♪ emily: i'm emily chang. this is the best of "bloomberg technology." we bring you all the top interviews from this world and tech. coming up, uber in the third quarter, and stocks shares are a discount. and softbank seeks shares at a discount. interviewexclusive with ceo meg whitman. the ceo of a company prepares to leave, wide range of topics, including her political ambitions. ngm's self driving car. -- and g.m.'s self driving car. my conversation with the gm president. uber losses widened in the third

quarter. the right healing service lost almost $1.5 billion in the period. as reported tuesday night as part of a formal bid from a softbank-led consortium looking to buy a large portion of stock. there's a 30% discount to its last private valuation, coming in at $69 billion. we caught up with someone intimately familiar with uber's inner workings, lane castleman, the former head of over in the americas, and eric newcomer. >> this is the opening salvo from softbank. and it's consortium of investors saying, we will pay $33 a share, which translates into that 48 billion dollars valuation, and see if we can get enough people to bite at that to meet the 14% of outstanding shares of he want to acquire. molly: and what is the

likelihood of them acquiring that? >> you know, there is a lot of appetite for liquidity and that is what softbank is counting on. people want to sell and do not want to miss out. people might offer them up knowing they can offer them at a higher price later. emily: you have shares to sell yourself. what are employees talking about? >> employees have a lot of confusion going on right now. there is not a lot of information out. all we know is what we are reading in the press. and there is not a lot of communication with former employees. everyone is wondering, can i sell? will i see monetary value from the stock that is been sitting here for such a long time. emily: what do employees feel about a discount like this? it, still, is a lot of money. >> for each employee, it is a very emotional issue. they need to determine whether or not the lower value will translate to enough income for what they believe the stock is

worth. emily: how with a shake up the power structure, eric? eric: government boards are tightened. the 17-person board that happens and some of the power gets restricted because of the shares --ting super-voting shares losing power and all of that is contingent on this deal going through. there is a lot of pressure to get this done. emily: the employees do not have much of a say in this. this is down to the biggest likes biggest investors travis kalanick himself, right? >> there is a misconception that they have a say in what happens next. there are a handful of people and mostly investors who have always say of what happens next. we are just along for the ride and we hope it is a good one. emily: eric, what kinds of negotiations are going on behind the scenes? eric the documents contain : financial information and risk factors.

of a hack mention that happened, and say, ok, you are selling your shares and you need to know something about the values of the shares to assess. softbank is making a calculated decision about the share value. former employees and other sellers will have to do the same. emily: we also wonder what we don't know. the other skeletons in the closet. lane, would you make of the hack?f the big lane: i do not believe in a coincidence and this came out two days before thanksgiving in the middle of this deal. it is a little too perfect and there is some intention to make investors make a quick deal with softbank. emily: eric, another thing trialing, the waymo happening now. the judge had very harsh words for uber about another government -- about another cover-up.

eric: another employee indicated that uber used encrypted messages and deleted communications to not be found in court later, you know? and that is super important here because google has been trying to turn up the 14,000 files another is a question of whether them ifld able to find , they were using encrypted services. emily: it seems that uber will be dealing with clean up for a long time. what other skeletons are there in the closet? lane: you are mostly worried about what you don't know, what is coming next. you have to do a top down of each division, department, and find out if there are other issues like this that exists? hopefully, most of them are exposed, but your job is to deal with these. there are probably other things out there that will come up and they will have to manage it.

emily: remind us about all the open issues -- london, the other investigations? , the right now, sullivan chief security officer, who was pushed out and he is tied to a lot of questions and his team is being looked at closely. the new general counsel will have to look into what the strategic services group, the uber internal counterintelligence group, what they surveilled and whether there was hacking. and then whether there was any there are a lot of questions in relationship to the waymo case and others. that is a whole set of issues. there are five criminal probes as of october that are to list them all is nearly impossible. there are a ton of issues that u.s. attorney's offices are looking at to try to determine if anything was criminal. emily: coming up, we will hear from uber board member arianna

huffington, her discussion on sexual harassment, from silicon valley to washington. plus, how cyber monday sales stacked up this year. we will dig into the numbers. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: the chairman of the fcc is going on the offensive, defending plans to defend net neutrality protections. the fcc chair since january has an issue to everyone from what companies to celebrities to lambasted -- to celebrities who lambasted his plan to dismantle the obama era protection. he took particular aim at twitter saying "when it comes to open internet, twitter is part of the problem. the company has a viewpoint and uses that viewpoint to discriminate." now to cyber monday. amazon said this was the biggest shopping day ever in the company's history. according to adobe analytics, cyber monday rate in $6.59 billion in online sales come up 16% from previous years. we spoke to bloomberg's emma

chandra on monday as the numbers were still rolling in. emma one of the things you : mentioned, adobe systems there. they have come out with their prediction. they are expecting $6.6 billion in sales. that would be the most ever in the u.s., and as they mention, they have -- they have seen half of that being achieved. they noted that web traffic was up, and they noted that mobile commerce was winning the day with traffic growing about 21% and accounting for more than 50% of all visits online. that is a trend we have been seeing all year, and for a number of years in terms of the growth of e-commerce in the growth of mobile shopping. if you took -- if you take a look at the terminal here at #btv 1928. mobile e-commerce is a good 20% of all e-commerce. we also heard from first data, the biggest mobile payments

company in the u.s., saying cyber monday has gotten off to a very solid start for e-commerce. strong and steady growth throughout the morning into the afternoon. they said through the first 14 hours of the day, they said that cyber monday will show some very good year on year growth trends. emily: talk to us about who the likely big winners are, or is it all about amazon? emma: we always talk about amazon, as the biggest online company, they think they will be the winners. we know that traditional department stores are continuing to promote and offer deals. but really, it is considered that amazon and walmart are the big online marketplaces and will be the big winners today competing on deal five flatscreen televisions, toys, gadgets, and a big push towards electronics and appliances. amazon alone is expected to

capture all the murders holiday -- to capture all e-commerce holiday spending growth. chart iook at another have for you here. it is g #btv 8686. what you can see is that while amazon, which is the blue line here, a soaring ahead of walmart when it comes to market cap, when you look at sales, this is the chart underneath, walmart is doing -- walmart is continuing to outperform amazon. emma, i was surprised to see that in-store sales, physical store sales, still account for 90% of retail purchases. when it comes to e-commerce, there is still a lot of growth to be had. talk to us about the trend we are seeing when it comes to online versus off-line commerce. emma: that is absolutely true. it is always quite surprising to see that e-commerce makes up 10%

to 11% of all retail sales. momentum is still with e-commerce, that is why there is a big focus on e-commerce with the analyst and investors looking at e-commerce. if you take a look at some of the predictions for the holiday season as a whole and not just as we can, you can see holiday sales growth as a whole being predicted between 3.5% and 4.5%, but if you look at the estimates of e-commerce growth, they are more towards 18%. that is what we are seeing traditional retailers like macy's, target, and walmart being ahead of the game for a while, focusing on what they are offering online. one of the things we saw from analysts reporting on black friday, they said what had been very promising this year among the traditional retailers was a had better integrated deals and promotions for products you can buy both in-store and online.

so customer could find the same thing at the same price whether they went in-store or online. emily: in the day is not yet done. chandra for usa in new york. thank you so much. staying with e-commerce the , increase in online action also means an increase risk of cyber attack. in the fourth quarter of last year, there was a 20% jump in attempted hacks from november to december. joining us from boston, patrick. what are you seeing so far this year? are you seeing a similar type of increase? patrick: the analysis that we did based on the data we collect was done on 2016, and we saw a material increase as you said, 20% increase in the month of december. and so, we anticipate that this year, we will see the same type of increase year-over-year. -- year-over-year in the month of december. in the primary driver is it provides the attacker, the people trying to make money

typically, all of the noise happening, like what you just spoke about in regards to cyber monday, all of that provides great cover for attackers to go and get consumers and get enterprises. emily: as i understand it phishing attacks have been the , most common. tell us about that. patrick certainly, : phishing attacks are used in a big way and they leverage social engineering. going back to the holiday season, all of us are receiving in our inbox many offers from many retailers, shipping services, holiday cards, etc. and we are trained to open those. we want to click on those links. and an attacker knows that as well as we do, so they leverage that to get us to go to a malicious website, and to drop malicious code on an unknowing consumer or an unknowing employee. then they are able to make an attack. emily: we spent a lot of time

covering the equifax hack earlier this year. have consumers been more wary this holiday season? are retailers doing anything differently as a result? patrick: i think it cuts both ways for consumers because breaches have been in the news a lot. equifax and certainly a lot of the ransomware we heard about this year. there is an awareness that goes up. at the same time, the holidays are a hectic time for all of us. in our jobs and also trying to buy presents and do other things at the end of the year. noise,that, all of that it allows us to put our guard down a bit. and it creates additional risks, for sure. retailers are smart about this. retailers recognize this, both online retailers as well as storesho run physical and point-of-sale systems are aware of this, and they definitely put additional security around this time of year in order to protect their consumers.

♪ black'shat was carbon ceo patrick morley. a possible movie merger announced this week. the u.s.'s number two movie chain regal entertainment is in talks with a u.k. world group. the deal would create a bigger international rival the industry leader, amc entertainment. remember, regal try to find a buyer in 2014, but was unsuccessful. coming up, general motors is taking its self-driving flagship car out of the showroom and onto the street. just how it fared in real life traffic, next. rivalsy used to be fears in the race to dominate china's mobile app. now they are joining forces. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪

emily general motors finally let : at self-driving car loose on the street of san francisco. chevrolet unveiled its autonomous car, powered by technology. we got the chance to take it on a hands-free ride, or should i say it took me on a ride. ,♪ >> we are waiting for a car. the name of our car is pickles. -- pickle. emily: pickle is here. all right. let's do this. ♪ emily: all right. we made it. >> we covered 2.4 miles, drove past a hundred 78 people, nine bikes and a 148 cars. emily: definitely a little jerky, stopping and starting at times. you could sense the car trying to figure out what people are going to do. where the kids playing with a ball?

were there construction workers that were not going to mow? but i am in for around two. i think it will get better next time. ♪ emily: friday after that ride, i sat down with general motors to see why they decided to let us ride in a self driving car that is not quite ready for consumer launch just yet. take a listen. >> our objective is to deploy cars in the most complex environments, that is why they are demonstrating in san francisco. we wanted to play with scale and apply with a really high level of safety. that is what we are marching towards. we have been moving at a really fast rate of development. that is why we wanted to get people like you an opportunity to experience the car. we're moving quickly. we are heading towards commercial deployment. we where some quarters away. emily: how many quarters? >> some quarters, quarters not years. emily: my right experience was

fascinating. a lot of starting and stopping. i understand it is a complex environment. there were a couple of times a try to merge, but there was a car there and we jerked back in. there was a time we pulled up to kids crossing a crosswalk, and you can see the car realizing it was a long line of children, not just one or two. but it got a little confused. how long will it take to smooth over those issues? >> so, safety is absolutely the number one priority. experience is that the cars relatively cautious, but again, that is all about safety, and safety will be the defining metric that will tell us when you are ready -- that will tell us when we are ready to deploy these cars. we are moving quickly in terms of continued improvement. in some number of months, people can get another read on where we are and see the rate of change. emily: how do you decide when you're at a point where this car would make the same decision that a human driver what? >> that is what we are aiming for.

level driver human performance and want to deliver that same level of performance, and better over time. emily: there is still a steering wheel, pedals, a safety driver. how far are you awake my car without a wheel and pedals? >> it is back to what needs to be true to launch commercially and that is getting the right level of safety performance. as soon as we get to that level, we can pull the driver out of the car and that will afford us an opportunity to rethink what the car might look like. emily: what about affordability? are they even close to being affordable, even for fleet companies? >> we think a rideshare environment is the logical place to deploy these cars, and the early days when the cars are expensive, we will still have a really compelling business case, still be able to offer rides at a more affordable rate then where human drivers are at. emily: can you give us an idea of how much it costs to make right now? one >> i could, but i'm not going to give you a number. [laughter] emily: ok.

so, what is the strategy to bring these to the market? >> to get a level of performance we want. we see the first appointment in a shared network in a complex urban environment. a rideshare type model. emily: you have partnered with lyft and made a big investment with lyft and have an agreement with uber to rent them, small number of cars. whose side are you on? >> our objective is to get this technology deployed in a large-scale possible with the right level of safety. as we think about how we ultimately do that, we could have one partner, we could have more than one partner. we could potentially have no partners. emily: what you think you will have? what looks like the most plausible scenario? >> at this point, all options remain open. as we get closer to commercial launch, those plans will crystallize. emily: now, we see the iterations of the various cars here. looking towards the next iteration, how do you get the equipment smaller and sleeker?

we're iterating at an unprecedented pace. you see three generations of a car here, we are working on a fourth generation right now. all of that has happened in less than 18 months. we're going to continue those iterations as we get closer to him through commercial launch and afterwards as well. emily: how critical is the -- howogy is a mark critical is the technology? >> >> we think it is a important part of the equation. we are getting the cost of the sensors down dramatically. we think we can reduce that by 99% from where we are today to where we could be in the relatively near future to get the performance of, and get the reliability up. with that combination of characteristics, we will have a really compelling multiplayer sensor suite. emily one of the experiences was : to see the app, see the objects on the road and across

the screen. how did that come together? >> so, the car is evaluating everything going on around it. and it is making predictions as to what those different characters are going to do. and then it plans its path around that. what you sell is a representation of what the car is seeing and how it is thinking about that environment. emily is that other technology? :>> that is all internally-developed technology. crews,when it comes to -- when it comes to cruise, how does it differentiate itself from competitors? >> >> we are making sure we >> we are making sure we control the pieces of the system. we are doing a lot of our own mapping work. we're doing a lot of work on the hardware side. we want to keep iterating the entire system as quickly as we can, and by controlling all the pieces, it enables us to move

more quickly. emily can you give us an update general? hevy bolt in >> chevy volt sales have been a record month last month and we feel really good about the trajectory. emily: a year from now, where will gm self driving efforts be? >> we will be in an interesting position a year from now, and we look forward to keeping you updated. emily: what has been your most interesting experience? >> it is really seeing the rate of progress we have been making. it is been really exciting over the past 18 months from the time we acquired of where we are, and -- from the time we acquired cruze. to get a sense of where we are, and a clear line of sight on getting to the point where we can launch this commercially. emily: would you take your family on a road trip in this yet? [laughter] >> we have still development work to go, but ultimately, that is the objective. emily: coming up, our exclusive ceo megtion with hp

whitman. and if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. you can listen to us on the radio app bloomberg news, and on the sirius xm. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: welcome back to the best of "bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang. is preparedhitman to step down in february. she joined us from discover conference image ready. we discussed her decision to leave, and why the time is right for her now, and for hpe. transformation a that might be one of the biggest transformations in global business history, from a single thatny, enormous company was really facing a lot of challenges, to four, really nimble, agile company with hewlett-packard enterprise.

it is well-positioned for the future and it is time for the , next generation of leaders to take hewlett-packard forward. as you know, emily, you and i have talked before. it is about getting the right person in the right job at the right time. i think antonio will be a fantastic next year. emily: why do you think antonio is the guy for the job? somebody who is benefit decades? meg: i have said that the next ceo needed to come from inside . and when you come from the outside, which i did the length , of time it takes to understand the product and the culture is long time. and antonio and i crafted the strategy and he will execute that strategy as a standalone company and he is a deep technologist. in the next ceo, i think, needs to be a deeper technologist that i am. listen, you may recall, i am more of a consumer technologist.

he is an enterprise technology executive. and i think he will take this company to a place i have never dreamed i could. emily: some of the critics would argue that hpe need a landscape shift, and appointing an insider is not that way. how do you respond to that? meg: think about the transformation we have gone as a whole. we shrunk down to about a $24 billion company. and we made six or seven acquisitions in the last six months, the largest being aruba, which is a fantastic acquisition, which is opened up a whole new growth frontier as called "the intelligence edge." the edge will eat the cloud because so much data is being generated at the edge. so, i think that the company is in very good shape. we are less dependent on the

commodity server business than we were six years ago. we got value products and growth products and are the leader in computing. we developed flexible consumption pricing so you can keep workloads and pay for them as you consume storage. so, i think we are in quite good shape with a very coherent strategy that is matched to the needs of the market now. emily: how do you turn around enterprise spinning with more and more companies are out for same to cloud service providers? so that takes a certain percentage of our market, largely the commodity server-oriented business, but there are so many workloads staying on trend, and what we have seen as the multi-cloud strategy. there may be multiple public clouds. in some might be a managed service provider. we have seen some companies

moving back on trend because it has gone so expensive in the public cloud. so we have to enable a hybrid a.p. -- a hybrid solution and help customers figure out the right mix where the workload should live. and that is a capability we are growing. and that is what our partner does. help figure out where the workloads go to enable the future. and the edge has as much pressure and it is growing like a weed. has that put a big chill on m&a a little bit side of the wheel house? or do you think eight pe will still be creative when it comes to thinking about doing deals? meg meg: yeah. i think we had some syndrome,atic stress

and we did not make any acquisitions until aruba. and we have to be very thoughtful. we took due diligence to an extreme. i said, i'm sorry about this, but you are the first acquisition after autonomy. but aruba has been an incredible acquisition for us. and i think we have got our momentum back around m&a. -- arubaeen fantastic has been fantastic. so, i think we now know what acquisitions work for us and it is complementary technology that we can put to our fantastic distribution system and partners , and accelerate the growth of those companies and maybe take out some cost and overhead. we have a formula now, and we have to buy these companies right. we cannot overpay. and we have not overpaid to date. we are going to get know-how and confidence to do good acquisitions. emily: so, in what areas do you think eight pe will be doing --

in what areas do you think hpe will be doing some deal hunting? meg meg: yeah. our strategy is three-fold. we power the intelligent edge and we have the services. we have cloud technology partners, as i mentioned. we acquired cloud cruiser that allows company to meet her how much technology they are using. we will be looking for certainly services acquisitions, and that something might come up in the intelligent edge that is germane to our view of that. we admit a couple of acquisitions for aruba, which is behavioral analytics to help with security. and then on hybrid i.t., where interested in the software-defined structure space. and we took our user interface and put it on the most prevalent 380.r in the world, the dl

that is turning out to be a winner for us as well. you can count on acquisitions, if we make them, only in those three areas. we are going to stick right to those areas because we think there is a lot of room and making hybrid i.t. simple powering the intelligent edge ,, and making services that happen for clients. emily: we then discussed the political landscape, and begin -- and began with one of the hottest topics -- tax reform. meg: i think we appreciate the reduction in corporate tax rates, although we pay below 35%, as do most corporations. but it will help on the margin for sure. we like the territorial tax system where we could bring in cash that is trapped overseas back, and what make investments back in the united states. there is a lot we like about it. i think being a californian, it is going to be challenging for people who live in california, new york, new jersey if that

stated thumbtacks the duction against your federal return is lost. that will make it more extensive to hire people in california than in other locations. so i don't think it hurts necessarily the united states, but i think it will put pressure on the california workforce and , other companies in high state tax jurisdictions. is,y: so, the big question what are you doing next? any interest in reentering politics, or have politics become too toxic? be andll, i will not elected politics again. i can't imagine it. i tried my hand at that in 2010. i learned a tremendous amount. i am a better ceo for it. but i think it is probably not my future. and so, i am not sure what i will do. i will surly take some time off. i have been working pretty hard and continuously since i was 22 years old. so i will take time off and see what the future reveals. and i'm a big believer that things reveal themselves. if you told me after the 2010 governor's race that i would be the ceo of hp, i would tell you

there's no possible way. and yet, it did. we will see what comes next. emily: our exclusive interview with hp's ceo meg whitman. onto another revolving door, speculation over disney's ceo bob iger's successor. it is now down to a single candidate. ahead of disney's parks and resorts division is now the top contender. they find that the company for over two decades, and helped oversee the shanghai disneyland, which had 11 million visitors in its first year. bob iger is set to retire in july 2019, leaving a transition for the top job. coming up, uber board member arianna huffington talks about raising money for the start up. uber's cultural turnaround , and washington.

♪ emily: alibaba is planning a $7 billion bond offering, one of largest by the corporate issuer this year. the chinese e-commerce plans to offer notes in five parts. maturities will range from 5.5 to 40 years. it will equip to $6 billion thering -- it will eclipse $6 billion offering. this week, we caught up with uber board member, and ceo arianna huffington. we covered important headlines from the week, from cooper's 2016 hack, to the wave of sexual harassment scandals. but we began on the latest $30 million funding round at huffington's company thrive. by others.was joined yearna: we spend the first , and the multiple clients around the world, refining our change,behavior

pathways, micro steps, and now with this new funding, we can create digital, science-based behavioral change offerings for corporations around the world, and for consumers to help them reduce the stress and burnout and there life while improving the productivity. fact, which is this is entirely science-based that our well-being and performance are tied together. they rise and fall together. that,companies realize they will continue to accelerate their investment in human capital because that has immediate and verifiable impact on the bottom line. emily: what do you see in a company like thrive?

besides the founder being arianna huffington? >> the big thing we look for is evidence of product market fit in hypergrowth. what is amazing as we looked at fries -- we look at the rise compared to other companies. thrive's first year is out of the gate in terms of customer adoption, revenue growth, which was phenomenal. that, we look for evidence that land expand, they were refurb , lending big customers with sizable contracts before they had a fully fledged salesforce. they are renewing those contracts before the contracts are due. they were expanding into different departments. in the best part we really look for is a customer referring this product, this service over to other people in the industry? people in human capital know

each other very well. it is a small, closely community. emily: arianna, you are trying to change behavior, which is difficult. what kind of change are you seeing, and how much work is there to be done? arianna: emily, there is a lot of work to be done. but what is exciting is that we are at a tipping point. more and more individuals and more and more companies are realizing that we have been living under this delusion that a noted to succeed, you have to burn out. what we have done, as well as b2b offering, was created a media platform that takes everything i have learned from 12 years at "the huffington post," and rings together the latest signs that proves unequivocally that when we take care of ourselves, and put our own oxygen mask on first, we are more effective at work. -- newo, new roll models role models. far successful people like jeff bezos and sheryl sandberg,

writing about how they prioritize their own well-being, and that makes them better at work. jeff bezos, for example, wrote a piece that went crazy viral, and the headline was "why am i getting eight hours of sleep is good for amazon shareholders?" and he broke it down and when he only got six hours of sleep, his not asns, he wrote, or good. and as he put it, my value is not in the amount of decisions i make, but in the quality of decisions. so, people want that reinforcement. and that permission, if you want, that goes against a lot of mainstream culture, which validates people who never retards, and ignores the data, that has a very negative impact on business metrics. emily: when it comes to entrepreneurs in the way you

communicate with your portfolio companies, had you do with these kinds of issues? >> when we see companies we are attracted to, the breakneck speed they are executing, but what she is referring to is the case where we have seen our portfolio companies, people burning out. when we do exit interviews, we theireir feedback, and feedback is i wish i had a chance to build a deeper relationship with my coworkers, and process some of the things i am building and learning about. what we are at as a tipping point where health care costs have skyrocketed in this country, and today, it is not a friend hr discussion -- it is not a fringe hr discussion. this is a ceo level discussion to say how do we were attract, retain, and naturally replenish -- and actually replenish our workforce. we'll amazing people who want to come to work. that is the opportunity ariana is bringing. emily: speaking about another

tipping point, i have to ask you about the continued sexual-harassment discrimination allegations in the media industry, politics, matt lauer was fired from nbc, charlie rose fired from cbs. bloomberg has ended its arrangement with charlie rose. arianna, as a media mogul yourself, how big a blow is this -- how big a blow is to these franchises, and how do they recover from that behavior by powerful men? arianna: we are seeing companies moving very fast, making decisions very fast. ending contracts very fast. in this is an indication of the cultural moment we are in. a cultural moment truly of zero-tolerance, where behavior that has been quietly accepted for decades is no longer accepted. it is a very, very important moment. and it is a moment that is going to make it much easier for women

to flourish in workplaces, and to rise and workplaces because again and again, we have seen how prevalent said some -- we've seen how prevalent sexism has made it much harder for women to have sustainable careers of many businesses, whether media, entertainment, or anywhere else. you know, when it comes to washington, senator al franken, arianna, i know some photos of you and him surfaced. there continues to be a question, where do we draw the line. you have defended him. why? arianna: the pictures of al and sketch,a part of a probably before you were born, called "strange bedfellows." an extension of a comedy sketch. i think they trivialize the real pain and the real anguish of women who have been groped and harassed.

it is not about defending al. what about making it clear us joking around at a photo shoot about a comedic sketch were about. emily: that was uber board member arianna huffington. the innovator behind google and a mobile platform 2014, but it's now coming to life that andy ruben departed after activation of inappropriate behavior. this according to a person familiar with the matter. the information first reported about google's internal investigation into his conduct. he told the board he needed time off to deal with personal matters. still ahead, talk about volatility. this week, we saw bitcoin surge past $11,000 only to drop more than 20%. and the fluctuations did not end there. is this a bubble?

we will discuss. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: a technical glitch may leave american airlines without any pilots over the holidays. the scheduling floss has left more than 15,000 flights without sufficient crews. is offering pilots 1.5 more times their hourly wage to pick up some of the flight. however, the union representing the pilots is filed a grievance saying the proposed solution violate its labor pact. this week, bitcoin topped the headlines. the cryptocurrency spiked and caught the attention of main street, but it's quick rise left many on wall street asking, when will this bubble pop? adam white joined us to discuss.

it is almost tripled the user base, now standing at 13 million. take a listen. >> this will become the biggest bubble of our lifetime item longshot. >> the record show, i did not say that. [laughter] >> mostly because it is so global. a $500they are starting million fund to invest in cryptocurrencies, says bitcoin could easily match their market cap. from newe joins us york. this is an online platform that allows you to buy or sell bitcoin for bank accounts that has a most triple the past this year, standing at 13 million. so, adam, biggest bubble of our lifetime? do you agree? adam: i don't think i agree with that. the price is an easy metric for everyone to point and look at. it is widely covered,

fascinating, and one important quantitative indicator to look at the success of this technology. spend a lot of time in the space looking at what is the utility of how many people are using the technology and what is the daily transactional volume? that happen severed from the price. but we are seeing great growth. emily: talk to us about the growth at going bays, the accounts tripling tip you 13 million -- $13 million in the last year. where do you see that growth going? adam: we started this year with around 5 million retail. this is effectively the easiest way to get started buying and selling with a little bit of digital currency. we are now reporting over 12 million retail customers. and what we have seen what that becoming, coin base the easy on-ramp to the digital currency space. we actually report our total trading volume. we have seen over $50 billion worth of cryptocurrency traded on our platform alone. these are both great leading

indicators but we are seeing average, everyday users beginning to adopt an experiment with this technology. emily: you know, it may not be the biggest bubble of our lifetime, according to you, but there is a lot of volatility. i wanted to take a look at this chart on g #btv 1909. this compares bitcoin's euro dollaro the the most traded currencies out there. you know, what you make of this volatility? and how can people to trust in this currency if this types of volatility keeps up? adam: it is a great question. a think this will be short-lived, lifespan of digital currencies like bitcoin. we are in the very early innings of the introduction of this technology. watching a marketing gauge in this process of price discovery. with that, we are seeing rapid increases and recovery in the price. last year.ed a paper but we looked at is the 2016

volatility of bitcoin compared other asset classes. what we found is bitcoin was as volatile as both oil and less volatile than twitter's stock in the year 2016. my opinion, we are seeing volatility and that is not a bad thing. entering thearkets space that will decrease the volatility in the digital currencies like bitcoin a really viable, financial instrument for the world. emily: that was out of white with coin base. meantime, tesla ceo elon musk says no, he is the person behind bitcoin and that he's forgotten where he keeps his. a borrow blog post suggesting he's the creator of bitcoin. he said, not true. a friend sent me part of a bitcoin a few years ago, but i don't know where it is. [laughter] emily: and that does it for this edition of the best "bloomberg technology." we will bring you the best in tech throughout the week. we will continue our coverage of cryptocurrencies wednesday.

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matt: coming up on "bloomberg best," the stories that shaped the week in business around the world. relief for retailers, opec agrees to extend production cuts, nuclear flashpoint flare again in north korea. president trump: this is a situation we will handle. matt: the senate grapples with the tax bill. the fed chair into the chair apparent speak on capitol hill. >> the case for raising interest rates at the next meeting is coming together. matt: a fed president shares insight in an exclusive conversation. >> the strategy of moving interest rates up given where the economy is and where it has