evan spiegel joined our next guest at the tech live conference and covered a lot of ground, criticizinghe metaverse, praising augmented reality. let's bring in joanna stern for a closer look. some of the things hinted at code not too long ago but talk about how he expanded upon them? >> we got to see a good side of evan spiegel he was optimistic, obviously looking back at the last couple of weeks and saying it's been a tough road both with the layoffs at the company but also obviously the stock price. i think some of the most interesting comments he made were around augmented reality, he remains really excited about this for the future of the company. i tried to press him specifically on how to can you expand that beyond fun filters he said we don't under estimate fun, we think that's the way to get people in. but how do you get more people as i was asking him to buy things through the app through augmented reality you can hold the phone to your feet and look at shoes. so how do you convert that into people buying. he had some interesting answers there about how he can build towards tha

we heard from evan spiegel at the wall street journal technology conference. he blasted the metaverse,g the last thing i want to do when i get home from work after a long day is live inside a computer. two questions. what does this mean for snap, and does this infatuation that some brands might have with the metaverse dry up, especially as we go into an economic downturn? jasmine: snap has positioned itself as anti-metaverse for some time. it has been susceptible to a lot of the challenges plaguing all social platforms. part of the problem is that snap is considered a less essential platform than meta, although meta is experiencing cuts. it is easy for advertisers to justify pulling ads and budget from snap. it doesn't help that it staked its future on augmented reality, which is a more experimental format for a lot of advertisers. snap has something that meta and twitter have struggled to articulate, and that is a long-term vision, but having a long-term vision, isn't really a way to help in the short term. snap has to turn things around now if it wants to ma

emily: remind us of the innovative things that evan spiegel has been trying over the last year.e also has an anti-meta-view on the metaverse. >> i am with david in the sense that evan is a smart person. i think he is one of the best. he has been routinely copied by mark zuckerberg at facebook. constantly coming up and do things. he is focused on augmented reality, similar to mark zuckerberg. he is trying to build that type of stuff into the camera, something that people already have in their hands, versus the metaverse idea which is still off. they tried to build a subscription product so that they are not quite as reliant on advertising. trying to give people early access to features. they have done spectacles. they are building other augmented reality glasses that are not here yet, but are coming. those of the types of projects i wonder if they will continue to invest in. they have started to pull back on anything not directly related to revenue end user growth. ar, while it is something he has been passionate about, makes me wonder if they can continue to invest that in no wa

we have seen this from mark zuckerberg, evan spiegel, no one has pulled it off. think that is a big ambition of a lot of folks. it's just that the internet may not work the same way here. we will have to see. emily: meantime, you have been doing some math, and i believe the calculation is if elon musk gets rid of all the bots and spam on twitter he might lose 13.5 million followers on his own? >> i think a lot of people will lose followers. it depends on what you think of as a bot. there are a lot of augmented accounts that people love, like ones that tell you when inert because happen. i don't think that is what elon musk is talking about. his account in particular is disproportionally affected by folks who want to do crypto scams, for instance, so i think that those celebrity accounts do tend to be more overrun by bots, and if you were to get rid of that kind of account on twitter, it would affect the biggest names, elon musk, justin bieber, long-standing accounts on twitter. emily: we are seeing his vision take shape, if this deal goes through. sarah frier, th

evan spiegel did address that last night on the earnings call. >> our revenue grew 6% year over year and we generated adjusted ebitda of $73 million and free cash flow of $18 million we were focused on increasing our share of wallet by working to increase the advertising spend as we believe these are the most defensible advertising budgets in a challenged economic environment. >> jim, i know you called it a joke company a moment ago. not so much a real company >> that was way too kind >> wow >> it's not a business it was a business. there were people who decided that capitalism could reign and you could possibly do an advertising page like the one i'm looking at for espn+ or casper, down with a bunch of joke stock that no one would ever look at, including any 18-year-old and 16-year-old, and it was something that, for an ephemeral moment, was thought to be a way to be in front of eyeballs of people who were trying to figure out colgate versus crest what they didn't realize, really, it was just a messaging system it's like a bad whatsapp so, i think that people who got behind this wer

these fundamental problems or challenges still exist but maybe some upside because snap as we know evan spiegel has been transparent with investors maybe under -- >> promising. >> yes, thank you. >> he has been so transparent talking about the decline in ad revenue, the plateau, the picking up of it if we look at the snap chart, look at it over the full year, it's interesting to see that trajectory, we are hearing from snap after the bell on thursday, and the question is how are they navigating the challenges? they talked about the headwinds of a contraction in ad spending. they've talked about the challenges of apple's operating system changes that make it harder to target ads are they finding better work arounds? and they have the augmented reality tools. how valuable are those tools to advertisers as they try to drive sales this holiday season. the question is, are they at an advantage or can they build up their advantage as they compete -- >> right and none of those have gone away. >> i'm wary. i wonder are we -- when i say "we" i'm including retail investors. there's this expectation, thin

it is so beaten down evan spiegel has told investors of all these worries he has and the macro headwinds they're facing is that going to work the same this time around >> we'll see julia had a good point around the ease in which the ad spend can be turned on or off. that could potend for a positive note, depending i think on the health of the consumer, i think looking at where inventory levels are i'm really mixed right now in terms of the signals that we're receiving. but it does feel like everyone is preparing on the retail side for a decline. if that happens, then we'll obviously see a little bit of a decline on advertising spend as well >> certainly, a lot of the challenges that snap is facing is baked in. share are down 76% year to date. when you look at pinterest, shares are down only 34% this year, which is better than meta, 60% loss year to date. what do you like in this space >> so again, i always go back to i like the diversity and the stability of businesses like google, so i like alphabet a lot. i'm a little concerned about meta i think it's not clear to me house the billions

i think about evan spiegel from snap. >> snap, i know. >> this was a company that was worth $100 billionding on how a wealth tax would have been constructed he would have paid -- look, i know nobody is getting out their smallest violin for evan spiegel, but he would have paid enormous taxes ostensibly when it was worth $100 billion. >> let's do the math 2% wealth tax. he would pay 2 billion now it's 13 billion so, okay, he would be worth 9 billion. >> that's market cap his numbers are going to be lower. >> yeah, okay. i'm fine in that case of someone being worth -- >> do you have a credit if they lose their wealth? >> we can have some credit here's the basic thing we should do one of these "squawk box"s from silicon valley. >> let's do it "squawk" in the valley >> moderna and pfizer ripe for windfall profits they benefit from this horrible pandemic. >> look, i've credited them for innovation but what i would have said they benefitted from nih funding but they should be making sure that's being sold at a fair price, not just in the united states. >> we didn't talk about trading. >> we did

evan spiegel seeing his net worth falling from $14 to $1.5 billion. very tiny violins. he's lost a full sergey brin that's amazing he has voting control, robert. we talk about, perhaps not enough that's the reason that meta is doing what it's doing because he wants it to. it's different than bezos, to a certain extent different than musk even, to some extent as well. but many of the other names you discussed also do have voting control over their companies >> look, you know, the argument to that, when people bought into meta, it's like, look, his fortune is tied to meta just like our fortune it's not comparable given he's taken $17 billion off the table. investors weren't that lucky i think that there's a whole misconception that, okay, it's a concentrated owner position. he has voting control, but just like us, he's his financial fortune is tied to this company. it's just not equivalent >> pretty amazing, robert, thank you. just one more angle of the meta story today. >>> markets hanging onto some green. s&p is up almost ten points. the vix close to