, andrew. you know that. why global investors are watching the ecb closely today

futures right now improved a little as we thought about how great it is to be here nasdaq up 17 s&p up -- not doing anything check out the biggest pre-market winners and losers. stay tuned you are watching "squawk box" live from times square and from the left coast seattle. we'll be right back. >> announcer: this cnbc program is sponsored by truist wealth. where meaningful relationships matter most. we discover exciting new technologies. redefine who we are and how we want to lead our lives. basically, choose what we want our future to look like. so what's yours going to be?

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it doesn't say it, but boom! breaking news. elon musk offering to buy twitter for $54.20 a share what will he do now? go home or go big? he is going big. who is that adl guy, andrew? his worst nightmare. jonathan greenblatt. if he owns the whole place, it is like go for it. the orange man will be back. this is unbelievable >> stock up 13%. >> unbelievable. >> jumping on this news. how much was the stock up before look at the stock price. on this news, up 13% the longer term, over the last couple weeks, it was only a week

ago monday that we first learned that he built that 9.2% stake. look at the stock. you look at the stock at 36. jumped above $50 came back down on the idea that maybe he would get out of it that is not the case it brings up the idea of the shareholder lawsuits angry about selling before if you held on to it, look at it now. >> nothing to do with a activisism >> kudos to dan ives he came on the broadcast he is on the phone now he said it he called it right from the beginning. we said was he taking his ball and going home or coming back and doing more he is doing more we have to look at this filing to see who is paying for all this that's the question i have is this part of the consortium

by himself this is a lot of money to do as an individual. is someone loaning money >> he is probably good for it. i would take a check i wouldn't wait for it to clear from him let's ask dan ives. >> what are we doing $30 billion? is that where we are here? >> it closed yesterday at market cap of $36.76 billion. >> another 6 >> 12% increase. i'm looking at the s.e.c. filing it looks like the reporting person elon planning to do this >> fraction. not quite couch change >> quickly, can i tell you this? >> yes. >> this is a comment from elon in the s.e.c. filing to the chairman of the board i invested in twitter as i believe the potential is platform for free speech around the globe. i believe free speech is as

societal imperative for functions democracy. i now realize the company will not thrive in the current form twitter needs to be transformed as a private company i'm offering to pay 100% of twitter for $54.20 and share of cash and premium over the day before i begin investing in twitter. 38% premium the day before my public announcement. this is the best and final offer. if it is not accepted, i need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. twitter has extraordinary potential. i will unlock it elon musk. there is the key this is the best and final offer. take it or leave it. if you don't take it, i'll sell all my stock >> it is worse than that if the deal doesn't work, given i don't have confidence in management or believe i can drive the necessary change in the public market, i need to reconsider my position as shareholder. the other component.

he is effectively out. that is part of the script he is writing. >> someone writes. the question is why did he wait six days and announce on 4/20? joining us now is dan ives of wedbush. will this fly? >> this will put twitter back against the wall they have to accept it through strategic process, but there is really no way that twitter, in my opinion, could reject this. ultimately from the fiduciary perspective, he put such a premium here and he has the cash now the street will read this as twitter will get sold and ultimately it is musk that will buy it >> i agree with what elon says

about societal imperative. why? is he doing this because it will be worth $70 billion after he restructures things and goes to a subscription is he doing it to make money or all of us to have a public forum where so many people pointed out and it is funny how twitter makes decisions on who stays and goes is that all he is interested >> no, there is a monetary piece here i think behind the scenes, whether consortium that he is consulting, he knows twitter is an under valued asset in terms of how it is monetized of course, because of the success of spacex and tesla, he views this as this is the time especially with dorsey going in the background the way the soap opera with the

board and off the board. now as we talked about it, him joining the board and capturing 15%. that would handcuff him from doing anything this is a scenario where he will buy twitter. >> come on really it really is $54.20. it really is $54.20. >> dan, dan, dan, do we think he has the money to do this do you think -- put consortium aside for a second would a bank loan him money against his shares does he has to do this as an elon musk individual he is not saying he has con st

consortium >> the stock is down tesla. >> the funding secured situation? writing a letter without the funding secured? >> i think he already hired an adviser. this is much more formal where obviously he has a significant amount of cash he probably is the street reading as leverage in tesla in terms of getting the cash. he has done things like that before in terms of his tesla ownership and spacex especially being private. this is one where he has the assets now it is a question of the semantics and how it will work i think twitter, they never thought in a million years he would actually look to buy the whole company. right now, i think within twitter board, this is something that they never thought would

happen as a scenario they thought he would get more active go to 15% or 20% stake and they handle him that way. now this is from a twitter board perspective, it is a code red situation. >> all right dan, so, dan, there was never a point after he said, all right forget the board and some of those typical elon tweets over the weekend. he was rejecting the board membership was there ever a point he was finished and gone? >> never one second. just the dna of musk and how he uses twitter he would never ultimately cut and run. he was just going to go big, right? this is really ultimately this

is the end game. obviously, the way he did it in the filing and put it out there and didn't put anything on twitter. this is a more formal process which actually goes against typical dna of musk. >> is there anyone who thinks he can't juggle all these balls >> there will be skeptics who will say he can't do it all between tesla and spacex we have seen him navigate that this is not just going to be him individually i think anyone that bets against him in terms of that balancing act, because that was the issue with tesla and spacex and others it has been hard to bet against him. he had that golden touch on tesla and spacex that's why when you look at twitter and this becomes historic move no one thought musk would become a corporate raider for twitter in 2022 >> dan, becky smartly pointed

out that tesla shares are moving lower on this news. >> not a lot >> is that an argument -- >> it's $14. >> is that because people are worried he has to sell his shares if that is a vote of anything, is that a vote he will have to sell his shares or we don't want this guy distracted as he will become >> it is less of the distraction and more what becky said more the knee jerk that because of this, he has to sell stock. if you look at the financial aspects of it, we do not believe that would happen. remember, he already sold stock which was for tax purposes or whatever i view it as a knee jerk i would highly doubt that would have a lead to b that is speculation given the scenario here. >> is there any other potential buyer out there who would want to compete with this bid

>> look, i think if he went at this level at -- just given the best case, i see no other bidder for twitter. that's why he went so above and beyond here. he is putting in a situation where there is no other bidder that is coming here. even private equity. if you cut costs 54 -- that would be financially untenable. >> dan ives, thank you instant analysis appreciate it. >> andrew, my fan boy quotient i used it all up >> fan boy and amazon? >> yeah. no, just with elon in general.

rolling my eyes over the last six months i love him this is unbelievable unbelievable i'll go wild on twitter. i'll go -- now i have to worry about my task masters here over what i said. i'm kidding. i'm kidding. i'm not going to do that >> we'll talk a lot more about the transaction this morning more on the breaking news that elon musk offering to buy all of twitter. we are taking you inside amazon this morning. we are here in seattle with the company's ceo andy jassy we are joined by david limp. he oversees the coolest stuff that amazon is working on. including a new broadband satellite plan it will compete with elon musk backft ts. aerhi

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good morning welcome back to "squawk box." i'm live at amazon headquarters. nasdaq and s&p off just a bit. the big story now breaking within the last 15 minutes elon musk who owns a 9.1% stake in twitter trying to buy the remaining shares of the company for $54.20 a share in cash. the world is atwitter about that news, becky. >> we were just talking about this look, he has laid out very clearly in the s.e.c. filing this is the best and final offer. take it or leave it. the question is how quickly will twitter do something with that it would not surprise me if they waiver on this or try to find a way to say we're not sure. we're looking the other alternatives it would not surprise me if he

pulls that deal. he may say forget it he laid the ground work. what happens to the stock? it craters as dan ives said, their backs are up against the wall. you will take a better offer for twitter shares 50% premium from when he started buying 38% premium before the day he announced the stake a week and a half ago it's up another 10% this morning on that news if they he don't take this and he walks away, the stock craters. there's a very tight timeline and a lot of pressure on the twitter board to figure out something quickly on this. by the way, more twitter still ahead. we are talking to gene munster he will join us in a moment. let's talk about crypto. seven months since el salvador made bitcoin a national kr currency the president of the country promoted it, but people want to

know does it work and does anyone use it? gadi schwartz spent time on the ground in el salvador to find out. >> reporter: this is a first country to take the promise and dream of bitcoin and actually turn it into an official currency these are the atms where people load up phones and use bitcoin to buy every day things. how does it work >> we finally got our money two hours later. $199.01. i'm not sure where the 99 cents went they have special lines for people paying in bitcoin we got groceries, but not because we paid in bitcoin they said the transaction was canceled it has shown it went through on the account. we are down $14. the second time we used bitcoin in el salvador with strike wallet 0 for 2. >> wow gadi is back from el salvador. he joins us. gadi, who did you talk to from

the government how is the salvadorian president defending the move to adopt bitcoin? the imf said don't do this >> reporter: on paper, el salvador is the perfect place to experiment, for several reasons. one reason, $6 billion remittance from the united states to people in el salvador. the push by the president down there was to take some of the fees that are paid on the remittances and put them in the pocket of people in el salvador to the tune of $400 million. that is one reason the other reason is 70% of people in el salvadordon't hav access to bank accounts. the concept of having a savings account is almost foreign. i was talking to one guy down there. he said the cash is like water the second you pull it out of your pocket, it seems to disappear. you spend it you put it down and it just goes away having the secure place to keep

money when 70% of people don't have bank accounts is another big reason those are the reasons the government is putting forward to try to get this widespread adopted. the third reason is because of trust. in el salvador, people trust the president. he has approval rating of 85% to 90%. every working class person said they trust their president when we were down there when it comes to bitcoin, cash needs to work 100% of the time you have one bad transaction or two bad transactions and this thing on the phone gets lost along the way or the balance doesn't show up or you put money into the atm and it takes two and a half or up to eight hours to hit your account. a lot of sitting and waiting a lot of anxiety for the people of el salvador, most of them have tried it

they were all given $30 of bitcoin at the beginning of the experiment they went to the grocery store a lot of lines formed. we held up the line for ten minutes just trying to get it to work it didn't work we were double-do charged most people in el salvador said they are not using it. >> i think the experience where you got double charged is the scary one. gadi, thank you. we love to have you back to talk more about it. coming up, elon musk offering to buy twitter for $50 plus $4.20 $54.20 in cash gene munster will join us next and more from andrew live at amazon coming up on "squawk box." i'll explain where we are. hint, it has to do with acspe and may be amazon's biggest

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welcome back to "squawk box. we are live in seattle at the amazon headquarters. a big news day with elon musk making a bid for twitter and then we will speak with andy jassy. he is out with the first sh shareholder letter the theme is innovation. an area that amazon is investing

$10 billion for a project called project kuiper a network the satellites in low earth orbit. it will compete with elon musk's spacex jassy said he is optimistic for its future business model. while in seattle t, i got a tour of the project take a listen. >> this is a satellite factory early version of it. this is the two buildings here in red mond it is dealing with the kuiper and satellite dishes and customer terminals the room we are in here is the manufacturing line the first of the manufacturing line for the kuiper satellites

>> when you first brought this to jeff, did he say this is great or this is crazy >> he said it was crazy. it was jeff and jeff wilke in the first meeting. i remember it well they both loved it from the very beginning. it needed refinement and a lot of numbers behind it it was hand waving in the first iteration. jeff loves space i love space it kind of has that north star moment when you read something it is ambitious. it is also something that five people in a garage can't do. if we are going to do good for society. this is something because amazon has scale and a balance sheet. this is the initiative, although risky, it could fail, but it is the initiative we can and should take on. >> i asked dave if project kuiper succeeds and if it has

the potential to be bigger than aws. >> aws is a once in a lifetime opportunity in the retail business i don't know what i would say is the first place i would look is how many customers are out there. hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of customers fit in the category of not having great broadband in their home we need that to be a fractional business that is a big business in it s itself from today, we could be bigger than cloud computing and enterprise this could be a meaningful business. >> you talked about an economical and reasonable thing for people to pay for especially in countries where the price point would have to be even lower. what do you think that price point looks like as a comp and i don't know if

this is a fair comp, elon musk with starlink at $110 a month. that would be considered a high price in certain countries and maybe in the united states. >> i don't know what goes into the calculus of pricing starlink for us, we won't price it any time soon. the service is still a ways away we will price as close to the last responsible moment as possible what i can say is we are dedicated to making it affordable you know, because that is part of the responsibility here i think it is in the dna of amazon for sure. we try to strive for low prices. we are architecting every part of the system. the only way you can control the pricing of it to make sure it will be low for customers is control your inputs. >> how do you think, by the way, about elon musk's starlink and the fact it is out there is this a winner take all

business or market is there a first mover advantage? >> yeah, this is not a sporting event. there is not one winner. it is not the olympics where there will be three winners. the unmet need is so large and just think about all of the other countries which skipped to mobile there are multiple mobile providers doing really well and customers have demand for more mobile services. i think leo constellations look multiple from the amazon perspective, let alone customer, we want lots of connectivity more power to starlink and spacex and anybody else who wants to pursue this we want to be successful and i think there is room for plenty of them. >> dave limp oversees all amazon devices. i asked what is the coolest

thing that will happen with alexa in the next year >> every time we add to it, it makes alexa more magical and gets more pro-active and more conversational we have been talking now for five or ten minutes. we haven't used each other's name once. every time i talk to alexa, i have to say the name that's just not how we're taught from birth to learn how to communicate and talk i think you will see us make significant advancements over conversational speech in the next 12 months the other thing that is delightful is when alexa is proactive. if you had a partner or assistant that can read your mind, you are at the airport and the flight delayed it gets rescheduled on your behalf behind the scenes you get the call go to gate 24 i booked you on the next flight. that's the best thing that ever happened to me if alexa can do more of those things proactively and

anticipate without you having to ask, that is more imagmagical. you will see progress on that. >> i want that desperately i know other people who get nervous about these things >> yeah. i think if it is personalized and right a lot. if alexa is right a lot and personalized, that will quickly become the new normal. i see it in my home. the other day i was cooking and cooking two types of bread i had two timers running i did the first bread timer. i said set a second timer for 40 minutes. alexa said what would you like to name the timer? i forgot which timer was which the context and being right are really important to being pro-active once that happens, i think people will accept it. >> you can see and hear more of

that interview on cnbc.com and on our squawk pod. i'm worried that people who have alexa all over the country right now are going off as we're talking. i don't know coming up at 8:30, we will speak with amazon ceo andy jassy here in seattle the day of his first shareholder letter coming out. i imagine we will talk about the big news, other big news of the morning, as well joe? >> the breaking story today. elon musk offering to buy twitter and take the company private for $54.20 a share joining us now is gene munster managing partner we pointed out, gene maybe we read too much into it we talked off camera, becky and i, and it just looks like he is saying you take this and if you don't take it, i'm gone.

i don't know what would happen to the stock it is like management is in a bind here if they don't agree. they probably don't want to agree to this. >> by the way, if they do agree, he will fire them all. >> right gene, what are your thoughts >> my initial here. >> initial reaction i think it probably happens i think management i agree is in a tight spot here. essentially he can force the hand it's not just about his $54 offer which is down from where the stock was but also about the base of people he can activate to have a bigger impact on twitter. he can have an influence in terms of outcome 80 million subscribers there's 215 million total monthly twitter subscribers. so you're talking 1 in 4 he's got influence on, and so i think that this probably does happen there could be some room where he inches that bid a little bit

higher but this is not a competitive bidding situation either first and foremost this is the 20% category -- 20% probabilitythality this would happen, so this was the lower probability option it did hit, and i think that he is probably going to get control of twitter here probably right around that price, and i think investors should largely welcome that and the reason they should welcome it is the first orders principle elon musk uses he invests his time and he has strong principle views, and one of them is first order principle. it basically says because something has been done some way for a long time doesn't mean you should continue to do it that way. in fact, because it's been done a certain way for a long time means you should do it differently, and that is pervasive in what elon musk does is look at spacex, how they're

getting to space and look at just the concept of tesla with electrification. i'm going to get to the point here in a second why first principles is important and why investors should be excited about this marginal premium where the stock is if he takes a first principles approach to twitter, that could mean something that most social networks would run as fast as they could in the opposite direction which would be charging users to use these platforms. it's something that is usually monetized through advertising or virtual goods. let me quick finish the math again, the idea here is what could elon do? and if he does charge let's just say a dollar per month per twitter user, you're going to lose some users but a lot of people are going to stay their $12 a year they'll still around and if you keep 2 million of

those, that alone adds 30% to revenue this year. it's really exciting from an investors standpoint to have the company in control of someone who really wants to make some profound changes >> there would be, obviously, if you charged you'd lose a lot of people, but half of them are bots anyway. -wheel you think about it i don't know how it'd all play out. you may end up with all active, real users let's say that the management and past situations like this management always say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to do everything we can for shareholders, but a lot of times they're thinking about what's in the chair for themselves and how it's going to affect them. they could make the case, look, it's traded much higher on its own. we think this -- you know,

there's transient factors that put us down at these lower levels and we think we can get this to $100 eventually. i mean, they could make that case where would the stock go if agree -- >> elon walks away next week >> probably 35, $25. i think a rebuff would be a powerful mistake for -- don't even want to think about that -- a big mistake for management and why ultimately is it would be a sign to investors they're not about innovation and that would be a big setback for this, and just to have, yeah, that optionality out there and also be a vote for investors that don't go here >> gene, the thing i don't understand here is actually in truth how it's going to be

financed i don't believe -- i'll just say it straight up i don't believe elon musk is planning to buy this only with his own money. that would be a 40-some odd billion purchase you could argue he's worth 200-some odd billion dollars if he was going to sell his shares and someone wanted to give a loan against the shares somehow that could happen. if you're the board, the board is going to want to do some kind of market check or know the financing is there all those things are going to take time and if he says put up or shut up and i'm leaving or says the shares were $70 at one point in the last year there's a lot of permutations that have to get worked out before then, no? >> there are, and i think that's an important guideline again, i'm in the camp that this

is a higher probability that it happens. understand that other view, and ultimately there's some risks here around just elon and how he behaves. of course when we talk about financing and getting things done, there is a legendary base case when it comes to elon with funding secured. and so i would agree that there's -- that piece -- but the "x" factor here is that his ability to -- to raise that money, i think if he came out with a plan that was something that had to do with monetization even though if the base contracts from where it's at today, if it was this first principles approach -- >> gene, that's not how the world works in terms of raising financing. you can't go to a board and say i'm buying a company, right? it's very difficult to do it that way >> andrew, to your point this is

the in the filing and this goes to what you're saying. in item four they have in the sec filing it says the proposal is nonbinding, and once structured and agreed upon would be conditioned upon among other things the receipt of any required government approvals, confirmatory legal business accounting and tax due diligence, the negotiation and execution of definitive agreements providing for the proposed transaction and completion of anticipated financing. note that anticipated financing that's on this also goes onto say the reporting person being elon reserves the right to withdraw the proposal or modify the terms at any time including with respect to the amount or form of consideration. so you're right to be on this, and it does sound like he can pick up his offer and walk away at any point take it or leave it, and if i don't like where it's going, this is a none binding proposal

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breaking news, the beg story of the day, elon musk upping the ante the tesla ceo offering to buy 100% of twitter shares, taking the company private. we've got the details still ahead. incoming earnings. the big banks start to report. we'll get new results this hour. and inside amazon. this hour we'll hear from the woman who makes sure your order gets from the warehouse to you on time. the second hour of "squawk box" begins right now good morning and what a morning it's turning out to be

welcome back to "squawk box" right here on cnbc today i'm in cement here in the hometown of amazon on the campus here we're getting ready for an exclusive interview we're going to do in about 90 minutes with its ceo, andy jassy, his first shareholder letter out a little while ago. a name that does loom large here given all the competition, elon musk, becky, with his big breaking news this morning >> yeah, this is what we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes or so. elon musk offering to buy 100% of twitter shares for $54.20 a share. this comes after he took a 9.2% stake just over a week ago that revealed he was going to join the board and then didn't. so it's been a tumultuous week and a half already in a letter to twitter emphasis board that was reveal in an sec filing this morning musk said since making the investment i

now realize the company will neither thrive or survive in its current form twitter needs to be transformed as a private company in regards to his offer he said i'm offering to buy 100% of twitter for $54.20 a share in cash, a 50% premium over the day i began investing in twitter and a 38% premium a day before my investment was publicly announced. my offer is the my best and final offer, and if it is not accepted i will need to reconsider my position as a shareholder. we've been digging through the details this morning in the filing and the proposal itself there's a lot of contingencies that this comes with the proposal is nonbinding and once structured and agreed upon it would be conditioned upon other things the receipt of any required government approvals, confirmatory legal business, regulatory and tax due diligence, the negotiation and

execution of defin itive agreements provided for the transaction and anticipated completed transaction. he goes onto say the reporting person reserves the right to withdrawal the proposal at any time -- >> some of that sounds as the boilerplate you always see, but other stuff gives him a nice -- andrew, i would have liked to have said i'm buying twitter because you know you ban the babylon be but the leader is still on it. so he's real but whether he's willing to own this white elephant for $40 billion elon musk, i'm not convinced he wants to own this thing. >> i think what's more important on this is he's not going to be selling tesla shares to do this, and maybe that gives some heart to tesla shareholders. maybe he would borrow against his share. but this would require financing -- >> and management can use all

this to say, look, this isn't a serious offer we're at 70, 80, we'll get it to 100 on our own, we don't take this seriously but elon is messing with them. >> if he walks away next week look how much the stock has built since this offer came in that's a huge air pocket if he suddenly walks away. >> the first 420 crazy take over bid. $54.20 but is he messing with -- >> guys, look at the calender. next wednesday's the day either he's going to make a deal or walk away. >> that the 420? >> next wednesday is >> when you've got a quarter a trillion dollars you can do whatever you want. >> i can think of a lot of things i would do like this.

>> he's mercurial. >> wins either way >> and you see the way he tweets about biden or bernie sanders. he does things for effect a lot of times, but then again he could do it and he's already got 9.2% if i did it he would say, yeah, sure, whatever >> but there's going to be a big question about the financing piece. i mean if he had the financing he'd go in with the financing in the public and you'd know it that's how you typically make one of these bids. so it's complicated to go in with a bid like this i imagine and even based on a little bit of reporting i've been doing in the last 15, 20 minutes they've been trying to find financing, by the way this is not like this is the first big time rodeo >> he's only been considering this -- >> that's the next thing when he says i do have financing >> look, he could. my guess is he'd not want to

sell his shares in tesla to do it he's not going to sell anything or give away anything in spacex. these are things he really cares about. he likes this idea and i'm sure he feels he wins either way. it's a good chess move and by the way, in the letter -- he did say that. he said i'm not playing a back and forth game he said just that. i've moved straight to the end it's a high price and your shareholders will love it. >> it's a fully financed $54.20 offer something management would have to take, do you think >> i don't -- a fully financed, they might be able to make the argument they can get even higher i was going to say, though, one other thing that's actually kind of interesting about this which is it was a prisoners dilemma for him which is if he's going to sell his shares, he has

disclose every 1% down, which is to say he's actually not going to be able to capture the gains either from this bid today or from whatever premium we think came when he made his original offer. >> he said the offer he made at $54.20 is 50-something percent above where he began buying. so his cost basis is not anywhere near the levels where it's at right now. >> but to the extent he's actually going to get out, it's going to be hard for him to truly benefit either >> now we're back to where it's money he doesn't -- 40 billion he cares about and now we're back to profits or losses on the 9.2% >> 40 billion he spent initially on it. >> nobody likes -- we understand the sentiment but i'm not sure that -- 40 billion makes a

difference, though, even if you've got 250 does a subscription model work, even or is he willing to be a st societal imperative that doesn't make money and never makes money. >> this goes to the question of financing, which goes to say most people won't finance for what you just said and if he's doing this for other reasons it becomes complicated quickly. >> you can ask peter, ask a couple of his buddies to -- >> it says he is the reporting person, that he's the one doing this but it also is clear it hasn't been completely lined up, so it could change it's -- >> we're going to continue to cover this story all morning long it is making lots of ripples and

sending twitter atwitter as you might imagine. the other big story is news from amazon company ceo andy jassy with his first shareholder letter out this morning and the consumer business has had what he calls a, quote, different demand trajectories during the pandemic. and we're going to be speaking with him about all of this revenue growth now back to its 2019 levels. amazon realized the equivalent of three years forecasted growth in about 15 months and meanwhile amazon doubled the number of fulfillment centers in the last 24 months to meet customer demand. he also talked about he spent 25 years building all the fulfillment centers and then in two years doubles it he was able to meet the moment of what he calls constant innovation, and a lot of the letter has steam about how he

thinks about innovation. and every business we're constantly experimenting and inventing and we're discontented with customer experiences whether they're our own not. the beauty of this mission is never run out of runway. i love that line and jassy's message i should say comes at a time amazon faces growing pressure among employees at some of these fulfillment centers to unionize. there's been questions about safety and other things. he says our injury rates are sometimes misunderstood. we have operations jobs that fit both the warehousing and courier and delivery categories. our reported incident rates were a little higher than the average of our warehousing peers but a also a little loyer than the average of our courier and delivery peers this makes us about average relative to peers, but we don't seek to be average also worth noting they brought on several hundred thousand new folks, employees to work at the

company during this period when you think about injuries it's actually very interesting they typically happen in the first six months when people are getting trained up, so i think when you start to look alt that over time, you might -- they're going to work to fix that, but i think it spexplains a lot of it and also look at some of those numbers where it relates to wal-mart and target and others we'll talk about all of this and so much more supply chains, labor, elon musk and all sorts of issues coming up right here inside amazon andy jassy at 8:30 a.m. eastern time. also going to be hearing from alicia who runs global customer fulfillment. we're going to do that in just a little bit we're going to take you inside one of these fulfillment centers. but up next how is a small business supposed to navigate the wildly fluctuating prices that have come to define the pandemic era we're going to speak to one owner who's locked in that battle right now as we head to a break take a

look at shares of wells fargo just out with first quarter results. the company beating earnings estimates despite a revenue miss wells ceo charlie sharp saying the bank will benefit from rising rates but warning the war in ukraine adds risk to the down side stay tuned you're watching squawk right here on cnbc [sound of helicopter blades] ugh... they found me. ♪ ♪ nice suits, you guys blend right in. the world needs you back. i'm retired greg, you know this. people have their money just sitting around doing nothing... that's bad, they shouldn't do that. they're getting crushed by inflation. well, i feel for them. they're taking financial advice from memes. [baby spits out milk] i'll get my onesies®. ♪ “baby one more time” by britney spears ♪ good to have you back, old friend. yeah, eyes on the road, benny. welcome to a new chapter in investing. [ding] e*trade now from morgan stanley.

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a new read out this morning on the consumer from one of it nation's biggest banks bank of america says that credit and debit card spending was up 15% in the first eight days of april compared to that same period last year among card holders with less than $50,000 in annual income card spending per household jumped a third in early april versus the same period in 2019 before the pandemic. and checking and savings balances of households with less than $50,000 in annual income have at least $15,000 more now than they did back in 2019 this is pretty significant the bank of america institute points out that while you are hearing all these surveys in the news from people saying consumers are pulling back, that they're not spending, they're not driving, they're not going out to eat, that's just not the case in terms of what they're doing. bank of america has 1 out of every 2 households in this country, and what they're seeing not only do people have more in

their checking accounts than did pre-pandemic $1,500 more for people who make $50,000 per year or less they're also spending more it tells us a lot about what's happening with the economy at this point when the fed is trying to decide how aggressively to raise rates at this point in fact, today we're kicking off a new series where we'll be talking to small business owners around the country to learn about how they're managing inflation, wages and just generally doing business as the pandemic recedes our goal is to give you a first-hand look at the state of the economy from a ground level. our inaugural guest is cameron mitchell, the ceo of cameron mitchell restaurants net group has roughly 20 restaurants across the country he's been talking to us throughout the pandemic and he joins us this morning with more. cameron, really, we want to know how things are happening with inflation. what you're getting in terms of

higher cost but what you're getting from customers >> good morning, becky thanks for having me on this morning. i'll tell you q1 of this year versus q1 of '21 we enjoyed very robust sales and stronger consumer demand. we're worried with everything else we're dealing with how long that consumer will be there and be in place and all the rising costs they're facing >> bank of america says at least in the first eight days of april people were still spending really aggressively, quite a bit more, 11% more than they were a year ageat this time is that kind of what you've seen in your restaurants, too >> i would agree with that fortunately, again, with covid and everyone is ready to get back out and wants to be in restaurants and enjoy

socialization and they're willing to spend right now how long that will continue is the big question we're facing and the biggest question we're concerned about. >> how much are your costs up. just in terms of what you're paying for labor, in terms of what you're paying for the food you bring in >> yeah. so right now year over year our cost of goods -- our food and beverage costs up 18.6%. our labor is up between management and hourly labor north of 15% construction costs are up. and that budget has gone up 37.5%. and so it's -- you know, everything in there is impacting our sales. we do start profitability by about 10% thus far first quarter of this year versus first quarter of last year but remember last year first

quarter we were fully entrenched in another covid wave, which had red reduced demand and so this year sales are pretty robust. we worry again about another covid wave, our rising interest rates coming down the pipe as a cost to our company on our debt, the wage and costs, inflation, construction inflation, ukraine,r, what happens with ukraine. there's a lot of storm clouds on the horizon but we're continuing to move forward as best we can >> hey, cameron, yields on the ten-year, on the treasury complex actually came down the last couple of days even as we were getting reports for these consumer and producer inflation numbers. and those numbers were hotter than expected, but you still saw the market react pretty well to it stock markets went up immediately on the news, yields came down. and that has people thinking

maybe we've seen the peak of inflation. do you think that's the case >> i think so, becky you know, i'm not an expert on inflation, but i'm not sure how much more can prices be taken. i think eventually people have to, you know, slow down here a little bit, and inflation has to slow down a little bit we just can't continue at this pace >> a big part of that is going to be wage inflation, and you said your wages have gone up considerably do you think the wage inflation has stopped, or do you have to keep paying people more? what's it like trying to hire someone right now? >> well, it's not necessarily hiring that's very difficult there's just not many people out there. we're fortunate. we have a great company culture and values that allows us to have a fairly secure force right now. we're about 94% of full employment in our economy

compared to 80% last third quarter into the fourth quarter. but there's not just a lot of bodies out there it's a matter once you have them keeping them because of the pressure from the guy down the street we want to voluntarily raise our wages significant, double what we did last year for our management personnel because their cost of living has gone up tremendously so maybe their cost of living has gone up 7%, we've tried to raise the wages up 10, 11, 12% this year just to keep our people going and keep our people happy and enjoying our keim. >> cameron, thank youfor being with us today and talking this through with us. >> my pleasure, becky. take care. when we come back, the saga continuing we'll go inside elon musk's offer for twitter. in fact, twitter just out with a statement saying it confirmed it

has received an unsolicited nonbinding proposal from elon musk to acquire all the company's outstanding common stock for $54.20 per share in cash the company said its board of directors will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the company and all twitter stock holders. twitter stock holders that would include elon musk and maybe some of the management. after the break much more from andrew live at amazon. coming up on "squawk box" we're going to take you inside an amazon fulfillment center this is 20 football fields large, more than 3,000 employees working in tandem with robots to get packages to your doorstep. we're going to take you inside when we come back. time now for today's aflac trivia question. tomorrow is the 110th anniversary of the sinking of

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now the answer to today's aflac trivia question. tomorrow is the 110th anniversary of the sinking of the titanic how much did a first class suite on the ship cost the answer, 4,350, or about $100,000 today our top story this morning, elon musk offering to buy twitter for $54.20 a share that's 100% of twitter he's offering to buy for an all-cash deal but is a nonbinding proposal, and that's something twitter is pointing out in the response it has just issued. twitter says they did indeed receive an unsolicited

nonbinding proposal from elon musk to acquire all of the company's outstandingstock for $54.20 a share in cash the twitter board of directors will carefully review the proposal elon musk made very clear in these sec statements -- or in this sec filing that this is his best and final offer he made this clear in a letter he sent to the chairman of twitter's board last night, best and final offer. and if it's not accepted he says he'll reconsider having any stake in the company at all. of course he already owns 9.2% of the company this was revealed in an sec filing last monday this is less than two weeks into his original foray into all of this stock has tine continued to climb. it is up as he points out in his filing 50% from where he first started acquiring that stake the offer he's made at $54.20 is 38% above where the stock stood

the day his holding was pebble public last monday musk saying twitter has extraordinary potential, i will unlock it saying he wants to see freedom of speech on this platform the stock up pretty significantly, up by about 9.5% this morning >> if it all comes down to where it never happens we need to realize there are billions of dollars of paper profits and losses moving around based on just someone's -- what could be whimsical or could be very serious. >> hard to know. maybe this is boiler play, but you don't often see boiler play this highly placed in a proposal this quickly it would be conditioned upon lots of things including anticipation of completed findings that's not out yet >> isn't this the lesson,

though, of trying to take tesla private? and the 420 and we talked about next week being 420 as well. at the same time if he had financing or thought he had financing you'd think he'd lean into that more you could maybe find a bank you could lend against your shares, but that would be him buying it himself. the question is whether he needs to get actually equity owners in this as well and whether they want to buy in especially if the argument about buying it is not strictly an economic one >> right but he's got so much money and so many shares he could punch the shares and get the money in a bank probably unless you think where is tesla tesla, you know, if -- if our

friend gordon -- if gordon johnson was the ceo of the bank he would not lend money against tesla shares >> gordon's been wrong for a lot -- >> i know. but there are many people who would lend money against $1,000 per share. >> tesla shares down, not a huge move but down in an otherwise kind of up market, but again it's $14 off $1,000. and morgan stnly is just out with its fourth quarter results. leslie picker has those numbers for us what are you seeing? >> becky, it's a boat on the top and bottom line here for morgan stanley. on the bottom line reporting $2.02 per share. you can see shares of morgan stanley up about 6% right now in premarket trading. the chairman and ceo noting despite market volatility and uncertainty -- these are words

we've seen a lot in these bank earning releases so far, the firm delivered high results. the key here as he puts it is the diversification of the business model they added about $142 billion. revenue management and investment management were pretty much flat for the quarter. the slump came from investment banking, about 30% lower revenue this quarter than the same time last year largely due to equity underwriting we haven't seen much in the way of ipos lately the number of deals that closed during the first quarter was relatively stable, and that's when they get paid trading held up well during the quarter. morgan stanley has a large equity business. compensation expense ticked down slightly as well

guys >> okay. stay with us, stay on it your day is just beginning wells fargo out with first quarter results. the company beating earnings despite a revenue miss wells ceo saying the bank will benefit from rising rates but warns the war in ukraine adds risk to the down side. >> meantime, amazon ceo andy jassy out with his first shareholder letter just out this morning. he talks about the growth of the company's consumer business. it has been quite something. he writes, quote, amazon realized the equivalent of three years forecasted growth in about 15 months during the pandemic. in the last 24 months amazon doubled its fulfillment network. yesterday i toured one of these centers with a senior vice president of global customer fulfillment. and we took a look inside how this all works

>> what you see there is that's one of our robotic drives, and we have thousands of those in the building, and what they're doing is they're clearing a path that holds inventories and that inventory is moved to an associate who has a responsibility to either put inventory in different locations on the pod or take it out to fulfill orders >> so i've always been fascinated by these. and partially because of the robots but also because i always wonder is there going to be a day when the robots are going to be able to actually pick the items out of the boxes themselves, or do you think our hands, the dexterity that's required today do it is a human function >> yeah, i've been around robotics for a long time, so i am optimistic that there will be a day that robotics will have the dexterity that's needed to pick items out of the pods there's so -- there's thousands and thousands of different items, different sizes,

different weights. and so we'll see but i do think technology will move to be able to help take some of those items, many of the items out of the pods. >> what is the efficiency just in terms of pure output. i believe this facility at one point pre-christmas had brought in over a million separate pieces of product in a day >> and that's usually in peak, like during our peak period during christmas right now we're also on a robotic floor. there's actually some technology i'd like to show you here using art financial intelligence machine learning and vision that is helping the associates determine where is the best spot to store the inventory >> there's camera there. >> it's happening inside that little computer there. there's a program that's running and once he scans it, it knows what the item is, what's in that pod. and then when he stores the item

it notes the size and dimension of the item. it knows how much space is left in the open bins and gives him a location to store it in. this is an kplachl of the technology we use to help our associates perform their standard work. >> for him this is almost gamified as well if he wants it to be. >> yeah, we do have some gameification. we find our associates that participate in the gameification, they have better quality. they seem to enjoy the work, and they're also working safely. >> what do you think the biggest misconception is about amazon warehouses around the country as national debates about employment and the labor >> i think the biggest misconception is that our warehouses are not safe. and so i will say that with clearly saying we have more work to do. however, we have -- in 2021 alone we invested over $300 million in safety improvements, and that's capital investments

that's vehicle technology. there's technology we've shown here, and we continue to make that investment. we're committed to improving the safety within were warehouses. when you come in this warehouse, our warehouses are clean, they're orderly and we work together as one team >> i got to tell you guys going inside that warehouse, it does give you a completely different perspective of what a warehouse even is in this day and age, how much technology is involved. you see a lot of the safety things they're working on. one, it's a little tiny one but it actually works, and over the last year and a half they've implemented it you have to wear a special kind of shoe -- i don't know if we're going to have a shot of it, but it's a capped toe shoe because things can land on peoples toes. they literally require everybody to wear those shoes, and now zero problems. so they're literally going in a very systematic way trying to approach all these different safety issues, and of course

they've been growing and trying to train people. they added 300,000 new people in the past two years 20 football fields they do a million pieces of product in and out of there in a day, and thask that's just one of what are hundreds around the world. we'll have a lot more of that interview with alicia davis. you can watch it on cnbc.com and also be on our podcast and then coming up at 8:30 we'll be speaking with amazon ceo andy jassy in an exclusive interview all about what's happening in amazon's supply chain, labor and so much more when we come back . and strengthen client confidence in you. before investing consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. go to flexshares.com for a prospectus containing this information. read it carefully. esg is responsible investing. for a prospectus who's responsible for building esg into your investments?

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elon musk offering to buy 100% of twitter for # $4.20 a share. he tweeted just a few minutes ago i made an offer, and he offered up a link to his sec filing of that bid for further reaction to today's big story we've been going back and forth all morning mow serious this offer is.

it also says he can walk away at any point or change the deal, too. stock is up immediately upon the release of this filing >> he also talked about taking tesla at 420 and currently used $54.20 a week before 420 there's definitely interesting aspects to this. i think the core problem is we still don't actually know what does elon musk want twitter to do i don't think anyone would disagree twitter could be better managed. i think there's been lots of investors frustrated with part time ceo and jack dorsey beforehand i don't think we know well enough yet as ceo. but clearly investors have wanted twitter to move faster,

drive revenue faster there's no doubt that investors want that. on the flip side elon is talking about removing advertising and making it, anything goes from a free speech standpoint and, you know, becky we know you can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. you've certainly seen the challenges and by the way facebook has been attacked for things like january 6th, and you need some set of rules so the idea of creating chaos on twitter and removing its revenue stream, that all seems very much at odds with what you, andrew and joe were talking about in terms of financing like who's going to finance twitter if all the revenue is going to disappear there's parts of this that don't make sense, and why why is this best and final as his first offer? >> if that's the case, where do you think the stock is right now? if you don't think this is a serious offer and you think it could get pulled what do you

think the shares are valued at right now? >> they're still down dramatically as tech is pulled back and twitter peaked in early 2021 the stock was at over 70 and was at this level not that long ago i don't think this is a terrible place for twitter. i think the interesting aspect all of this has done not just today, becky, but going to where they first sort of purchased it reminds shareholders that most of the companies in tech and media land there's no controlled shareholder. you can buy twitter. twitter is a company that can be taken over, and you can't say that if you think about mark zuckerberg, think about snap chat this is not possible google they're not possible to sort of take over companies the way you can take over twitter. are people going to look at what elon is talking about and the

opportunity to improve twitter, accelerate growth, accelerate revenues would anyone else come out of the woodwork, and that's going to be interesting if elon really is serious about moving forward and explaining what he would do and let alone whether he even has the financing in place this time >> so you think this puts the company in play no matter what >> i mean, it certainly raises the profile. if you think about the last time twitter was in play. remember when disney was bidding against salesforce i google, nothing ended up materializing, and twitter doubled down and it it led to tremendous improvements in twitter products the other side of this is nothing may happen, but it has been a loud wakeup call to management and i think it's going to push the board to be very aggressive in how fast they move and how fast they push management to drive growth and results. so i think this could end up being a very good thing for twitter stock. >> the only thing is if you have this stuff happening, you've got

a new ceo, a lot of pressure on the company already, and to get this whipsawed back and forth i can't imagine management is doing anything other than trying to figure out how to deal with the income from elon musk on a daily basis. the stuff has to have him distracted at the very least >> and i think even in the tweet the other day he basically alluded to distractions ahead. so we sort of assumed that meant elon might try to go hostile in some form. i think the question is sort of nonbinding with a sort of nod towards these changes or what needs to be done and would be betters a private company. it's not clear what that means is he referring to removing some of the revenue streams the markets would like if it's the free speech stuff we've seen all the social media companies deal with the challenges of content moderation i think until you're in the inside you don't understand how hard these challenges are and

the whack a mole nature of the problem. we've seen the mobilization of things that can go wrong when you look at january 6th last year i don't know this is obviously a distraction and not very good in the short-term for twitter but if it pushes management to really rethink what are their most important objectives and push harden those, this could end up much like the last time we saw a rate on twitter this could end up being a positive. >> joe brought up a good point earlier this is happening and playing out whether it's serious or not, there's billions of dollars changing hands through this there's already shareholder lawsuits because of elon failing to disclose in a more timely manner he originally filed that thing saying he was not going to be an active shareholder he would have had to reveal weeks earlier if he said at the time he was going to be an

activist shareholder, which he said a few days after revealing it, and there were a lot of shares that traded hands people say they're mad because they sold those shares add a discount, that elon was kind of defrauding their money on. what's going to happen if there's not a deal that comes on this >> i mean, look, elon is not the most predictable human, right? i mean part of this is he even serious? is this a game is he simply having fun and making a point about free speech and trying to hold management's feet to the fire or does he actually want to own and control twitter and own it >> and does he know now? >> that's the crazy thing, we don't know actually what his goal is. >> it may depend on vurks circumstances and how he's treated. a billion dollars is a out of

money to you, to me. but, one, two, three, billion if someone really ang angered him or felt they're not taking me seriously i think he'd say i'll make it somewhere else i don't think he knows what he wants to do right now. i don't think he knows fully >> but twitter has thousands of employees all around the world when you see elon musk, their largest single shareholder tweet out the other day making their headquarters shelter in a poll and it's sort of disconcerting and hard to take the individual seriously when dure things like that let alone offering it to buy the company at $54.20. is this trolling, just having fun with management, is it torturing management it's really not clear what he wants and other than talking about free speech, he hasn't really talked about what he would do differently and whether

he wants to run twitter, does he actually want to run twitter day to day alongside tesla would anyone want to finance that plan? >> you wouldn't take it off the table he'd say all right you think i'm joking, i'll pledge these shares, i'm doing it and he may not know he's going to do that now, but that's not to say he might not. >> that's, vbs, look a fully financed bid, fully committed at a price i don't know if $54.20 will be enough, but that certainly changes the game a fully financed bid with an actual plan. >> but fully financed he's not going to go higher he said that. you could take it and get fulling, but then is it enough >> he says he won't, but, again, who knows. >> couple quick things there is a potential this is his

exit strategy, this is the way out. we talked about the prisoners dilemma, though, for him to sell at this point he's a 13d filer so you'll know when he's filing. my question is when you think about folks who can finance this, who are they he's had a very complicated relationship over the years with jp morgan which has not financed him historically at these kinds of numbers when you're talking about 30 some odd billion dollars he's going to need or 40 some odd billion dollars, if you were in a private equity firm or something like that do you think a soft bank would give him money? who could possibly do this >> it really comes down to is this being run as a company for profit or destroy the free cash flow or earnings for this

company to get to the objective? if you're creating chaos on the platform that could hurt actual usage or start to change why people are comfortable changing the platform, they've done a lot on safety to rebuild trust with the platform if you start undoing that, revenue and profit can go in the wrong direction. how do you finance that? that's the question, who's financing this bid with someone who wants to remove the only revenue stream twit has like with advertising it's very hard to understand what he's actually after, and again, that's what makes me go back to maybe this is all a joke maybe this is all to make a larger point and sort of to show management they have to change some of their policies >> rich, we want to thank you for your perspective on all of it, and we'll continue this conversation we're going to have andy jassy right here in seattle from amazon in just a little bit and i imagine we'll talk about this topic as well. >> like so many things we've had this great interview scheduled, and the news comes up, and

luckily our next guest might have -- might have some expertise in the business world. let us welcome governor youngkin from virginia, and we're going to talk about a lot of different things we'll talk about how inflation concerns virginians. i talk about all kinds of stuff, governor, but initially since you were a big shot at carlyle, what's going on with elon musk what do you think is happening here and think he would get financing? do you think he's serious? do you think there's a need for an open forum that isn't evident right now or self-evident on twitter at this point? >> well, good morning and thank you for having me. and i'm waking up to the news this morning on elon musk's offer just like all of you are and i just believe this is another step of competition. and at the end of the day the competition for ideas is why america is great and we'll have to see how this

unfolds, but i think this reflects the fact innovators like elon musk can shake things up, and i think we're seeing it all over that as folks bring new ideas and raise capital and direct that capital towards competing, we're seeing things really move. and i'll tell you, joe, this is what's happening across virginia right now and across the country as we see companies making big moves. and i think it's really exciting to see this kind of innovation and capital put to work. >> we -- we watched your election closely and obviously virginia keeps ranking very high on our cnbc best state to do business, obviously. but a lot of what was evident in the race that you have eventually prevailed were culture wars, and i think twitter plays into the culture wars as well, and the whole notion that, you know, that one side or another side is -- is

more or less, there's a bias, inherent bias in the people running twitter on who gets to say things and who doesn't it just seems like it's all part of the state of the country we're in right now, that you certainly could speak to based on -- on what you ran on in virginia successfully. >> well, i think it's time for common sense to be reintroduced to the discord, and i think what we saw last november was a state that had elected democrats consistently for a while wake up and recognize that it was time to reintroduce common sense. and so empowering parents to make decisions with regard to their kids education and, by the way, funding law enforcement and supporting them as we see rising crime. and in a state like virginia where we have been 42nd in the nation in job recovery coming out of the pandemic and we've seen taxes going up and regulations going up, we have a

chance to bring taxes down and cut regulations, fund education, empower parents and fund law enforcement. and what we've seen right now particularly as we head through our march numbers is continued strength in our government receipts we had a strong march, and in fact what that underpins is we're seeing now some green shoots on job recovery in virginia that's really exciting we're going to have a big sur plus, and that gives us the funds to cut taxes and invest in education, law enforcement and mental health. and i think this is the common sense approach that virginians were looking for when they elected us, which is let's get the cost down. we're seeing inflation run away over the last year, rising grocery prices, rising gas prices, rising utility bill, and we've got to get to work to get costs down, and the near-term opportunity for us is to cut taxes and in virginia we have the ability to do that, and that's why we're working so hard

with our legislature to get that done right now >> i wonder how you see this next election, what the issues are going to be, and i don't know how i'd describe you, governor, kindler, gentler you're kind of a conservative 2.0. what advice would you give both the republicans and the democrats on how to appeal to voters in november where is the cross-section in this country where do voters lie right now and then you can talk about inflation and everything else the biden administration is dealing with >> well, it's all about common sense, kitchen table issues. it's gotten to be too expensive and we've got to get costs down, and parents are really concerned about their kids education and preparing them for life and to make sure they're learning the critical things they need to know in math and science and reading so they're prepared, and that we have to have safe communities. these are the kitchen table issues that virginians and

americans are worried about right now. and i think we constantly have to remind ourselves i've got 8.6 million bosses in virginia and i'm listening to them about what they want to get done, and that's why i'm so focused on tax cuts, getting the cost of living down, funding edgequation and funding law enforcement that we have the best place to live and work by having a low cost of living and that people want to stay in virginia and live their live and just think that politicians oftentimes forget that we work for the people that elect us, and when we listen to them what they want us to do is get things done and, oh, by the way, address the things we need right now and that's education, cost of living and crime and safety in their communities >> i don't know the state of the current feeling for a lot of democrats. obviously there's one part of

that party very progressive and wants to double down on the progressive. i don't know how i'd characterize the gop at this point, governor. you walked a fine line in terms of your relationship with former president trump. there are polls out now even trump supporters, some want them to run i think more people that support him it was very close. even though who support him, who wants to run and doesn't then you saw recent numbers with governor desantis. and trump even for his next gubernatorial race, maybe he's saying he won't run in 2024. what do you think the gop should do, and are you a possibility to put your hat in the ring in 2024 >> well, i've got a new job in virginia, and i am extremely excited to be doing it, and we're giving it all we got and what we learned in november is that this is not republicans versus democrats these issues are universal

we won a majority of the independent vote we won a ton of votes from democrat voters who had never voted for a republican before. we did better with the hispanic community, asian community and the black community than a republican has done in virginia ever and this translated into maybe i think for virginians that in fact these basic concepts, these core beliefs is small government standing up for parents rights, investing in law enforcement, getting regulations down and being even more business friendly you said earlier virginia was rated the top state for business by cnbc. we can be even better. we can protect our right to work we can cut job killing regulations, get taxes down. we can grow a work force i think this is where republican politicians have to focus, and oh, by the way, i recommend democrats do, too. work for the people that elected us >> you've got a lot of peoples

attention in a state like virginia with your message and i'd like to talk to you more, so i want to invite you back, again, very soon, governor, to talk about all these issues we'll talk about the economy in virginia and everything else i know you wanted to talk about. but news keeps happening we appreciate your time this morning, governor. >> thank you so much for having me have a blessed day okay, we've got two big breaking tech stories this morning. elon musk offering to buy twitter. it's happening and promising to transform it as a private company. and amazon boss andy jassy releasing his first shareholder letter as ceo just hours ago he's going to join us right here on "squawk box" in an exclusive interview from seattle as the final hour of "squawk box" begins right now

good morning welcome to "squawk box" here on cnbc live from the nasdaq market site in times square i'm joe kernen along with becky quick and ran drew ross sorkin who's live at amazon's headquarters in seattle. he's going to bring us that live interview with the ceo of amazon, andy jassy at 8:30 a.m. eastern. i still haven't figured out what 20 football fields is either they must be stacked all around. >> it's incredible the size and scale of it all is incredible, the technology is incredible >> it's not segues there are literally robots that

are moving effectively big squares of boxes where each of the items get picked it's something to behold >> you know those steel toed shoes, those have been around. i've never owned a pair. >> they're requiring everyone to wear them. >> yes, but it sounds like a new thing. and it certainly would -- if you've got boxes that way 400 pounds that are going to fall on your toe, that'll put you out of business quicker than -- the other big story today elon musk offering to buy the social media company for -- it's not $52.20 it's $54.20 share in cash. twitter confirming it received what it calls an unsolicited nonbinding proposal from musk.

we have a team of cnbc reporters all over this, julia borstin, robert frank, jon fortt all here let's talk to everyone, but, julia, what was your reaction when you first saw this or heard this >> well, look, i think it's not tirely surprising considering the steps musk has taken over the past week particularly the stems he took this past weekend to not be on the board but there's so many big questions here what's going to happen next first where is thisfinancing coming from, and second what does musk want to do with this company? and those two things are interrelated because if he's committed to making twitter a global town square, and he's committed to getting rid of reliance on advertising, something he's tweeted about a number of times, that fundamentally undermines twitter's business model, and there's the question of who's

going to finance effectively potentially making twitter a non-profit at least for some period of time because though there is this push into a subscription business that is a long ways off in terms of being a sustainable business, so the question is what kind of financial partner, what financial partner would team up with musk if he has this sort of more philanthropic vision of what twitter should be >> robert, financing obviously we keep saying the "f" word again and again and again. >> yeah, look, i mean on the face of it he's worth $260 billion, so he could write a $43 billion check and still be $35 billion richer than jeff bezos so on the one hand you could say he could easily fund this, but it's unlikely he would because number one it would bring his stake in tesla down from 17% to about 13%. he does not want to do that. he did sell shares last year but

that was only because he exercised options, and he wound up last year with actually a greater stake in tesla than he started the year so it's unlikely he'd sell those shares, unlikely he'd sell that stake as well to fund this the question is who is the financing partner? is it private equity, is it vc could he pledge his shares and get a lender to get him collateral to fund the shares? he could fund part of it that way, but this is for even the richest guy in the world $43 billion, you're talking real money, unlikely he would do even half of that on his own. >> that starts adding up we've got to get to jon, but as we've said, robert, i mean if it was 1, 2, $3 billion and whether he makes it, up 1, 2, 3, down 1,

2, 3, to make a point i don't know if that type of money enters into his calculus if he's intent on making a point or feels as if he was disrespected or -- i think if he's such a wild card i don't know we can say anything definitively, and maybe he doesn't know what he's going to do at this point. it depends on -- >> and remember at one time he had half of his entire tesla stake pledged to banks as collateral simply to fund, you know, his houses, his lifestyle. so he has been known to go big on leverage in a personal way to fund things he believes in, so i wouldn't rule that out, but, yeah, this is a lot of money he has to bring in a big partner. i don't know what his relationship is with peter teal right now, but you imagine he just brings in two or three

buddies and funds it that way. >> fortt, this is like custom made for you i mean, there's a -- you've done a couple on this already, this is just custom made. the point i made to robert, this is true on the other hand, because i'm not convinced even elon musk knows exactly how this is going to play out at this point depending on circumstances and what happens >> elon musk doesn't seem to be convinced that he knows how he wants this to play out i mean, first of all, it would be an extraordinary surrender for twitter's board to work to do this deal for $54.20 a share especially since in this filing elon musk makes it clear he has no confidence in management and this can't be changed as a public company that's what he thinks. everyone's fired if elon musk gets there unless they think the price for this was trading a few weeks ago

and really the end of last year just a few weeks ago still, that was ridiculous, and there's no way they can get it back there anytime soon on their own and everybody should just give up, they're probably going to shop this around, but taylor who's the chairman of twitter and also co-ceo of salesforce, i'd be shocked if they don't do some shopping of this, and, you know, anybody who's going to come in on this with elon, they're probably going to ask themselves why wouldn't i do this myself especially since elon hasn't laid out a plan how his vision of twitter ever makes money. >> so a classic on the other hand we got it, jon give me your real -- i want to know what jon fortt thinks and only use one hand.

>> i don't have any information. what is elon musk's plan not only to do the tweeting he wants to do but a more interesting business he doesn't necessarily have to make that case to shareholders because they don't get a stake, you have to convince everybody else $.54 20 is the best price you'd hope to get but he's got to convince everybody this is a good deal to make. how does he do that? i don't know >> all right, thank you. julia and robert and jon fortt, we shall see it's the gift that keeps on giving, that's for sure. >> that is joining us right now is a man who has plenty of experience and let's walk this through. earlier this week you joined us and said you think the sec is

already going to be looking into the trades that were made between the time elon passed 5% ownership and the time he discl disclosed he was a 9.2% owner iin the stock. the stock was up 12% immediately after the filing came out saying he was making this 100% cash offer for all the remaining shares of twitter. >> well, good morning, becky and actually john did a nice job let me try to break this down into five constituencies you have obviously elon musk having made an offer you guys recognized is conditional, subject to a number of contingencies including financing. you have the board of directors whose job it is as we've talked about in the last week to take care of shareholders and other constituencies pursuant to their few shared duties. one of the things they're

clearly doing is figuring out just how uncertain, how many contingencies and the like this offer is subject to. we just heard from jon maybe there are others out there who are interested in this asset then you raised regulators, and i think it is important to note that around any transaction and given the activity here there will be regulatory scrutiny. it's ongoing and lastly i think most importantly shareholders and in particular retail shareholders retail shareholders should at least understand that there are those other four constituencies and that there is a great deal of uncertainty around where this will land at the end of the day. i think you've done a nice job this morning of laying that out. >> you know, we've compared this to the $420 offer to take tesla

public or take tesla private, that he didn't have financing for it at the time but he said he had it kind of lined up with the saudis nothing ever came with the sec looking into that. this has been pretty clear in the filing and he said this is contingent on financing he's anticipating giving. >> i'm not going to comment on the detail of any prior matter i was in the government at that time and that case was settled the number of ongoing obligations as a result of that, and i'll leave it at that. i think you need to examine this as its own situation, and there will be scrutiny about as we talked about and scrutiny about whether the right file was formed, scrutiny about whether the disclosure was correct in light of the current movements and like i said before i have

every confidence but no special information that the government authorities are looking into this >> let's talk more about broadly about what's happening in the public markets right now and what regulators are thinking about. we heard yesterday from jamie dimon the comments he made just that there's so much happening, so many risks at play, so many global issues, everything from inflation to lockdowns in china to the war in ukraine that he's convinced the one thing you can say with certainty is more volatility what should regulators be thinking in that context of increased volatility for the stock market >> yeah, jamie made those comments, charlie today. there are uncertainties around them we've been talking about the unfortunate war in ukraine what do we have? we have energy dislocation, agricultural dislocation, clearly supply chain and logistics problems and undoubtedly an inflation

problem. i see all of those in market prices that we're seeing and particularly in the u.s. markets, the sentiment seems to be they will be solved in the near to medium term, and i think what regulators and i used to think about this as much as anything else which is financial stability and what that means for our financial markets and trying to get ahead of problems. regulators should be looking at those issues and assessing whether the market has it right. are we going to have stable energy prices. is agriculture going to be a problem going forward, and this is a little bit different from past situations of instability which kind of came at us in a little bit of a surprise think about it this way. all of those issues i cited are ones that require governments to function well. okay, i mean, look, america is

in probably the best place of any industrialized country right now. andrew, i saw at amazon the fact we have more supply chains, the fact we're fairly energy independent, the fact we are in many ways food independent, we're in a better place to handle these uncertainties and others it's probably why dollars or capital is flowing into america. but american policy makers need to realize the rest of the world is connected to us if these problems manifest themselves elsewhere they will find their way back in some way, shape or form to the u.s >> meaning what, if you don't have bipartisanship and big picture issues that both sides can agree on, you're not going to be able to douj some of the head winds coming our way? >> sure, if i were back sitting in my seat and what do you see in the markets and tell us about what we want to do in terms of the at the executive branch

level, it would be the market is assuming that we're going to get the energy situation under control, and whether that's a result of peace in ukraine and i don't think we can count on that anytime soon but we'll be expecting a credible energy policy going forward and that does require global coordination. >> i hope they're listening. jay, thank you for joining us today. coming up in just a moment an exclusive interview right here in seattle with amazon ceo andy jassy stay tuned u' watching "squawk box" right here on cnbc mount everest, the tallest mountain on the face of the earth. keep dreaming. [music: “you can get it if you really want” by jimmy cliff]

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welcome back to "squawk box. twitter shares rising on news elon musk is offering to buy the company for $54.20 a share how many followers you got there, miky? >> maybe 70,000 in that range, something like that. >> do you block people

>> i only honestly i only block people who are mostly marketing in the stream. crypto bots kind of chain mail type stuff i don't really block people because they annoy me. i'm lucky i don't get attacked it's fascinating i'm not interesting enough to do that, i guess. but what is fascinating you take the -- what maybe the objectives are of musk here, and then you take it if we're going to do on a face value basis, the financial proposition, it becomes very tricky. i'm sure it's been discussed a lot here you look at a two-year chart of twitter that spent most of last year above $54.20 a share, which of course is the offer on the table. if indeed this is an opening gambit and also last and final that's usually not the ato persuade a board of directors to engage in a process and essentially say this is where we're going to go. let's just say roughly, you know, that's the 54-ish area

there, and employees have compensation to those levels and it becomes difficult and also worth keeping in mind you don't really see any take private transactions of a company of this magnitude where there's not some sort of infrastructure here where a single person is doing it now lots of single people own including musk more or less with other investors, but these are just some of the hurdles out there, if you're looking at if from a straight corporate finance perspective. >> so historically, mike, given where the stock has been do you think management will make the case this is not enough that we're -- you know, it's depressed for whatever reason and the nasdaq has been weak, tech stocks, all that stuff. do you think they'll say this is not a serious offer, you don't have financing and we've had 70

on our own >> yes, there's multiple ways it's easy to have first responses as we don't believe this in the interest of shareholders and other stakeholders mostly because it underslews and we have a plan a new ceo, and sometimes that would persuade people and sometimes that would initiate a process whether with musk or other potential buyers, and maybe this is the way this will go if this is implicitly playing the company in play on some level, but i don't think it's difficult for the company to come back with something along those lines? >> very good, thank you. mike santoli coming up we have an exclusive interview and amazon ceo andy jassy, and looks like they're ready and definitely coordinated the outfits. they look awesome and can't wait to go to break

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welcome back to "squawk box. i'm leslie picker. i just got off the stone with morgan stanley cfo i asked her about the investment banking and underwriting pipelines because that business has been a drag across wall street she told me the pipelines do

remain healthy and if the macroconditions stabilize deals could come to market that have otherwise been punted due to that volatility. despite the slump in investment banking, investment welt management were effectively flat for the quarter. it was similar story for goldman sachs. overall revenue and profit were down significantly from a year ago as ceo david sullivan said in a release, quote, the rapidly unfolding market and environment and significant effect on climate activity came to the fore and equity issuance came to a near standstill. trading higher premarket citi reporting about a half hour ago also beating estimates ceo jane frasier quoted in the release saying how the geopolitical macroenvironment has become more volatile although she's pleased with

services which were a bright spot for the quarter however, investment banking, again, was a drag, but frasier said the area remains a, quote, key area of investment for the firm you can see citi group shares up about 1.6% right now in a separate release citi updated its russia exposure down from 9.8 billion that citi disclosed last month in an updated 10k. andrew >> okay. thanks so hutch. when we come back, we are going to be joined by this man, andy jassy. we've been waiting all morning to talk to him an exclusive conversation with the ceo. stay tuned you're watching "squawk box" on cnbc this thing, it's making me get an ice bath again. what do you mean? these straps are mind-blowing! they collect hundreds of data points like hrv and rem sleep, so you know all you need for recovery. and you are? i'm an investor...in invesco qqq,

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welcome back to "squawk box. we are live in seattle, and amazon's headquarters this morning where andy jassy just published his first shareholder letter since taking helm of the company last summer. he joins me right now in an exclusive administer view right here in a room, by the way, we were talking about this earlier. this has posters with basically signatures of every new product that's been developed in the company over the years it's very nice to have you here on what's turned out to be a very jam-packed news day, and i want to talk about your letter

in just a moment, because it is a major piece of the news on the morning. elon musk does loom large here in certain ways given you're now competing with him when it comes to space and satellites and also now with your vehicles what do you make of this >> i don't know you how wake up at this hour every day but the news and it's interesting, we all use twitter to some degree it's very interesting service and capability >> would you ever think amazon should own a twitter i ask because i think wal-mart at one point wanted to get involved with tiktok and social media. you think elon musk is going to ultimately be the buyer? >> i don't know. it's the rumor, what you guys

are talking about. >> let me talk about your letter and what's going on right now. one of the things fascinating is what's happened during this company -- to this company during your new time here. i mean, you're been here have a very long time, but in this new role and we're talking about supply chain issues, the pandemic with issues of china and what that's going to mean, big inflationary pressures. how do you just see things as they are right now >> well, it's quite an interesting time and, you know, we -- we grew three times faster than we expected in 15 months. we had a fulfillment center network that we built -- it's a pretty big network we built over 25 years that we had to double in 24 months it's been a time of extraordinary growth, and at the same time when you grow that fast and some of the things happening in the world there are also challenges. we doubled our fulfillment center network we hired about 300,000 people

last year alone, which is a lot of people. at the same time even though we hired a lot of people, we couldn't hire all the people we needed in all the places we needed so that created challenges in placing inventory close to our customers as we typically do, and when you have to place it further away it means longer transportation costs to get there. the rate of transportation has gone up over the last number of months, and you see what's happened with the war in ukraine. you look at the cost of fuel and metal and building just very different. the metal on supply chains you mention it's -- there are certain items that are very difficult to get you know, we all are -- have a lot more demand for chips than there is supply right now. and because we design our own chips and things we do in aws

and devices and even our own vehicles, we get a fair share of those but still it's not fast enough or fair enough. it's still more expensive and more time consuming to get products into the country, so there's still supply chain challenges >> you have to plan out -- how are you even planning at this point in terms of just how transitory or not these inflationary pressures are i know you just added a 5% surcharge to third party sellers to deal with the fuel costs. do you think that is a long-term situation? do you think that that shifts back >> i hope not. you know, the last thing we ever want to do is have to raise costs for our sellers. and sellers for us are, you know, so important, so critical to the business. and in the early part of the pandemic with all the costs i

talked about ural, all along we absorbed all those costs for sellers but in part because we thought some of those would attenuate as we got to this year and some of the impacts and change there's a certain point you can't keep avoiding all those costs and running a business economically i think we're very aware sellers have costs as well they're very important customers as well and partners and we'll keep looking at how costs evolve >> what do you think we we should be doing here in the united states in manufacturing those chips, and does amazon have a role in that long-term, you think? >> i think it should concern people that so much of the chip production is concentrated in one place, and there's -- you know, there's a lot of geopolitical things that could happen so i think it's quite wise of the u.s. to be thinking about creating more production here.

and i'm very happy about the chips act we've been working on in the country it's a lot of money, 35, $40 billion and it's probably not enough i think we're going to need more than that to have the ability to withstand some kind of shock to production in a particular part of the world, but i think it's very important you know, i think we design our own chips and bieg buyers and customers and so there could be a role for us to play. we certainly want to help and we certainly want to partner. >> i know intel is trying to do this, but do we have enough know how in the country to actually do the manufacturing piece of this >> it's a good question. i think we have a start. intel obviously has been doing this for a long time and first on the vp side for a long time and i have confidence in the ability to produce and

they have work to do and we're going to need additional providers to be where we ultimately want to be. and what are you seeing in terms of wages going up? >> well, they certainly have gone up over the last two years, and some of which we did ourselves, and we championed the 15 and it's high time that changed, too, by the way >> i don't know the exact number, but below $7.50 to me feels very wrong i think it should be closer to that $15 minimum wage. our average starting salary know is over $18. wages have continued to go up. when you run a retail business like we do there are relatively

low operating margin businesses, so there's really only so far you can go and have an economic business and make sense. but we continue to see wages go up there's been significant acceleration over the last two years, and it's hard to tell how much more they'll go up. i don't think we'll go backwards, though. >> in that context how do you see the union movement that's taking place frankly around the country but clearly in certain places and i'm thinking about new york where i'm from at amazon >> i'd say a few things. first of all, of course, it's employees choice whether or not they want to join a union. we happen to think we're better not doing so for a couple of reasons at least a place like amazon empowers employees. if they see something they can do better for customers and themselves then go meet in a room and decide to change it and then change it that doesn't happen in unions. i also think people are better

off having direct connections with their managers. we get to hear from a lot of people as opposed to it all being filtered through one voice. if you want to keep the construct we've had for this long, you have to have competitive and compelling benefits for employees our clear choice program where the full fimment center for employees who want to get a college education, we'll pay for their full tew egz those things really matter we just won't compromise in the customer experience. that for us is paramount >> what did you think when you heard president biden effectively say, and this is in regard to the unions around amazon, here we come >> well, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and, you

know, we have a lot of things that we i think have supported the administration on and agreed with them on, some of the way we've tried to help with covid and immigration and, you know, the chips piece we were talking about, the infrastructure bill we don't agree on everything, though >> one of the issues the unions have raised you know so well are safety issues and you addressed this in some degree in this morning's letter and i'm hoping you can speak to it because there's some data out two days ago that seems to suggest and this was data put together by the union advocates there are more even double the number of injuries at amazon facilities relative to their peers. >> well, look, there's a lot of ways you can spin the safety data, and some special interest folks like you're talking about with this case will do it for their own interests, and that data is not really accurate.

you know, what i would say is a few things first of all, anybody that hired a lot of people during the pandemic like we did -- and there are plenty of others who did as well -- their incident rates or recordable incidents which osha asked everyone to report on went up in 2021 versus 2020 because you had a lot of new people in our case we hired about 300,000 people just in 2021 most had never worked in this type of industrial space and had to be trained. and all the data we have said that the incidents of injury in the first six months is always much higher than thereafter. so when you have a lot of new people you'll have more more incidents. but that said if you look at the injury data and safety data, you know, for us we have few macroareas in which we do work we have what osha calls warehousing. we have what osha calls messenger and couriers, and then we have grocery. if you look at the industry average versus our numbers,

we're a little bit higher than average in warehousing we're a little bit lower than average in messenger and courier and groceries. we don't aspire to be average. we are trying to be the best in the industry, and it's why we're spending -- we spend about $300 million on safety last year alone. we have about 8,000 people who just work in safety, and we're trying all sorts of things and working on all sorts of things we have a rotational program we built where we build sophisticated algorithms that try to predict when someone is doing something too frequently and rotate their jobs and rotate what they're working in. we've had new shoes we've had everybody wear, new training and mechanics. we're working on those things. but the reality is we'll not be

happy until we're the best in industry and even then i won't bow happy because i know there are things we have to work on. >> one of the things jeff said in his letter last year is one of the missions now is to be earth's best employer and earth's safest place to work how do you think about that relative to the priority of serving the customer >> i don't think they have to be at odds. in fact, i think they're very complementary. when you take care of employees and employees are safe and love working where they work, they stay longer. they tend to be happier and more productive and all of those things improve customer experience. i see them as complementary. >> i mention third party sellers and fuel surcharge, but i also want to talk because there are investigations going on as you know and other concerns about amazon doing what microsoft has

labeled products that compete with third party sellers how do you think about that relationship and also how do you think about being able to use or not use data to think about selling or not selling and working? >> i think you're talking about similar brands and private labels and as you know we didn't invent private label that's a decades long practice all the big retailers have participated in for a long period of time i think when you decide to build private label in particular areas for us it's almost always driven by customers who say i like this particular product, but i want an alternative that's more cost-effective. for us it's a smaller part of our business than it is for most retailers. but what we always are going to show customers is what we think they most want

and we're always going to optimize to show customers what we think would be best >> how should third party sellers think about this >> third party sellers and their products are a majority of units that we sell in the store today, and so if you build a great product with a great price and high quality, you're going to perform better like everybody else you have to find ways to get awareness, but you have that product, there's only so many things any company can manufacture. we tend to focus in areas that tend to be the over day household pieces that people want and need. but if you build a great product you're going to have a business over time. and this is what we've seen

borne out in the numbers >> talking about products and talking about a couple of component parts of amazon, but in the retail piece i have a prime question for you which is where do you think it elasticity is long-term on the prime price? we talked about this on the air actually when you raised the price on it last year in terms of you're a family of four >> it's a good question and i don't think anyone knows the answer to it i think the value of prime today when you think about all the two-day shipping and increasingly we're moving more and more shipments to one day, what you get in prime video, you know, with our originals and all the products that we have a channels program where third party entertainment companies are selling subscriptions and channels to meme we've got a whole catalog in music, what we've got on the

gaming side with the grocery and then you layer in some of the things we keep adding really every month. so we keep adding value. i think it is a great value today, and we don't plan on stopping atting value in prime >> what is the valuation in media. we talked about last week warnermedia merged with discovery plus everyone is trying to think what the streaming wars look like when you think about the economic matter is this a component part of prime, or is the economics of it independent of prime and i ask that because, you know, does the business -- do these other businesses ultimately subsidize the

streaming business a lot of people in hollywood are trying to understand what it's all going to look like i think it's still pretty early days for us in entertainment, and we've invested -- >> you just merged with mgm. >> yes, we just merged with mgm. we've invested a lot of money and resource we're very optimistic about what's possible, and, you know, today what we find is so many people are starting prime because they see some show that they love in prime video, and then they oftentimes once they start prime, they use the shipping benefit and buy retail products and vice versa. so i think that today it really -- it connects that prime value proposition, and i think people get a lot of value from those collected pieces as we keep adding more and more content as you see what we're doing with sports, and we're pretty early in what we'll add,

it's possible we'll explore other models as well >> it's part of prime, not something you want to spin-off just yet >> no. >> talking about spin-offs obviously you've heard speculations for years now whether certain parts should be reasons or economic reasons. how do you think about that? >> well, did jon fortt put you up to this >> he did not. >> jon asks me this every time i see him. you know, i think that you always have to decide, you know, when you're going to choose to spin something off, when you want to smpin off. typically, it is when companies need money to invest in a business or if they want to get something off their balance sheet, financial statements. we just don't find that to be the case you know, our consumer businesses have a lot of connectivity between them. we were talking about an example of that with prime video and our

retail business. you know, in the case of aws, we haven't had any issues with respect to being able to fund that business the way it's needed to be funded to grow. we just haven't found a compelling reason to do so. >> you recently aw ly announcede stock split. what was the rational >> there is no substantive reason to do it. it wasn't more those types of reasons. it was really, because of that, it meant you could keep it the way you were running it or you could change it. we just kind of looked and thought it might provide more flexibility for our employees. there's a bunch of small but meaningful examples, including, you know, when your stock price is over $3,000, if you have an employee who wants to sell for whatever reason they need to sell, but they don't need to dispose of $3,000, they have to

sell a whole share, opposed to when your stock price is more like $150, you need to sell a share because you need something that is $500 or $1,000 it is more flexible and more convenient for them. we just, at the end of the day, felt like it'd provide a little more flexibility for employees. >> one of the things we bat around on this show virtually every day, it's hard to get through an interview without mentioning the word "crypto. as a payment platform, and you have a huge payment platform, how do you think of crypto today? >> i think it's an emerging area, obviously. it's very interesting and there's a lot of discussion about it yeah, i think nfts have really started to take off. >> do you own any? >> i don't own any nfts myself. >> bitcoin >> i don't have bitcoin myself so, you know, i think i expect that nfts will continue to grow very significantly we're not probably close to adding crypto as a payment

mechanism in our retail business, but i do believe, over time, that you'll see crypto become bigger. it's possible. >> could you see yourself selling nfts >> i think it is possible down the road. >> on the platform before we let you go, it's been ten months now in this new role, and i'm curious what the relationship is like with jeff how much time you guys spend together what does he think of all of this we were mentioning, we thought your letter was a little bezosian in some respects. what's it been like? >> well, i have a great relationship with jeff you know, i've known him for a long time. unbelievable amount of respect for him. we talk registrularly we talk weekly it is great to have a sounding board, and he's got so much wisdom you know, i think both of us share a lot of excitement and

optimism for the future. we're so early in all of our businesses i mean, even in our retail business, which people think of as kind of our most mature business, you know, we're about 1% of the worldwide retail market segment 85% of retail still lives off yn line we're so early in all of these areas. aws is a growing 37% year-over-year in 2021 90% of the world's i.t. spend is o on-prem sand not in the cloud alexis with the chance to be the best personal assistant who changes your live. entertainment, as we talked about. advertising. kiper, building a low-earth orbit satellite. robo taxi service. we're so early in these areas, we both share optimism that there's an opportunity to change a lot of customer experiences

over time. >> are you going to space? >> i'm not going any time soon >> you don't want to go up >> i didn't say i didn't want to go up. i'm just saying i'm not going any time soon. >> andy jassy, thank you. >> thanks for having me. >> congratulations on the letter we hope to do this more often. thank you again. thanks guys, i'm going to send it back to you in the studio we have a lot more on the other big corporate story of the morning. elon musk offeringo tbuy twitter outright stay tuned coming right back. what if it's a company that's pursuing 100% renewable energy in our operations. and aiming to protect millions of acres of land. so we can all live better.

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welcome back to ""squawk box."" european central bank leaving rates unchanged and changing the plans to end the quantitative easing in the quarter, perhaps providing firmer guidance it'll do so. the ecb president battling through covid, giving a press conference explaining that inflation pressures have intensified and they're more widespread meanwhile, growth will remain weak as a result of the russian conflict, she said the war and the pandemic lockdowns in asia are creating new bottlenecks, and the ecb stands ready to adjust all its instruments, including a significant impact from the -- there would be, sorry, a significant impact on a boycott of russian oil and gas

what you see when you look at the german 2-year, for example the statement was more dovish than expected. there was expectation they might pull forward, ending quantitative easing. by ten basis points or so. came back halfway as a result of imparting the idea that maybe the ecb could move earlier >> war and the lockdowns, you'd have to figure, steve, probably not big a surprise all right, thank you finally, one more look at twitter and the shares we'll look at tesla, as well, since some conjecture that something could affect the shares of the main thing we think about with elon musk twitter is at 48, below 54. >> well, it shot up 12%, now you see the gains of about 6% for twitter shares, as people wonder if he goes through with it or if twitter will actually take it seriously and say yes to a deal

like that. he said this is his last and best offer. >> who knows what lurks in the minds of men you know who knows >> no. >> only the shadow only the shadow knows. i don't know what elon is thinking it's been a great thing to speculate about today. make sure you join us -- oh, no, not tomorrow, monday three days tax day, eh. see you monday good thursday morning. welcome to "squawk on the street." i'm carl quintanilla with david cramer we'll discuss the big news of the morning. of course, it is elon musk launching a $43 billion hostile takeover of twitter, offering $54.20 a share, 18% premium to the prior close. musk writing a letter to chair taylor saying,