A logo of US company’s Meta is displayed during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, on May 22, 2024.
Julien De Rosa | Afp | Getty Images
A former Meta staffer who was placed on a “Do Not Hire” list after he stalked and harassed one of the company’s employees found himself rehired by the tech giant after it gutted its talent and recruitment department, a lawsuit filed Tuesday says.
The suit, filed in New York Supreme Court on behalf of Meta employee James Napoli, accuses the company of violating New York City’s human rights law and negligence for hiring the person back. It also accuses the company of retaliation after it allegedly sidelined Napoli and took him off big projects when he raised concerns that the person had been rehired.
“I had spoken to my employer about this … on numerous occasions and I was told that he would not be able to enter our offices, that he would not be hired again, and then like, all of a sudden, this guy is reaching out to me [on Meta’s internal messaging system],” Napoli, a marketing leader who works out of Meta’s New York City office, told CNBC in an interview. “I trusted that my employer would be able to keep me safe, right? Because stalkers and harassers are also workplace hazards. … And this isn’t just a hazard for me, this is a dangerous individual that was let back into the workplace.”
The lawsuit comes after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in March 2023 that Meta would be reducing the size of its recruiting team as part of a larger strategy to cut 21,000 jobs, remove layers of middle management and operate more efficiently.
Although Wall Street has responded favorably to Meta’s cost-cutting plans, layoffs in the company’s customer service and trust and safety teams have made it harder for the social networking giant to respond to concerns from small businesses and influencers, as well as state and local election officials who use Facebook and Instagram, CNBC has previously reported.
In the aftermath of Meta’s cost-cutting efforts and ensuing layoffs, attorneys for Napoli say in the lawsuit that the company is relying “more heavily on hiring employees through outside contractors” and employs “far fewer recruiters to screen applicants,” which has negatively impacted their ability to properly catch red flags.
“Meta’s employment practices are apparently so chaotic, reckless, and ineffectual that the company fails to keep track of the most fundamental data point in its workplace – the dangerous people who pose a severe risk to Meta’s own employees,” the lawsuit, filed by attorneys Carrie Goldberg and Peter Romer-Friedman, states. “Yet Meta tells the public and public officials that the company has the ability to safeguard the personal data of billions of children and adults on their platforms.”
Meta has previously dealt with similar allegations that it’s employed workers who have engaged in stalking and related activity. For example, in 2018, the company said it fired a security engineer who allegedly used internal data to stalk women online.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to request for comment on the lawsuit filed Tuesday.
‘Do Not Hire’ list
The person accused of stalking Napoli, identified only by the initials “G.F.” in the complaint, was a member of Meta’s marketing team before he was laid off in November 2022 when the company cut 13% of its staff as part of a larger restructuring.
Before the layoffs, G.F. and Napoli occasionally saw each other in meetings but were no more than “work acquaintances,” Napoli said. After G.F. lost his job, he reached out to Napoli for support and asked him to get a coffee. During that meeting, the accused stalker started making “disturbing” comments, the filing states.
“[He] told me that he hears voices, God talks to him, and God had been talking to him about me since April of that year, and he sent me a list of documents that were his like journal entries over the months,” Napoli recalled.
Napoli “immediately” reported the incident to his manager and to HR, and says at first he was concerned for G.F.’s well-being. But over the next year, Napoli says, the situation escalated.
G.F. began sending Napoli up to 30 messages a day, contacting his family members and referencing Napoli’s partner, friends and even his dog, Luigi, in messages.
“I am being mind tortured with an A.I tech which I don’t know where it’s coming from and I am feeling like my love for you is being used for experiences I didn’t agree for, while I am being told by spirits that you and I are the two messengers,” G.F. wrote in one message to Napoli, according to the complaint.
G.F. found out where Napoli lived and “personally delivered a large ream of disturbing writings and drawings” to the apartment, forcing Napoli and his partner to move, the lawsuit says.
“It really felt like I was drowning for a long time because there was just nothing that I could do to escape. … It was really terrifying,” said Napoli. “I was worried about going out, I was worried about my dog, I was worried about my partner, because they were all mentioned by this person.”
Napoli reported G.F. to the police and considered getting a restraining order, but under New York state law orders of protection are only available to people who have an intimate or familial relationship to their stalker, the lawsuit states.
In September 2023, Napoli informed Meta that the stalking had increased “in both frequency and severity,” and the HR department assured him that G.F. was on the company’s “Do Not Hire” list and its “No Entry” list, which identifies people who shouldn’t be permitted into company buildings.
But just four months later, the company hired G.F. back to a contractor position after he apparently slipped through the cracks in the hiring process, the lawsuit says. Napoli learned his accused stalker was back at Meta when G.F.’s name popped up on Workplace, the company’s internal messaging system. Napoli says he received a message from G.F. stating that he’d been rehired and would be seeing him at meetings and events.
“To have all of that come back after I was guaranteed that I would be kept safe, it was really harrowing,” said Napoli. “I immediately went to [HR]… they let me know that they were equally stunned. They didn’t have an answer as to how it happened, and they let me know that they would investigate.”
Terminated again
For the next month, Napoli says he “lived in terror of interacting with G.F. at work” until Meta notified him that G.F. had been terminated. However, after G.F. lost his job a second time, his “stalking and harassment of Mr. Napoli significantly amplified and became more creative, sexually violent, and obsessive,” the lawsuit states.
As Napoli grappled with the continued stalking, he also faced what the lawsuit says was retaliation at Meta for complaining to his managers and to HR about the decision to rehire G.F.
Napoli had been tapped to lead an artificial intelligence marketing push at Meta, but says that in response to his complaints, those projects were taken away and he found himself sidelined with reduced responsibilities.
In his complaint, Napoli is asking for damages but didn’t specify an amount. He also asked the court to enter judgements that would prohibit G.F. from being rehired at Meta and prohibit the company from “engaging in any further discriminatory or retaliatory acts” against Napoli.
“I want to be able to do my job, and I want to be able to do my job without feeling like the shoe is going to drop,” said Napoli. “I am very passionate about my work, and I take a lot of pride in my work, and that is really all I want to be able to do.”
Napoli said he decided to tell his story because he wants Meta to make reforms that would prevent something like this from happening again.
“It doesn’t seem to me as though there are the right processes in place to stop this from happening to … me or to someone else,” said Napoli. “Everybody deserves a safe workplace.”
Eric Baker, co-founder and CEO of Ticket reseller StubHub, rings the opening bell during his company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., September 17, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
StubHub shares opened at $25.35in their New York Stock Exchange debut on Wednesday after the online ticket seller priced its IPO in the middle of its expected range.
The pricing late Tuesday at $23.50 per share raised $800 million for the company, now trading under ticker symbol “STUB.”
StubHub’s long-awaited IPO comes after the company paused its plans in April, when President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the stock market into a tailspin. It was the second such delay, after market volatility forced StubHub to temporarily shelve its IPO plans in July 2024.
The IPO is the latest in a flurry of tech offerings as the market rebounds from a dismal few years. Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna and Gemini, the crypto firm founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, rose in their respective debuts last week. Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchangeBullish, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle have also hit the market in recent months.
StubHub has been through a number of transactions in its 25-year history to get to this point. It was purchased by eBay for $310 million in 2007, but was reacquired by its co-founder Eric Baker in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
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StubHub has benefited from a resurgence in the live events market in the years following the Covid lockdowns. Sales have also boomed from massively popular shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, as well as sporting events like the Super Bowl.
The company said in its updated prospectus filed last month that those sorts of events can also make StubHub’s revenues lumpy and difficult to predict.
In the first quarter, StubHub reported revenue growth of 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. Its net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago. Gross merchandise sales, which represent the total dollar value paid by ticket buyers, reached $2.08 billion in the three months ended March 31.
StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. More than 40 million tickets were sold on StubHub’s marketplace last year from roughly one million sellers, the company said in August.
The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of probing Ticketmaster over whether it’s done enough to keep automated bots from circumventing its per-person ticket limits for popular events, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The FTC in May sent a warning letter to StubHub saying it must comply with the agency’s “junk fees” rule and alleging some of its ticket listings failed to display the total price, including all mandatory fees and charges.
Madrone Partners is StubHub’s largest investor with ownership of 24.5% of Class A shares prior to the offering. WestCap is second at 12.3%, followed by Bessemer Venture Partners at 8.8%.
It’s been a decade since Kayvon Beykpour sold Periscope to Twitter for a reported $100 million, allowing the social media site to jump into livestreaming.
Twitter shuttered Periscope in 2021, and the parent company, now called X and owned by Elon Musk, gravitated to a live events product called Spaces.
Meanwhile, Beykpour, who spent seven years at Twitter after the acquisition, is back with Macroscope. He said on Wednesday that he’s raised $40 million from venture investors, including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive Capital.
While Periscope targeted a consumer audience, Macroscope is going squarely after businesses. Beykpour’s idea is to help software developers easily spot issues in their code, and show managers what their engineers are doing.
Beykpour said the lack of transparency in the software development process was a big problem in his former gig.
“So much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was just understanding what the hell was happening,” Beykpour, said in an interview. “You have all these engineers at the company and all these very important things that we need to get done with absolute opaqueness around, like, What progress did we make? What are all these people working on?”
He said the startup set out to help product leaders first and added features for programmers later.
Macroscope integrates with Microsoft-owned GitHub’s source code repositories and project management software from Atlassian and Linear. Its technology connects to artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI that can propose alternative code and answer questions from developers and product executives.
Products like GitHub Copilot and Cursor’s BugBot already can review code with help from AI. Beykpour said that in testing Macroscope outperformed competitors when it came to correctly identifying known software bugs.
And when it comes to tools to help managers stay on top of developers’ activity, there’s not much available, Beykpour said.
“They’re solving it with meetings,” he said. “If we cannot surpass the bar of, people call a meeting to ask a bunch of engineers what’s happening, we’ve failed miserably.”
Macroscope costs $30 per developer per month, which includes the status-checking components for bosses, while Cursor is priced at $32 per month when purchased annually.
Early users include film studio A24, online learning startup Class and probiotics company Seed Health.
Beykpour started Macroscope in 2023 with Periscope co-founder Joseph Bernstein and Rob Bishop, founder of AI startup Magic Pony, which Twitter acquired in 2016. The company has 17 employees and is based in San Francisco.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker said Wednesday that recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing will cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.
Revenue is expected to dip year over year as consumers digest the new rules, Baker told CNBC, which require online ticket sellers to prominently show the total cost upfront.
“We’ve seen this in states like New York that have done it. You have a drop off and it hits about 10%. … Then it’s just back to normal,” Baker said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “You’re growing off the base because you now normalized it. So it’s just a one-time hit to conversion, resets the market, and then onward and upward you go.”
The online ticket marketplace is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday under the symbol “STUB.”
StubHub late Tuesday priced its IPO at $23.50, landing at the midpoint of the expected range it gave last week of $22 to $25. The share sale values the company at $8.6 billion.
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Online ticket sellers such as StubHub, Live Nation’s Ticketmaster and Vivid Seats have had to adjust to the Federal Trade Commission’s “junk fees” rule that took effect in May.
The rule “prohibits bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide total prices and mislead people about fees in the live-event ticketing and short-term lodging industries,” the agency said.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued StubHub last August for “predatory drip pricing,” or deceptively advertising low prices for tickets, while a countdown clock creates a false sense of urgency and the total cost at checkout climbs “vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”
Baker said the company has advocated for ticket providers to have “all-in pricing.”
“If you’re the only person in the market doing it for the reasons I said, you end up with a problem,” Baker said. “So now that everyone’s doing it, everyone’s happier, and you have a level playing field.”
The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Baker in 2000, and was acquired by eBay for $310 million seven years later. Baker reacquired StubHub in 2020 for roughly $4 billion through his new company Viagogo.
StubHub delayed its planned IPO in April as President Donald Trump‘s sweeping tariffs jolted markets.