carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." in this week's issue, wall street loses an ally in the white house. and a late david rockefeller's billion-dollar estate sale. jason: all of that and more on "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ carol: we are with the editor-in-chief of "bloomberg businessweek" joel webber, so much going on in the world of politics this week.

we have to talk about gary cohn. >> big news, gary cohn, the voice of business in the white house, has resigned. now, all bets are off. it was at a moment of stability, actually, in the white house and all of a sudden, that is gone and the guy who was the voice of business for trump is no longer there. jason: this was the guy who, people on wall street felt comfortable picking up the phone and saying, gary, you are my guy, give me a straight read on what is going on and it also feels like trusting that he had their best interests at heart in talking to the president. joel: our story by joshua green looks at the last six weeks, which when we look back at this trump administration, the past six weeks will probably go down as the biggest achievements they ever had between tax reform, which gary cohn actually helped

usher, and now that whole group of people in the cabinet are gone. jason: gary cohn, you're talking about dina powell, another alum going back to goldman sachs. carol: what is also interesting too is this is leading the politics section this week, but also when you look at the administration, you look at the balance of individuals there, whether it comes to trade policy, immigration policy and now maybe with gary cohn not such a big player in it, it is a different composition. joel: totally different, and more nationalistic. heading into midterms, that is a theme you will hear from trump. in many ways, gary cohn provided a buffer to trump and without that, we will get unbridled trump, probably. jason: speaking of unbridled, the other person he had leave was hope hicks, one of his

closest advisors and someone seen as a check, maybe have him think twice about a tweet every now and again, really had his close counsel. joel: reporting suggests that gary cohn pushed off his resignation because of this , because the backdrop of this his tariffs. trump has been ready to do this and gary cohn was the one guy bringing ceos quietly through the white house saying this is going to be bad, this is going to be bad and now that voice is no longer there. jason: another important wall street voice was wilbur ross, mnuchin on the other side, more on the cohn side of this. we are setting up for a very interesting dynamic in this white house. joel: cats in a bag. carol: which the president has said he likes in that press conference with the swedish prime minister. he said a lot of people like being in my administration. joel: will business like it?

that will be the bigger question. carol: more with peter on what the president has right and wrong on trade. peter: he has some good points, one point is that the u.s. has suffered from overcapacity steel and aluminum companies from other countries selling into the u.s. extremely low prices and it is because there is a global glut. huge capacity coming from china and trump complained about china, it was one of his strongest campaign themes. he had a point, yes. the unemployment in america's metals industries can be traced directly to subsidies and other ways china is favoring domestic producers. secondly, trump is also right that china is becoming more of a strategic challenge to the united states, not just in commerce but even on the military we see that, skirmishing in the south china sea, china trying to more and

more challenge the american military in different ways and exert power overseas. carol: trump making the national security argument and that is why we need to protect in terms of our aluminum and steel production, have domestic production. so where does this go, because it is interesting. you look at what china is doing, peter. whenever there is a foreign company that wants to operate on their home turf, they often have to share intellectual property. it is kind of interesting. china is also worried about its own national security, as well. peter: yeah, china has a national policy of requiring companies that want to operate, want access to the huge chinese market, to share their intellectual property. there is a huge thorn in the side of foreign companies. that is another issue trump is going after. three things where trump is

right, and so what is the problem? the problem is that the solution is not going to get him where he wants to get. it is not going to get the united states where it wants to get. carol: it will not really penalize china, right? with canada -- >> they are the leading exporter of both steel and aluminum to the united states. canada is one of our most trusted allies and if we put tariffs worldwide -- first of all, we don't know how these tariffs will turn out, but the first blush, the first statement trump made is that they will be on every country. carol: you have to worry about retaliation. joel: yeah, but you also have to worry, are we doing something shooting ourselves in the foot? do we really want to be alienating the canadians, the mexicans, the germans and so on, that are our trusted allies and trading partners when the goal is to try and get all of those countries into a coalition that

will confront china as the source of overcapacity. jason: up next, inside the headquarters and complicated ownership structure of kalashnikov usa. carol: and why america is giving away the $30 million medical marijuana industry. ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: and i'm jason kelly. you can find us on our mobile app. carol: in the politics section, a look at the drastic steps kalashnikov usa has tried to make guns in america despite restrictions. >> kalashnikov usa is headquartered in a nondescript 40,000 square foot warehouse in florida, only about 13 miles from parkland, where the recent shooting happened. it is the russian beachhead of

the classic, iconic industry, state-owned company kalashnikov concern, which has been for 70 years the manufacturer of the ak-47, which is seen as one of the top russian inventions of the 20th century. jason: how are these companies connected? help us -- carol: we know it is complicated, as often things are when there is a russian factor. >> through a lot of interlocking parent and llc companies that we have been able to connect executives of the usa affiliate to the parent company outside moscow and also to a lot of allies of president vladimir putin. just to start a little history, before the sanctions were put in place by the obama administration after the ukraine situation in 2014, kalashnikov usa was going to be the sole

distributor of ak-47 style rifles that were going to be imported from russia into the u.s. from the parent company. when the sanctions went down, the parent company kalashnikov concern was sanctioned. that put a freeze on their ability to import parts from russia. now they say they source all their parts from the u.s. and assemble them in this nondescript plant and then sell them out to about three dozen distributors in the u.s. what is interesting is this kind of web of executives and interlocking parent companies that connect the parent company of kalashnikov usa back to the parent company in moscow and this web of oligarchs and our very good investigative reporter michael smith spent a long time

going through public records and trying to connect these dots. it is an interesting story taht connects to big topics in the news right now, which is guns and russia. jason: so vladimir putin, how does he play into this web you describe? matthew: he almost sees it as a work of art. he changed the name of the company, put it back into the name of the founder, mikael kalashnikov, who only died in his late 90's in 2013, and it has been stayed on for years, but since been privatized. the ceo of kalashnikov concern now on 75% of the parent company. what michael smith was able to do was connect this individual back to executives with kalashnikov usa.

there was a transfer of holdings that were in the name of the moscow-based ceo that were made to an executive living in florida who is an armenian man. they say nothing is improper and sanctions have not been violated, and they have gone a long ways to avoid violating those sanctions, spending a lot of money on lawyers and things like that. but it raises some interesting questions. jason: israel and canada are grabbing market share in the medical marijuana industry. carol: and the u.s. is losing out. jason: editor dan ferrara tells us more. dan: smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes, the other side is developing pharmaceuticals based on marijuana. both of which are being done in other countries and none of which is being done in this country. carol: why are we so hesitant to do it? dan: we have a war on drugs and

because the dea has placed marijuana in the schedule one category, meaning in a category with heroine, lsd and ecstasy. you can't do work on schedule one drugs without the license from the dea. carol: also, dea has facilities where they are growing marijuana. dan: a single facility, 10 acres on the campus of ole miss and that d.a. license have been given to a drug research institution. they have this license, they grow this pot there and are extremely stingy with giving the pot to anybody for study, for the purposes for which a lot of people would like to explore. carol: the national institute on drug abuse, that's overseen by

the government? dan: right, and that is part of nih. carol: talk to us about rick doblin. dan: for many years, he tried to expand the understanding as he sees it of what various psychedelics will do. he wants to see marijuana legalized for medicinal uses, as it is on the state level and wants to see it accessible to scientists to create pharmaceuticals and find other medicinal uses for it. carol: what are the hopes and expectations for pharmaceutical uses of marijuana? do we have early indications? dan: yeah, because other countries have industries and that is one of the points of this story. while we stay rigidly in a no posture about this, other nations -- especially israel, canada and the netherlands, are developing multibillion-dollar industries around medical marijuana.

both growing marijuana with certain characteristics that make it valuable medicinally and growing marijuana and taking the constituents of it to develop drugs. carol: rick doblin called lyle cracker the rosa parks of medical marijuana production. dan: lyle cracker is a pure scientist, a person who has never offended anybody, a person who is unlike doblin, not a agitator, a rabble-rouser, just a -- he doesn't have any background. of course he wants to legalize pot, he has never smoked a joint in his life. he is the perfect face for saying this is a purely scientific endeavor and the government is frustrating it for no reason. carol: next, overstock.com ceo has blockchain fever and the securities and exchange commission has questions.

jason: and the command center for the war against google. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm jason kelly. carol: i'm carol massar. you can listen to us on sirius xm 119, in new york, boston, washington, d.c. and in the bay area. jason: and in london on dab and in asia on the bloomberg radio plus app. in the technology section, missouri's attorney general stakes a senate bid on an antitrust case against google. carol: it is in investigation into alphabet's data collection practices. jason: joshua burstein says whether or not the company

should be worried. joshua: he is into the question of whether google has abused market power in the united states. carol: talk about their market power and size when it comes to search. joshua: google has about 90% of the search engine market. it is about 80% of the ad market in the united states, which mostly comes from the dominance in search. there has been a long-running suspicion that it will throw that power around to gain advantages elsewhere. carol: think about the climate for these companies, google's and others. we talk about the role of social media in the elections and so on and so forth. we are realizing how much power they have and how much oversight they're doing policing they are of their social media platforms. there is a lot of criticism against tech names like google right now. joshua: right now, there is a freewheeling anxiety about technology companies, google being one of the biggest ones

falls into there. it can be a little hard to separate fear about meddling in the election versus dominance over the advertising market, versus a general sense that they know too much about us. carol: legally, what is the case in terms of google having too much power in the online ad market? joshua: we haven't seen the specifics of the holly case yet. he started investigating google in november and if he brings the case, it would come this summer. we know from past investigations into google, kind of the framework about what holley is looking into. if breaks into a couple of different sections. he is worried about privacy and will be looking at google's privacy practices. whether or not it is mishandling user data or miss communicating to users what those policies are, so that is one bucket. the other bucket is whether it uses its search engine to take

traffic that might have ended up elsewhere. this is the most prominent critic of this practice has been yelp, the local search site. basically, the complaint has been that google appropriates yelp's content so when you type -- you are looking for a restaurant on the upper east side, it shows you what you are looking for on google. it doesn't make you click through to a competitor. this gives google an advantage. carol: what do various lawyers and observers say about what google is doing? is it just a very successful company good at what they are doing and people are just jealous of that? might or are they in a really powerful position? joshua: everyone agrees they are in a powerful position. where the debate comes is whether google is abusing that position, and what abuse of a position even means. you have really strong defenders of google who say look, it is

not the government's job to protect weaker competitors against google. it is the government's job to watch competition, but that doesn't mean someone who is not as good as google should be allowed to win over it. then the other argument is that look, google controls the funnel that everyone is experiencing the internet through, and it has done some things that question whether it is a fair arbiter. carol: such as? joshua: such as the appropriating of other companies content so you see content right away. carol: overstock.com founder patrick byrne is a vocal supporter of technology. jason: he has his own platform called tzero. zeke: he's the head of overstock.com, an online store where you might go to buy lamps or furniture and it has been around, it is fairly successful.

he about a decade ago, became obsessed with naked shortselling and became a household name on wall street for that. jason: to be clear, it is not from "wolf of wall street." this is a term of art and finance. zeke: when you sell a stock short, you are betting it will go down. what you are supposed to go out and find someone else who will lend you the stock so you can sell it and you will buy it back later and returned the stock. naked shortselling is when you do not borrow the stock. you are selling phantom stock you don't have. burne became convinced hedge funds and banks were in a conspiracy to drive down his stock price using this tactic. in 2005, he went on this really epic rant about a sith lord pulling all the strings and leading this campaign against him.

this is probably a hall of fame earnings call. he went on to sue a hedge fund and a lot of brokerages for this and whether through him being right or his doggedness, he was able to get them to settle the lawsuit and pay him. he got goldman and merrill to pay a total of about $34 million. carol: so payoff from his pursuit? zeke: it probably cost him a lot and lawyers fees, but maybe there is something to what he was saying. jason: there was a crusading aspect to it, he felt he was fighting the good fight in a lot of ways. zeke: exactly, and it has come out that banks have gotten fined by the fcc and he has spun that as validation of his theories, even though i don't think it has

ever been proven that anyone was conspiring to drive down the price of overstock. carol: let's fast-forward to today. he sees another way to stick it to wall street and that is bitcoin and blockchain. zeke: yeah, he has always had this fascination with how wall street works, and now in this moment of crypto euphoria, he has got a willing audience of people who are ready to believe him. he is saying now that he is going to start something called tzero, an exchange for crypto assets, regular assets, his ambitions for it are out of control. he says it could replace wall street. normally, when a furniture seller would say that, nobody would listen, but in these days he seems like a very highly qualified person compared to a lot of the people who are raising billions of dollars for their new rival to bitcoin.

jason: we have bitcoin jesus we have talked about, he feels like a bitcoin john the baptist may be. part of the reasons people are paying attention to him is that he does sort of have wall street's number, right? he is able to cut through a lot of the malarkey on wall street. are people getting behind him? zeke: he has raised $100 million so far for this tzero company, and has brought in some new investors to overstock, soros and another well-known. the stock has doubled in the past month or so he has talked about this, but it is hard to say if this is just more of the bitcoin hype or if people are really believing in his new exchange. jason: still ahead, how to use blockchain and how not to.

carol: and a revolution turns five years old. women putting lessons from the movement to work. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ mom, dad, can we talk?

sure. what's up, son? i can't be your it guy anymore. what? you guys have xfinity. you can do this. what's a good wifi password, mom? you still have to visit us. i will. no. make that the password: "you_stillóhave_toóvisit_us." that's a good one. seems a bit long, but okay... set a memorable wifi password with xfinity my account. one more way comcast is working to fit into your life, not the other way around.

jason: welcome back to bloomberg "businessweek." carol: in this week's issue, the five year anniversary. jason: a letter to blockchain. carol: and a preview of david rockefeller's estate sale. jason: all of that ahead on bloomberg "businessweek." ♪ carol: we're back with the editor-in-chief of bloomberg businessweek, joel weber. i want to go to the finance session. something we talk about a lot on

air. an investment vehicle, high yield or junk bond etf's. joel: this story originated a month ago when the markets got red. everybody wondered what was going on. we did a little bit of reporting and sleuthing on the terminal and found a mutual fund outside of boston in massachusetts almost $1 billion in assets, and exclusively does junk bond etf's. jason: i looked at this and felt like i was through the looking glass, because in the age of passive versus active, this seemed like a weird collision of worlds. joel: an etf is generally passive, right? and yet active managers and bts, happens to be an active manager. their market timing and they are using a passive instrument to do that. they are basically watching, and they have factors they take into account to decide when they will time it, but they are going all cash and then all junk bond etf's.

carol: this is a small investment firm, if you will. but they may be having a much broader impact in the market. jason: literally moving the market with every decision they make. joel: that was one of those things that came out, about $7 billion moved in junk bond etf's, $1 billion might have been this one firm. they might have had an outsized impact on what happened in february and markets went red because these guys moved and everybody else said, what is going on? somebody is moving. they counter and say we trade in blocks, we are not responsible for this, but the fact of the matter is this is a nuance to finance now because we can do this in real time. an etf versus a mutual fund, you can trade in real-time on your smart phone if you want with an etf.

that introduces a whole new set of variables. jason: whenever we talk about active versus passive, we talk about fees. etf's are attractive because fees are so low, active not so much. joel: you are doing that on your phone, basically paying for what of the etf is and maybe a small transaction fee. the beauty of what they are doing from a business standpoint, they have a low-cost product they are interacting with, but turning around and charging clients active fees. they are walking away with a pretty nice premium for service that is somewhat debatable when you could buy and hold the same thing. jason: let's talk about the global cover story, five years since "lean in." joel: i can't believe how much has happened since the book came out. when you think about the social change that has happened from gamer date, me too, all of these

things that happened since lean in. it's an incredible landmark book. we looked back and said five years, what happened and what does it all mean and what is next? carol: for more on what has and hasn't changed since "lean in" hit the social landscape. >> the topics were many things women struggled with, but the way she talked about them were difficult to relate to. she was a billionaire already, she tells this story about discovering that her kids had lice, but she was on ebay's private jet at the time. while many mothers have had to leave work to take care of lice, they probably weren't on private jets when it happened. her first story is basically about how she was at google and they did not have parking spaces for expectant mothers. she went and demanded parking spaces, which is great, but she was an executive at the time.

i have to think if you were a young 20 something woman lower down at google they probably would not have taken your request that seriously. carol: in your story, you say here we are after the book and nothing and everything has changed. so what changed and what hasn't? especially coming off of the #metoo movement. there is a lot of coverage about inequalities in terms of income, what women have had to do in certain industries to get ahead, so talked to us about what you have seen as a result of the story. claire: i will go first with the downer side of things, which is that statistically in those last five years, the pay gap hasn't budged, there are still only 6% of fortune 500 companies headed by a women. you can combine them into one executive board of one company if you wanted to. there are so few of them, and the first and only black female

ceo of a fortune 500 company stepped down in 2016 from xerox. she was the first and still only. she is one woman, but the fact that it takes one person to step back like that, and we are back to where we were 20 years ago statistically, women are still struggling, they are still doing about one third as much housework as men, still doing as much childcare, they are more likely to leave the workforce after they have kids. a disproportionate number of them are clustered into low-paying industries, most minimum-wage workers are women, actually. so that is a bad thing. it is sad, but the good part and heartening part which you don't necessarily see in statistics, but when i talked about women about what "lean in" did for them -- >> because many women took at heart, right? claire: oh yeah.

i talked to a number of women who it changed their lives and careers because of this book. even though you don't see the reflection in statistics, probably because this is a very specific book for the female population, it changed the way women thought about the careers and they are leaning in. they're asking for wages and -- asking for raises and negotiating as much as men and hadn't been before. carol: clinton cardell put "lean in" on the cover of bloomberg "businessweek." carol: your job was to turn the "lean in" cover story into a cover image. what went into this thinking? clinton: we talked about how to revisit this story and where cheryl fit into the narrative and we ultimately felt like hearing from a range of women and men around the world about how this book has changed the conversation and ways in which there is still a lot of work

left to do like help push the story forward. we decided to photograph all the women from the story, and men, actually. when the pictures came in, it was clear that seeing as many of them as possible. carol: we are saying five years and since sheryl sandberg wrote "lean in" but to talk to women and hear their experiences, and these are real women. >> we wanted to show them in their own context, we have on the cover a woman based in sweden, a woman who works at a firm in london, a woman from palo alto. inside the issue, we speak to people in india, germany all around the world. so much of when you see a magazine piece about empowering women or the way women are shown, there is a tendency to

glamorize, beautify, and that is not what this magazine is. we are just looking at real people, hearing real perspectives. jason: next, how japan's convenience stores found themselves on the bleeding edge of automation. carol: and a vast pool of retirement savings waiting to be reunited with its missing owners. jason: this is bloomberg "businessweek." ♪

♪ jason: welcome back to bloomberg "businessweek," i'm jason kelly. carol: i'm carol massar. you can also find us online on businessweek.com. jason: in the economic section, japan needs workers. carol: the company -- the country is investing in laborsaving technology. jason here is editor cristina : lindblad. >> one thing it is doing is working with major operators in the convenience store industry to roll out rfid. radiofrequency identification tags have been used mostly in

-- mostly in logistics and higher and sectors of manufacturing, for example automotive. they used to track movements of parts through the supply chain, and you can find them in dvd boxes, dvd rental boxes while they track which movies are going out and coming in. they want to put them on everything. we are talking about lots of product. jason: you were saying 17% or so of food sales go through convenient sales? cristina: they are much bigger in japan than they are here. in japan -- in new york, we call them corner stores, in japan, the corner store is a convenience store. one you would find netxt to a gas station in the u.s. the egg sandwich you can't have

lunchtime to the pair of underwear, which they also sell. that supports a whole bunch of laborsaving processes and one of them is self checkout. carol: what is the government involvement in making sure -- helping out workers or convenience stores and others? cristina: this country has a long tradition of working with the private sector. you have to remember, for example, in communications, how much the government has done to lay out the superhighway they had. they want to help everybody implement this. jason: the idea is you throw stuff into your cart or basket, and it just checked you out? cristina: you don't have to scan it. say cvs in new york and other

stores around the country, there you are scanning the barcode. it is actually much more -- the format that amazon has been testing in san francisco, that does not even involve a cash register at all. carol: billions of dollars in unclaimed retirement funds are waiting for their owners. jason: suzanne woolley tells us how to get your money. suzanne: it is kind of crazy because here we are, america has a retirement crisis and there are billions of unclaimed funds in bank accounts, in employer pension plans, and what has happened is people get lost. they move, they change jobs, they get married, they don't tell their pension plan about that or the pension plan, which is supposed to keep track of you, doesn't do a great job or does a very lackluster unimaginative job of tracking you down. so your money is just sort of sitting there and you may know

it is due and you don't know where to find it. carol: we say billions of dollars, but how much? suzanne: we don't know exactly how much but we know it is a lot. there are estimates in your pension plan world that may be 15% of people who have left those jobs and had pension plans and are vested in the plans, 15% of them are "lost. " that is a huge amount of money. carol: what happens with the money? is it just sitting in some -- not making any interest. who has that money? suzanne: some of it goes to banks. what plans can do if they have small amounts of money in these abandoned plans or lost participant accounts, they can have them rolled over into a bank ira in your name and then that bank tries to find you, but meanwhile while it is trying to

find you, your small account may be being charged a maintenance fee and an annual fee and being slowly eaten away. carol: let's talk about what is being done to find these people. what is the responsibility of a company or bank to find those people? suzanne: the pension plan is a fiduciary, so they have a responsibility. it is a little gray about how hard they have to find you. they do have to send you a notice. if that notice comes back undeliverable, they need to do an address search to try and find you. basically, the department of labor has some lackluster attempts. they and a number of other initiatives are pushing to try harder. carol: sometimes the mail i get, that looks so bogus. what might someone get in the mail? suzanne: it is true, they would get a letter from the pension guarantee organization and it -- the pension benefit guarantee organization. and it might look like spam.

that is what they are worried about, because they have a searchable database you can go to online and look to see if you might be in a terminated pension plan. if they send a notice to your home and you chuck it, they take you out of that database. you won't find yourself. carol: next, unlocking the potential of blockchain. jason: and a potentially record-setting estate sale that will give us a rare glimpse at david rockefeller's art collection. carol: this is bloomberg "businessweek." ♪

♪ carol: welcome back to bloomberg "businessweek." i'm carol massar. jason: and i'm jason kelly. you can listen to us on the radio on sirius xm, and also in new york, in boston, washington, d.c., and in the bay area. carol: and in london or asia.

in the features section, how to think about blockchain and its potential on everyday life. jason: here is writer paul ford. paul: i've been following blockchain and bitcoin stuff since 2009. at one point, i had my computer mining them and then i thought it was lame. if i had left it on a couple of nights, i would probably be a millionaire. here is what has happened. this is as someone who lived through the first dot-com crash in 2000. it hit the wonderful stage of everything losing its mind. you can't tell what's real and what's not. at the same time, underneath this stuff, there is a fascinating stack of technologies and i am seeing -- i know from young people getting excited about something, my argument in this article is even if there is a crash, don't even worry. they are in it. no one is going to be able to leave these technologies. carol: what have we learned from the tech boom of 1999 and 2000 that may be similar, this to

blockchain and bitcoin. paul: america understands these things by financializing them. what will we do to make sense of art? this thing came completely -- already defined to mess with silicon valley and central banking's brain. what is it, it it is a market based on coins that are not coins, and they get everyone obsessed and fascinated and seeing it as a market, but all the things that go into making that work you have a database , that runs on all sorts of computers that can't be shut down. that is all the transactions on bit coin are in the database. it could be anything. jason: i want to make sure we talk about this idea because it feels like something that gets lost in all the crypto euphoria. we are talking about blockchain, not bitcoin. the underlying technology. paul: blockchain, when you buy

something from when bitcoin to another, that gets turned into a block of transactions. imagine an excel spreadsheet with transactions listed. the way the software works is it wraps all of those up and encodes them in such a way or puts a token on them so it is impossible to forge them. it takes into account every other transaction that has ever occurred before. it is immutable, a chain of blocks of transaction. that technology, what it does in its essence -- it is important to remember, this is just software. bitcoin and blockchain is software that runs on your computer. it is incredibly confusing under the hood, but you should be able to use it and understand it. jason: and what is comforting to people is it is a potential safety net. people freak about what if my mac blows up or what if i drop my laptop in the water, this is

why the cloud has made people feel so much more comfortable. paul: that's right. jason: or scared, depending. paul: this could be an anonymous cloud permanent cloud, people , put art into the blockchain. they are able to say this is the first time this piece of work was created under there is only one available. granted you can take a , screenshot. it is still digital stuff. but we have learned that when human beings decide to collectively believe something, the work of a van gogh, we assign value. the kind of extract and compared to u.s. carol: it may turn out dollars. to be a billion-dollar estate sale. jason: 1500 lots going on sale from the late david rockefeller's estate, picassos, monets -- >> he was born into a family where just kind of buying things

was part of their disposition, but he took it to a different level. we should say his mother founded the museum of modern art. the family was already deeply involved with modern art and collections. david rockefeller bought some of the most important picassos, monets that exist at and donated a lot of them already. also have extraordinary masterpieces of his home. carol: these are great works of

carol: these are great works of art that he look at everyday, really loved. james: he really did. of bringing visitors to paintings he felt were neglected. the other aspect of his estate, which comprises -- it is coming up to auction and has a very conservative estimate of 500 million dollars. it is expected to sell for a lot more than that. carol: especially since that leonardo da vinci went for $450 million. james: it is boom time for masterworks and there is a tiny group of extraordinarily wealthy individuals on the planet who are willing to pay whatever it takes. carol: this is about 2000 plus pieces that are going out there and some of them are great works of art. some of these are great works of art. some are interesting things like dishes from napoleon. james: david rockefeller had 67 dinner services. someone told me that rockefeller never saw a plate he didn't like. he collected some of the best porcelain in china that exists. the napoleon service you are

referring to, napoleon brought it with him on to exile. it is crazy stuff. carol: is everything going to go up for sale? james: the thing is, all of this is going to charity. the rockefellers have charitable giving in their blood. the children are going to be just fine. david rockefeller and his wife decided together that they were going to give everything they had to charity. all of the proceeds are going to 12 charities. >> he gave away stuff while he was alive but the reason they held a lot of it for after he passed away is tax implications. james: he wanted bang for his buck. in 2007, he sold one painting and it made over $7 million.

-- over $70 million. this was a work he bought for 10,000 dollars. talk about capital gains taxes. that was this real moment for him when he realized wait a second, i am a rich man, but a huge part of my net worth is actually tied up in these artworks and the more i sell of these, the less i am able to give to the charities. carol: bloomberg "businessweek is available on newsstands now. jason: and online at businessweek.com and our mobile app. what is your favorite story? carol: i have to say the cover story about "lean in," kind of a gut check on the progress we have made. i also like the kalashnikov usa story. a lot of questions. jason: i loved the chat with paul ford we had. he wrote the definitive story on coding and now is explaining blockchain. i think people will start to understand this. it was incredible. carol: i felt i finally

understood what block chain was all about. more bloomberg television starts right now. ♪