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.”
A slogan related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is displayed on a screen in Intel pavilion, during the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 16, 2024.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Big Tech is doubling down on investing billions in India, drawn by its abundance of resources for building data centers, a large talent and digital user pool, and market opportunity.
In under 24 hours, Microsoft and Amazon pledged more than $50 billion toward India’s cloud and AI infrastructure, while Intel on Monday announced plans to make chips in the country to capitalize on its growing PC demand and speedy AI adoption.
While India trails the U.S. and China in the race to develop a native AI foundational model, and lacks a large domestic AI infrastructure company, it wants to leverage its expertise in the information technology sector to create and deploy AI applications at enterprise level, also offering Big Tech companies a huge opportunity.
Having a model or computing is not enough for any enterprise to use AI effectively, and it requires companies making application layer and a large talent pool to deploy them, S. Krishnan, secretary at India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told CNBC.
Stanford University ranks India among the top four countries along with the U.S., China and the UK in the global and national AI vibrancy ranking. GitHub, a community of developers, has ranked India at the top with the global share of 24% of all projects.
India’s opportunity lies more in “developing applications” which will be used to drive revenues for AI companies, Krishnan said.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced $17.5 billion in investment in the country, spread over 4 years, aimed at expanding hyperscale infrastructure, embedding AI into national platforms, and advancing workforce readiness.
“This scale of capex gives Microsoft first‑mover advantage in GPU‑rich data centers while making Azure the preferred platform for India’s AI workloads, as well as deepening alignment with the government’s AI public infrastructure push,” said Tarun Pathak, research Director at Counterpoint Research.
Amazon on Wednesday announced plans to invest over $35 billion, on top of the $40 billion it has already invested in the country.
Over the past few months, AI and tech majors such as OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity have offered their tools for free to millions in India, with Google also firming up its plans to invest $15 billion toward building data center capacity for a new AI hub in southern India.
“India combines a huge digital user base, rapidly growing cloud and AI demand, and a high-talent IT ecosystem that can build and consume AI at scale, making it more than just a market for users and instead a core engineering and deployment hub,” Pathak said.
Data center opportunity
India has several advantages when it comes to building data centers. Markets such as Japan, Australia, China and Singapore in the Asia Pacific region have matured. Singapore, one of the oldest data center hubs in the region, has limited room to deploy large-scale data centers due to land availability issues.
India has abundant space for large-scale data center developments. When compared with data center hubs in Europe, power costs in India are relatively low. Coupled with India’s growing renewable energy capacity — critical for power-hungry data centers — and the economics begin to look compelling.
Local demand, fueled by the rise of e-commerce — a major driver of data center growth in recent years — and potential new rules for storing social media data, strengthens the case.
Put simply: India is entering a sweet spot where global cloud providers, AI players, and domestic digitalization all converge to create one of the world’s hottest data center markets.
“India is a pivotal market and one of the fastest‑growing regions for AI spending in Asia Pacific,” said Deepika Giri, associate vice president and head of research, big data & AI, at International Data Corporation.
“A major gap, and therefore a significant opportunity, lies in the shortage of suitable compute infrastructure for running AI models,” she added. Big Tech is looking to capitalize on the infrastructure opportunity in India by investing heavily in the cloud and data center space.
Global companies are expanding capacities closer to service bases in IT cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune from traditional centers like Mumbai and Chennai which are closer to landing cables, as they build data centers in India for the world, Krishnan said.
— CNBC’s Dylan Butts, Amitoj Singh contributed to this report.
Illustration of the SK Hynix company logo seen displayed on a smartphone screen.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday confirmed that it is weighing a U.S. listing as the memory chipmaker’s valuation soars on global demand for artificial intelligence hardware.
The company at the center of the AI infrastructure boom said in a regulatory filing that it was “reviewing various measures to enhance corporate value, including a U.S. stock market listing utilizing treasury shares,” while noting that no final decision has been made.
A U.S. listing would give American investors direct access to SK Hynix shares, which have surged nearly 230% so far this year in trading in Seoul on the back of strong AI demand.
The Korea Exchange on Tuesday asked SK Hynix to address a Korea Economic Daily report that the company had received proposals to list about 2.4% of its shares as American depositary receipts (ADRs) backed by treasury stock.
ADRs are tradable certificates issued by U.S. banks that represent shares in a foreign company. While they tend to trade with lower liquidity than a full U.S. listing, which can deter some investors, ADRs use existing shares rather than new stock, preserving value for existing shareholders.
SK Hynix holds treasury shares equivalent to about 2.4% of its issued stock, according to the company’s investor relations website.
Shares of SK Hynix rose 4% on Wednesday following its statement, before paring gains on Thursday, trading over 2% lower.
The company has cemented its lead in high-bandwidth memory chips, which are used in Nvidia’s AI processors.
A U.S. listing could help narrow valuation gaps between the company and U.S.-listed memory rival Micron Technology, as well as Samsung Electronics.
SK Hynix has also been committing significant capital at home and abroad to expand its supply capacity, as it races to keep up with growing AI demand.
The firm has committed nearly $4 billion to an advanced packaging fab in Indiana, aligning with Washington’s aim to expand domestic chip production.
SK Hynix is also set to benefit from the government’s growing support of the local semiconductor industry.
South Korea is considering building a 4.5 trillion won ($3.06 billion) foundry, funded by state and private capital to nurture local chipmakers amid growing demand for AI chips, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday.
The report added that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met with executives from chipmakers, including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, on the same day to discuss plans to maintain the country’s lead in memory chips and support its local chip manufacturing.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reacts while speaking during a press conference following the Federal Open Markets Committee meeting at the Federal Reserve on Dec. 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
It ended up being a “hawkish cut,” as expected. Still, investors managed to find a few gifts tucked betweenthe lumps of coal.
Even though the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered interest rates on Wednesday stateside, two regional bank presidents — Jeffrey Schmid of Kansas City and Austan Goolsbee of Chicago — wanted rates to stand pat.
Their cautioned was echoed in the Fed’s “dot plot” of rate projection, which showed officials penciling in just one cut in 2026 and another for 2027.
Even the Fed’s rate statement was repurposed from the December 2024 meeting, which ushered in a nine-month period without cuts until September this year.
Why, then, did U.S. markets rise after the meeting?
The biggest surprise was the Fed’s announcement that it would begin purchasing $40 billion in Treasury bills, starting Friday. That move increases the money supply in the economy. In other words, it’s a stealthy way to ease conditions, which helps support financial markets.
Next, Chair Jerome Powell dismissed speculation about future hikes.
“I don’t think that a rate hike … is anybody’s base case at this point,” Powell said. “I’m not hearing that.”
Fed officials also see the U.S economy as remaining resilient. Collectively, they increased their forecast for economic expansion in 2026 to 2.3% from an earlier estimate of 1.8% in September.
“We have an extraordinary economy,” said Powell.
And the markets may be setting up for an extraordinary finish to the year.
“The last interest rate decision of 2025 has essentially paved the way for a Santa Claus rally to end the year, and the S&P 500 is poised to exceed the 7,000 milestone in the next few weeks,” said José Torres, senior economist at Interactive Brokers.
For investors, that would count as a very decent Christmas surprise.
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.
What you need to know today
And finally…
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the U.S. economy and affordability at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, U.S. Dec. 9, 2025.
U.S. President Donald Trump has once again provoked outrage among his European allies, describing them as “weak” in an interview with Politico published Tuesday. Criticizing the region’s response to the war in Ukraine, Trump said: “I think they don’t know what to do.”
That comment will be jarring for Europe after its efforts to support Ukraine — efforts which Trump has frequently downplayed. Instead, Europe has had to watch on as U.S. officials have held talks with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on a draft peace plan for Ukraine, without a seat at the table.
