>> welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." >> they are here inside the newspapers magazine -- the magazines headquarters. >> coming up in this week's issue, the french president, what he has been up to and his influence on president trump. >> and a tech firm that might know too much about who you are. >> also, colors are taken for granted, but there is so much science and chance behind them. >> all that ahead on "businessweek." ♪ >> we are here with the editor-in-chief of "bloomberg

businessweek," joel webber. politics is the european cover this week. emmanuel macron. the- you take a look at french president emmanuel macron. he is trying to energize europe. >> he has a to do list. it is probably never ending but we tried to whittle it down. the big one, he has had a lot of checkmarks he has put next to his resume already and the next one, what he was elected to do, was fix france. this is a big test coming up. it is viewed as a make or break moment. if he can get around this, the sky is the limit. he could save all of europe. if he can't, let's see what happens. >> i love the beginning of the story when you compare him to donald trump and some of their similarities and the relationship he has with the u.s., but also the relationship france has with the rest of europe. how have those relationships changed? >> complicated. [laughter] one thing he has done reasonably

well is complement angela merkel in germany. that is a really important part of the dynamic. u.k., germany, france. these are the biggest economies in europe. france is actually -- the biggest thing they are facing is this union conversation. the french union worker can retire at 52. >> nice. >> so that is pretty great, right? not a great thing for your economy overall when someone is clocking out at 52 and you have to pay them. that's one of the things he is wrestling with. but this dynamic in europe, he has put france on the world stage in a way it has not been for a while. >> what is also interesting, the relationship with president trump. they have become a kind of buddies. the first official visit, state visit will be emmanuel macron to the white house. >> that was the peg on why we chose to do on the cover now, he is rising to the global stage. they just had this military action on syria together.

it is this interesting thing where merkel and trump have had loggerheads, and here we have macron who can speak to trump in a different way. this is a little allegiance he has managed to have with washington. the only other one close to that is britain. >> that gives them power with the eu. >> it does because he's flexing his muscle. all of this is for naught if you -- if he can't fix france. that's why these contests with the unions that are on the horizon, it will be a make or break thing. he has to get his citizens behind him. >> you talk about the union. we also know there is very high employment. the situation he is facing over there is different from maybe what we face in the u.s. what other problems is he facing? >> that is an economic problem. how do you supercharge an economy where there is an

entitlement to cashing out at 52 in the case of the union workers? how do you flip that on its head? he has been huge on science, artificial intelligence. he is capable of actually taking the economy to a warp speed area. again, that is a problem because they are not there yet but it is where he is going. >> the other big story in the u.s. and asia cover is data mining companies. walk us through this tangled web that is coming back into the news. >> palantir is a fascinating company, founded by peter thiel. really came around post 9/11 as a way that u.s. intelligence was able to have a new tool on the battlefield, which was data mining. and they used it to fight terrorism. it was incredibly capable. the only problem was palantir

had to get to a new moment in time to find growth. it worked really well. so what is the next chapter in volunteer -- in palantir's strategy? that became, maybe we can cater the corporations and that is where it got spooky. >> stop right there. [laughter] >> we have more on the rise of palantir from reporter peter waldman. >> jpmorgan engaged palantir in 2009 and they became fast friends. here you had at that point the data, theminor of big engine being developed in silicon valley that had proved itself at war literally, and this global financial institution with millions and millions of credit card users and borrowers and all the rest. they got together and a guy who was at that point one of the

chief operating -- excuse me, chief information officer at jpmorgan, really became its patron and supporter. and jpmorgan made an equity investment in palantir and became the kind of testing ground for its application in counter fraud, insider threat purposes within financial institutions. and at one point, there were as many as 100 or 120 forward deployed engineers from palantir at jpmorgan, which was something of a culture clash because these kind of brogrammer types from california would show up to work on skateboards and in t-shirts and so forth. but anyway, they got used to each other. in.eter, let me jump it is interesting, you talk about jpmorgan making the equity

investment in palantir. but they also, you point out jpmorgan executives would talk about how great this group is and they inducted them into jpmorgan's hall of innovation. they were kind of all in, in terms of what palantir was doing, but then things started to go amiss. talk to us about that. >> yeah i will, it is very much illustrative of the fears people now have of palantir and the business direction it went in. from credit card fraud and other things, it got used in the insider threat group, which was essentially a special ops unit that looked at insiders, traders, bankers, other employees of jpmorgan for signs of internal fraud, of people abusing corporate assets. remember the london whale escapade in london, which cost jpmorgan billions in trading losses.

they did not want to see something like that happen again. they used palantir essentially as a tool ultimately to spy on their own employees. and let's face it, all of us who sign up with big companies, who work for big companies, we generally sign away our right to privacy in terms of using corporate devices. so our cell phones provided by the company, our desktop computers, our laptops, those are all searchable. we understand that. they don't belong to us and we and to be aware understand the corporations can accept that stuff. financial companies do, they don't want their employees is using corporate assets or information. jpmorgan like other institutions had an insider threat group led by a former secret service person.

the story recounts how he became something of a rogue in terms of his use of palantir. he had an office several floors above the other security people in jersey city, across the hudson river in new jersey. he was surrounded by palantir forward deployed engineers, essentially computer consultants supplied by palantir. together, they developed a comprehensive system that really allowed him to follow employees from their phone records to their computer usage to just things as simple as what they were printing out on the computer printer and their gps movements on their cell phones. it became something like an internal espionage thing that other people in the jpm security detail found excessive. >> our design director put palantir on the cover of "businessweek."

>> we wanted to get at the alarming aspects of the story and really bring to the reader you should be scared of this. we wanted an image that pulled you in and spoke to the reader. we came up with the idea of this staring eye. >> it is creepy. >> whose eye was it? >> we started with a larger photo of peter thiel on the cover. the more we zoomed in, the better it got. >> next, we will introduce you to the number two at amazon. >> and the production>> facing elon musk again. >> this is "bloomberg businessweek."

♪ >> welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am carol massar. >> i am taylor riggs. you can find us online at businessweek.com. >> and on our mobile app.

in the technology section, we have an interview with jeff wilke. right-handdeputy, man, and he has been there for 18 years. >> and he's on the front line as president trump criticizes amazon. >> we got the scoop from editor brandon stone -- from editor brad stone. >> amazon has two ceos of sight from jeff bezos. there is the ceo of the cloud business, and in this story focus on the other ceo, jeff wilke, who is the ceo of consumer business, basically classic amazon, the retail business that sells you things online or on your phone and then figures out how to get it to your house most efficiently. he is someone who has worked at amazon now for 18 years. he started out basically solving the kind of mystery of amazon's fulfillment centers, which were ruinously unprofitable and an efficient, and he brought some real science to the problem

of basically organizing a warehouse to ship individual units to people's homes instead of pallets to stores. and he has basically risen through the ranks of amazon ever since. >> it's interesting, he came up with amazon prime. some really key programs that amazon, right? >> he made amazon prime work. that was a project that was originally directed by jeff bezos. i think the rise of amazon prime under his watch as he has taken over more and more of the retail business has been pretty much parallel with his rise in the organization. >> why are you writing about jeff wilke right now? one reasonason -->> why he is taking on more of a public role because of his evangelism on artificial intelligence. this is a topic all of the tech companies are eager and willing to talk about. one big reason and one minor reason. the big reason is they are in a foot race to hire the best ai

talent, to remake themselves as ai companies from the perspective of consumers and investors, and to get the best people on board. wilke has been out there talking to people before us and now we have gotten some time with him about amazon as an ai company. >> i am always curious, and i have had conversations with folks about what they have done at their fulfillment centers and the use of robots and whether they could apply that to something like the u.s. postal service, which they also use a lot of. >> they do and that brings us to what has been a hot topic this month. we did ask jeff wilke about that, which is president trump's tweets criticizing amazon for its relationship with the post office. amazon has been pretty fiercely unresponsive to the president's criticism. i don't think they want to engage in hand-to-hand combat. but since we had the opportunity to talk to wilke, we asked him about that. he said, look, the relationship is profitable. he said it has been good for

both parties, but he also made the point that amazon has other options to get packages to people's homes. they have good relationships with fedex, ups, and small shippers they partner with. sometimes with trucks that say amazon on the side. trump ordered a review of post office finances. if rates go up, i think the message amazon would send it is they have other options. >> in the business section, we take a look at the production problems facing tesla's model three. >> there has been a lot of them and we look at what it might mean for the future of the company. here is reporter liam denning. >> look at the balance sheet, the bulls, just look at the revenue line. >> which is impressive. >> it is impresses. but further down it is not so impressive. where we are with tesla is this. they began the year with $5.4 billion in liquidity. that is cash and available

credit. analysts expect them to burn through something like $2.8 billion this year. i think that maybe on the low side because we need to factor in a lot of these delays that have occurred since with the model three and the extra spending they are taking on. plus, they have about $1.2 billion of convertible debt that is going to fall due sometime in the next few months. on paper, that doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for the expect -- unexpected, or if the analysts' forecasts are optimistic, looking back over history, they have tended to be. >> that the big part of the tesla story. elon musk lays out a forecast in terms of production and does not meet it. we have heard that many times and it has been a little bit comical. but investors have been along for the ride because shares of -- have been up big time. it feels like more recently something is coming undone. >> tesla's great strength has always been this cultlike aspect to the stock. people have incredible faith in

elon musk and there have been some real achievements. the model s was universally lauded as a great car. they have achieved some of the things they wanted to achieve, which was to push the rest of the auto industry toward electrification. which it has achieved quite a lot of that. i think the problem is, when you depend upon a cultish aspect to a stock, it is really a belief, and belief can turn quite quickly, as we know from previous market crashes, from previous stock flameouts. >> up next, what if the price of bitcoin has in common with a bottle of red wine. >> and a scientist on a quest to turn blue into red. >> this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ >> welcome back. taylor riggs. >> and i'm carol massar. you can also listen to us on the radio on sirius xm and on a.m. 99.1 in d.c.,rk, and a.m. 960 in the bay area. >> and in london and asia on the bloomberg radio plus app. in the finance section, a lot has been written about how much the value of bitcoin is worth. >> this week, we set out to find out how much it is valued. it depends on who you talk to. we got more from our reporter. >> these are two economists meet -- who meet in london on a

thelar basis, and conversation over bitcoin got heated. they decided to work out on a napkin how to apply a list -- how to apply this theory to bitcoin. that is how they came up with initially $200, and realized there were -- they were a decimal place out and it actually was $20. bitcoin's fair value is $20, which is way below where it is today. but obviously, you have to make a lot of assumptions and a lot of other people who are very bullish on bitcoin will say hold on, i think the future use of bitcoin will skyrocket. i think the economy could be as big as all of the money laundering in the world or all of africa as it tries to get onto the banking system. >> that's a big part of it, the assumptions that you say. whether it is just a certain segment of the currency market,

whether it goes into the black market, illegal usage emerging , markets. that's a big part of whether you come up with $20 or several thousand dollars. >> bitcoin is only just now entering the financial market space, as in where you can trade it, trade derivatives on it, where people have hedge funds invested in it. there is a lot of money writing on putting a number on this. but the problem is it is a very venture capitalist type of that. -- type event. a lot of the evangelists for bitcoin say we are at the beginning of the adoption cycle. a lot of people have to price in the idea that there will be a huge amount of growth in the next five or 10 years, or the best wrinkly -- the best frankly is behind us and it is time to go the other direction. >> is current economic theory sufficient enough to explain the value of bitcoin? >> some people say it will just take time to come up with new ways, new models to value something that could be seen as a new asset class. i think the one cautionary note

is that we have also seen in recent history plenty of attempts to sell new asset classes to investors, whether it is dot-com startups sold on clicks, modern art sold as a trophy asset, or wines. there is plenty of evidence that suggests it is helpful for people to act like there is analysis or a theory to validate bitcoin, because there is vested interest in trying to get this stuff in portfolios. there is always this warning sign when it comes to trying to analyze bitcoin. >> in the features section this week, i love this story, it is a profile about color. >> a man created the first loop pigment in years. -- the first blue pigment in years. >> and now he's working on a

red. >> he is a humble chemist working at oregon state. a few years ago in 2009, he stumbled upon a new pigment, the color was blue. it was completely accidental. he was in the process of mixing various metals together to come up with a new electronic material. and these materials, materials -- the medals he was working with were gray and black and plain, boring colors. one night he puts it in the oven and he arrived the next morning and out popped out this vibrant blue from the material. this started him on a journey to figure out what exactly, what else could he create from mixing various metals together. he had never done pigment research before. that while found is blue is rare, the holy grail of pigments is red. >> how far is he in the process?

he is in the discovery phase area -- the discovery phase. i didn't realize there were so many steps before you see a red car, for example. where is he in the process? [laughter] >> it is a good question. think he would say he has no idea. the thing about pigment research that is really fascinating to me is even though -- he is a chemist, he has been doing it his whole life area he knows what he is doing. but when you next metals together, you don't necessarily know what is going to pop out of the oven until you open the oven door's. -- doors. this is what happened with the blue that he created in 2009. he was mixing various metals that were gray and black and so on, and he opened the oven and out came blue. now he is trying to use some of those same materials in different ways and he's hoping what he is mixing together is going to produce the same vibrant color red but he does not really know until the oven opens.

>> you talk about numbers in your story. you said a new pigment could generate hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting every product category, whether it is plastics, cosmetics, automotive, or construction. you said a single pigment today, talk about that one and how much money it is worth. it is titanium dioxide. >> titanium dioxide is white. it is what we commonly think of as coloring whatever we see as white, whether it is powdered doughnuts or stock or straight lines -- or street lines on the road. there is a huge market for that. the reason it is so popular is that again, it is one of these that is safe, it is durable, it is stable. white has been settled. >> the holy grail of white has been found. >> and obviously it is very popular. they are trying to do the same

thing with a different color. >> next, the exodus of high skilled workers from silicon valley to canada. >> plus dating apps for the , rich, educated and coastal. >> this is "bloomberg businessweek." retail.

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businessweek. >> still ahead, china's deregulating mission. >> canada is trying to take high-tech workers from the u.s. >> and dating apps threaten more income inequality. >> all of this ahead on "bloomberg businessweek." ♪ >> we are back with editor in chief joel webber. over in the economic section, we are actually looking at dating apps. >> not just any dating apps.

tinder changed the game because they made it so easy, swipe left or right. you end up basically having the most easy way of interacting with a dating thing. that really changed the game. what is happening now is that they are bringing the same sort of simplicity, only the user group is a little bit more curated. i will call it elite. there are some new startups to come out. the league has been one of them. it is a big character in the story. what it has done, basically the lead gators -- the league caters to educated, ivy league. what we are seeing, and this is where it gets complicated, the ivys only hang out with each other. we think this could lead to inequality issues. because we are only having really educated, hyper-affluent people interacting with each

other. technology is helping them do that. there is less interaction between socioeconomic groups. >> the counter argument is don't we kind of do that anyway? >> maybe. but you could always meet someone through your brother-in-law or sister-in-law or on a random date through a colleague, a friend, or whatever. as technology has disrupted dating, maybe you are a little less likely to have that chance encounter that leads somewhere. >> what do the dating apps from their perspective say? that they are aware of the risk and capitalizing on it? >> i wanted to marry someone who is educated, or maybe more similar to me or share s interests. so they create a bubble and why would you get out of it? >> what is interesting too is this league app has a waiting list. >> it is around the idea of exclusivity. once you have the waiting list, you want to be on it.

>> i wonder if there is a little bit of a geographic thing. could you talk about coastal cities? of course if you are in new york and educated, you are meeting other educated people in new york. there is a geographic shift we are noticing as well? >> definitely, because we are seeing more and more affluence is concentrated in cities and that is where the youngs are. you get affluent youngs in cities, and not having that interaction between urban and rural. all of that becomes this thing -- we don't know what the outcome of any of this is, we're just saying if you look at these ingredients, this could really accelerate inequality really quickly. not over a decade, i mean we will see this generation start to have children soon, and then where does it go? >> you cut yourself off. let's go to a feature story, we have heard the expression "go west, young men." this is more about going north,

young man or woman. and we mean canada from the united states. a great story. >> this is one we had been watching a while. we thought it was a fascinating story. it is about h-1b visas. it had been newsworthy since president trump came into office. because we have started to change some of our immigration policies and maybe limit the number of people getting h-1b visas, which are basically the most skilled tech workers in the country sometimes. a lot of them have come from india. and what we are seeing is there is a slight north to canada to get out of the u.s. almost preemptively and they are going in large part to toronto. >> we got the scoop on toronto from karen weiss. >> it was started by a man, and it is essentially a chronicle of his journey as someone who worked in silicon valley who worked at linkedin and was sick of waiting for a green card and moved with his family north to toronto.

he eventually wrote down qu.estions from friends about how he did it, and he started writing down his experience. he started just by writing down his experience. the blog went viral among folks in the u.s. on h-1b visas and he started developing the site more and it has become a quiet destination for people who are considering the move from the u.s. to canada basically, sick of the difficulty of getting permanency as a high skilled worker. >> the varying immigration policies we are seeing between the united states and canada when it comes to workers, particularly in the tech industry. >> h-1b is not a permanent residency. they separately have to apply for a green card. that backlog has grown and grown and grown for countries like india and china, which send a lot of engineers to the u.s. as that has gotten harder into the trump administration has

come in and threatened to cut back on immigration and the process of letting people in, canada has done the opposite. canada has thrown open its doors and gone on this really aggressive recruiting effort to lure engineers from all over the world. they have made it much easier to hire engineers and senior tech talent in particular. visa toget a temporary convert to a long-term visa in as little as two weeks. >> is it just engineers? is it just the tech sector? or is canada thinking about other areas as well to hire talent? >> they recruit across a bunch of different skills and skill types. but they made a particular focus, particularly with the new global skills strategy visa, the really fast that is really for one. senior engineers and senior management talent. what happens in canada, you

haven't seen what they call the flywheel in silicon valley, where people start their own startup, they scale it, they ipo, they sell, they know the experience of building something and growing it to a certain scale, and they just have not seen that as much in canada. they are lacking not in the core, basic programming talent but in the really experience, senior talent. i heard it over and over again when i was reporting there. it is that a person who can convert a company to a half $1 billion company. they don't have that skill set in the country already. canada has also made an effort in the last several decades, they realized they needed to bring in more people to grow economically. it has an extremely large foreign-born population. particularly in big cities, where most people live. >> you are also seeing some of the well-known tech companies building setups there,

developing areas offices and so on and outposts. that is helping attract workers in. uber in amazon and google all have large engineering output. >> largely in trenton, but also montreal and vancouver. they are obviously not the mothership office, but they are significant engineering presences with hundreds if not thousands of employees depending on the company. >> up next behind china's , ever-changing gdp figure. >> plus, the so-called big bang that could propel china to an -- economy to even bigger milestones. >> this is "bloomberg businessweek."

♪ >> welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm taylor riggs. >> and i'm carol massar. you can also find us online at businessweek.com. >> and on our mobile app. in the economic section, china's economy continues to grow at a very consistent pace, maybe too consistent, year after year. >> after year after year. that has led some in the international investor community to look for other ways to track chinese growth. >> here is our editor. >> first quarter, 6.8, pretty much like the quarter before and the quarter before that. [laughter] we have been looking at the amazing lack of variability in this data set. since 2015, it varies by less than 0.1%.

in the u.s. you can get a full percentage point between quarters. >> you sound suspect. >> i don't know. it has been a long time and people have suspected that china fudges its numbers. they thought it was overestimating because you had these amazing sometimes double-digit growth figures. suspect thereople has been a smoothing of the numbers that it is designed to create comfort. there is no volatility. we delved into that. we talked to a lot of people who need to use this data for their business. it was interesting, it was kind of like -- the evolution in the thinking of what the data means and how useful it is. >> i wonder how important is this to investors? because clearly we need to be in china. we need to be investing in china, that is what investors say. they cannot trust the numbers, what do they do? >> there are two camps on this.

people who have been working and in china for a while -- working and operating in china for a while we encounter people who , said don't worry about it, don't look at the gdp data set, because there is a huge of other friday data that has higher frequency and easier to confirm. fromxample, everything volume of rail traffic to movie ticket sales. there is a satellite image that shows what is going on and -- in factories. our inventories piling up, is product going out the door? people say that stuff is easier to confirm because you can actually talk to the companies and see it. but then we talked to another set of people who say you cannot totally ignore the numbers either. >> the numbers from the government. >> yeah. because if you delve into them, they do tell important stories. you might not want to pin your forecast -- your business

forecast to the actual figure but they tell you about the evolution of the chinese economy. one of the things we saw in the latest quarter is that consumption -- consumers accounted for something like 78% of the growth in gdp. so that is an important development. it is something we know has been happening. china has moved in this trend where first it was exports that powered the economy and in recent years it was government investment. to see that the consumer is picking up as an engine of growth is a good thing. >> staying on china for a moment, opening the magazine in remarks, our editor-in-chief john micklethwait writes about china's reaction to trade tensions with president trump. >> he says the threat of a trade war may accelerate china's financial sophistication. >> we got more from john micklethwait. >> the new guy in charge of the pboc, almost unnoticed last week at the forum where xi jinping went and made this general

speech about economic reform. the governor went there and suddenly put through the main reforms in slightly more detail. he said by the end of june, we will allow foreigners to have majority stakes in the joint ventures and in three years, any limitations on ownership will go completely. bang withwords big him. he reacted with horror partly because the word explosion is never great to have in the context of finance. and they want to see these things gradual. and these things will take time, and if you talk to financers, they will say it is difficult to into -- to move into chinese domestic equities. nobody's going to make money there, just like americans lost money in the city of london. but things change. foreign capital will come in. some chinese capital will go out of china. the cumulative effect of this

will be massive. >> once the ball starts rolling, it is hard to change. >> salary is a good example. the head of the main, biggest chinese bank gets paid $100,000 per year. we worked out that is roughly the same that jamie dimon gets paid every several hours. the world's most profitable bank, i should add. that gap is going to narrow and it is unlikely that jamie dimon is going to be the one to take their salary down to accommodate the chinese. that will cause a huge amount of social change in its path. it is really interesting, not only the financial sector, which they have worked to open up, but other sectors, maybe the auto sector. what have you learned about other sectors? they also do want to open up to foreign investment? sector, all the attention will be on wings like the auto sector because donald

trump, and even people who don't like donald trump might excuse him this, donald trump is more likely to go on about the fact that isn't it great that companies like tesla and other foreign car companies can own the whole thing in china and really take off. he will talk about that and it will resonate in the midwest, i think. he is unlikely to go and say that goldman sachs can now move in, because that's not going to win him any votes. but the second thing will have a very big effects. all these other different things that you asked me about, i think you see a group of reformers, technocrat reformers, who under the person who is the main economic minister there, have gained a degree of power. the shipping -- xi jinping is normally something of control freak. but in terms of the economy, he is giving considerable economy. freedom to the

economy. i think that is making a difference. this group of technocrats, all of them have been educated in the west, harvard, oxford, indiana in the case of the new governor of the central bank. at the least, i think they are using the crisis. there is this trade war or the possibility of a trade war with america and what they have decided to do is push ahead with reforms, which they will always claimed they were going to do anyway. but i think fundamentally, that is a big deal and china is opening up more. and there will be short-term kerfuffles and there will be problems in getting licenses and all of those things, but once you start this thing, it is very difficult to stop. >> you mentioned president xi, what happens if it goes too fast? >> i think he will always have the get out. there is this group of technocrats doing this and i had no idea they were going to do this much. like many other monarchies, they could into paying a high price is it doesn't work out well and there are problems for them. one problem is the fact that

this is kind of a wild east, not -- same hearted people could lose a lot of money. once you start introducing things like derivatives and things like that, there are worries there. another huge worry for them, they are trying to do two things which are not wholly contradictory but caused a little bit of difficulty. one, they want to open up chinese finance and they want to prepare investment. wedding foreigners, -- let in foreigners, allow more capital to go overseas. prepare so that the chinese middle class can retire with savings. that is one thing. the other thing, the more immediate and pressing one, is to clear up china's bad debt problem. the two are not wholly contradictory because some of that foreign money could be used to buy chinese debt and some of it will have an impact on the way local banks run, but there is a tension between the two and china has built up the most huge amount of debt and they need to focus on that. if they don't deal with that, they could be in trouble.

>> up next, sri lanka finds itself on the luxury travel map. >> and robert de niro on the -- this year's tribeca film festival. >> this is "bloomberg businessweek."

♪ >> welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm carol massar. >> and i'm taylor riggs. you can listen to us on the radio on sirius xm and on a.m. 106.1 inew york, in the bay a.m. 960 area. >> and in london and asia on the bloomberg radio app. the tribeca film festival happening right now in new york. >> i got to sit down with the founders. >> we are always influenced by the world around us.

the festival was started because of 9/11. we have always had an activist spirit about what you can do with film in a sociopolitical, you know, point of view. and that is what we do. so this year was no different. >> do you hope to advance some of the conversations -- you both have been pretty vocal about women helping women. about the administration. do you hope in some way it advances? as a journalist it has been very difficult to report on facts and have it be respected. i'm curious about the role of the festival in this. >> we have a movie about "the new york times" on a day-to-day basis, journalists working, it is just about trump and his fake news they have to counter and set straight.

it is the easiest thing in the world, and makes you realize when someone like him lies and distorts, people can buy it so simply, certain people in the country will just say they believe him. >> in the pursuit section, we travel over to sri lanka, where a scene of renaissance for luxury travelers. >> he is one of a few hoteliers who are building resort complexes to bring more people into sri lanka. he actually started his resort during the sri lankan civil war, during a cease-fire. in 2004, he bought his first bungalow and started renovating it. then the cease-fire ended. the civil war continued. he was a small business owner, who was able to hang on. because he had his family's tea company behind him, which was a huge company that allowed him to

continue his business. the actually employ about 25,000 people. when the war ended, he continued to grow the resort more. >> you talk about the economy of sri lanka, tea was important but now tourism is important. >> for a long time tea has represented to persona -- 2% of the national economy. tourism is now 5% and is growing. for a long time, tourism was backpackers and in recent years, china has invested a lot in sri lanka, so there was chinese tourism and now the rest of the world is catching on. now there is more luxury tourism, so that means luxury dollars. >> how much is it costing me? >> the resort he runs could be $700 a night, which is expensive. especially for sri lanka. >> it is your typical luxury resort. >> oh yes. if you are an international traveler, this is not necessarily breaking the bank. lodgeis a watch on -- a

on the southern coast where you can not only state on the beach but you can go into the jungle and see rare leopards. our writer saw incredible stuff, buffaloes fighting leopards, totally crazy and incredibly beautiful. african type stuff. >> is it really lux? >> yes, the architecture is very interesting, a mix of thatched architecture and gorgeous pools over the ocean. on the central coast are incredible, wavy almost look , like space pods. they are have tend, have glass. it feels like you are in the jungle. >> the locals also have employment opportunities. you talked about how a hotel owner is working to actively train and employ locals on the ground there, so they are also benefiting from a revival. >> not only does his family's tea company employ people, but they actually run a foundation. 10% of the profits from the

resorts actually go toward a family foundation that does everything from employ people to teach people about sustainable jobs, teach people skills unrelated to what they do. they also do wildlife conservation. it is a great organization. >> "bloomberg businessweek" is available on newsstands now. >> and online at is this week.com. -- at businessweek.com. >> what was your favorite story? >> i really liked the cover story about palantir. maybe a company you have not heard about it but it came up in the testimony when mark zuckerberg was at capitol hill recently. it is a company that has incredible data collecting and connecting capabilities. some of it can be a good but some of it can be for questionable acts. it is a must read. >> a real tangled web of people and companies. >> your favorite? >> tesla. it is hard to root against a man who has sent a rocket to space, but that model three, lots of production problems for the model three. seems like the clock might be taking. more of bloomberg television starts now. ♪ this wi-fi is fast.

i know! i know! i know! i know! when did brian move back in? brian's back? he doesn't get my room. he's only going to be here for like a week. like a month, tops. oh boy. wi-fi fast enough for the whole family is simple, easy, awesome. in many cultures, young men would stay with their families until their 40's.

♪ >> i'm emily chang in this is "the best of bloomberg technology," where we bring you the best interviews from this week in tech. coming up netflix sets the bar. the stock pops on user growth. we break it down. plus, tesla's second timeout. the electric car manufacturer stops production on the model 3 sedan and sends workers home, only to reverse course and declare a 24/7 operation. we will explain. and pain for