emily: i am emily chang in san francisco, and this is "bloomberg technology." coming up in the next hour, driving the narrative. tesla ceo elon musk invests $1.5 billion in bitcoin, and they will begin to accept the cryptocurrency as payment. all the details and reaction. plus, investment in technology. we will catch up with the ceo of

kohl's to talk about the future of department stores in a digital world and their partnership with amazon. and can democracy and surveillance capitalism coexist? the harvard professor joins us to talk about the coup she thinks we are not talking about enough, and is our own government to blame? all those stories in a moment, but first, u.s. stocks posting the longest rally since august in hopes of a robust stimulus package seemed poised to materialize. let's get to ed ludlow with the latest. ed, walk us through this monday. ed: that rally, extending to six straight days. stimulus front and center for investors, but there is also optimism around the rolet of the vaccine, particularly here in the united states, but janet yellen, the treasury secretary, really lit a fire under the stimulus package. in terms of the sector story, technology one of the best performers, sending stocks to

fresh records, the s&p 500 up .7%, the nasdaq 100 up .7% hitting a fresh record, the same with the nyse, up almost 1%. some actually lower, but on the whole, positive. the semiconductor index, a big outperformance from the stocks today. in terms of some of the companies, there are a lot of different dynamic stories out there. what is up almost 6% on a deal with ibm. the kind of crux of it is that this relationship gives them access to the ibm team of salespeople. palantir has its own team of about 30 people through this deal and will have access to 2500, which is getting a lot of optimism that will grow its topline sales through that partnership. gamestop down, continuing off the back of that 18% decline, -- 80% decline, its worst in the

last week, a lot of hedge funds exiting their positions. we have been talking about this. this is weighing on the stock. blink down 2.3%. blink charging is one of the smallest charging stations out there. if you dig deeper, they have got hardly any revenue. they have never recorded the annual profit, and they have gone through many management changes, so now, the people on the bloomberg terminal, investors out there, paying more attention to this stock. of course, we have to talk about tesla. the headcount is up as the company grows revenue. the bulk of the revenue coming from outside of the u.s. for the first time, but, really, it was just one story, emily, and that is that tesla has invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin. that is a tiny portion of tesla's cash on hand but interesting nonetheless, sending bitcoin to a fresh record on the back of that news. elon musk, outspoken on their

-- backer of the cryptocurrency, the ceo of tesla saying in the near term they will try to allow bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to be used in transaction payments for some other products as long -- some of their products as long as it is within the law of different jurisdictions and in sort of a limited way, emily. emily: interesting fine print there, ed. thank you so much. our ed ludlow. in san francisco with more on tesla's mega bitcoin purchase, i'm joined by bloomberg's joe weisenthal, host of "what'd you miss?" do you think elon musk putting his money where his mouth is could change the game for bitcoin or is this just a small step toward a bigger future? joe: i will say a few things. one, look. part of bitcoin's rise over the last months has been growing institutional acceptance. there is less career risk if you are associated with it, less perhaps perceived to be embarrassing, so big companies like tesla, a big, successful

company like tesla, it absolutely helps that story. the other thing is i think there is a lot of fomo in the retail, and cfo's who are looking at other people making a lot of money and, "should i get involved in this? what is the harm if i allocate a couple of percentage of our treasury to it? why not?" it is not hard for me to imagine more companies making that decision, "everybody else is doing it. i feel like i should." so that accelerates this process. emily: someone else who is probably also happy about elon's decision, night note -- mike, a guest on bloomberg a couple of hours ago who says he thinks the price could get to 100,000 dollars. let's take a listen to say. >> i initially thought $50,000, $60,000 but things are happening

faster than i predicted. the corporate adoption rate, the institutional adoption rate, is accelerating beyond what i had thought about. i think bitcoin could end the year at $100,000. emily: so, look, joe. some of the bigger names, that are already accepting bitcoin, paypal, wikipedia, microsoft, in fact. does this just spur wider spread corporate adoption? some saying they can do it where it is legal, but are there are a lot of hurdles standing in the way? joe: there really are, but the biggest hurdle is people that have bitcoin tend to not want to spend it. it is not that it is a technical challenge per se, not a legal challenge per se. these things can be accepted, bitcoin payments, some have been doing it for a long time. it is just that those who have it see it as an investment and see it going a lot higher, see it as a savings vehicle and are

not inclined to spend it. that being said, it would not surprise me if at least some longtime bitcoin holders do end up buying a tesla with their bitcoin in part as a show of support, maybe show gratitude. maybe a is a cool story to say i bought this tesla with a bitcoin , very futuristic sounding sentence, so while it does not seem like we're going to see anytime soon rapid adoption of bitcoin as a payment vehicle for most people. you know, we can see more companies announcing they would accept it. good pr if nothing else. emily: it does, joe, beg the question, especially because we have also watched the rise of gamestop, what is fake versus real value? if elon musk says it is worth something, does that mean that it is? just like a flooring kitty says so, or no? joe: it is probably less different than people would like to believe. there is a difference between the two. in a way, the roaring kitty

gamestop long hypothesis was may be even more fundamental based than a call for bitcoin at this point. not necessarily in terms of price, but in terms of the logic, but, look. we do live in this sort of moment where influencers can emerge out of anything, and they can decide a stock is worth more, and it could be a joke currency, like dogecoin, and it is also at record highs. it is a weird moment, but it is the intersection of social media and the community and more to make all of this possible. emily: and quickly, because we have some great video, what is dogecoin, and why does elon like it? joe: it is a joke currency, but people like being in on jokes. the joke can get bigger and bigger the more people that repeated and the way you repeat it is by buying some. i think elon is having a lot of

fun. i think that is the reason he bought bitcoin. i think he likes trading dogecoin because it is fun and some celebrities like doing it because it is fun. it is a funny joke that keeps getting bigger. emily: all right, the joke we will continue to follow. joe weisenthal, thank you so much, as always, for joining us. all right, coming up, we are continuing the tesla/bitcoin story, also diving into where apple stands with electric cars. speculation. -- lots of speculation through the weekend. all of that next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: as we have been covering, bitcoin surging to another record high monday as the

cryptocurrency touches the $44,000 mark, in part because of tesla's big $1.5 billion investment, becoming the biggest company to back the currency. mike novogratz spoke earlier. mike: young people are buying into the future, and they see cryptocurrencies as their currency, and so elon is a genius in that he realizes listen to the people. the balance sheet, he worries about the dollar, but it is more the messaging, soon to be allowing customers to buy in crypto and to see every company in america do the same thing. >> it is not just companies thinking about this. you have the mayor of miami looking at adopting bitcoin on their balance sheet. how realistic is that, and are more cities likely to look at it?

mike: there is a war for talent. between companies and between cities, right? we have got this arbitrage going on where people move out of new york to miami or to austin, texas. you have got cities fighting for the best human capital. now, you have got the wealthiest man in the world and one of the biggest stories doing it. you've got to think other cfo's are going to be thinking about what should we be doing? >> let's think about value for a second. where should bitcoin be in six months? mike: i said bitcoin was going to be around $50,000, and things are happening so much faster than i predicted. the corporate adoption rate, the institutional adoption rate is accelerating beyond sort of what i thought about. bitcoin could end the year at $100,000. emily: joining us now is a -- and a look at tesla's dive into bitcoin, wedbush is

security director, dan ives. dan, what is your take on elon and tesla backing bitcoin to this extent? dan: the speculation in the market the last few weeks, would tesla ultimately dive into the deep end of the pool when it came to bitcoin? i think this is a move that is significant because it is tesla and musk, and ultimately, it is two parts. this is going to have a massive impact across corporations. microstrategy and now tesla. when he talks, others listen and this will be a big move in terms of the corporate perspective for tesla, just another potential from a momentum perspective. emily: you are one of the people who have to try to figure out what it actually means. what is your take on these dogecoin tweets, and does it

actually matter for the business? >> you do not want a sideshow to disrupt what is happening in the golden age of ev's. right now, they are in a leadership position in the market that is going to be in the trillions with gm and others going after it. that is the one thing on bitcoin, transactions be a , leader. we've seen it across the board, but you do not want to the sideshow and some of the tweets to overshadow the story that is happening right now. that continues to be a balancing act for investors, especially when you look at musk and everything he's accomplished. emily: right. i do want to move on to apple, a lot of speculation through the weekend as to whether apple is in talks with hyundai and kia about an electric self-driving

car, both of those companies coming forward, saying they are not in talks with apple. what exactly is happening here? what is apple working on? >> i think there will be a lot of twists and turns on initiate -- ev cupertino initiatives. what we saw with this funding news, it just shows that apple is going to continue to pick a partner, and they are not done. we thought hyundai, vw, others. it is not a matter if they are going to go in but a matter of when. it is a significant initiative in terms of the apple car, it is about a partner. we believe the next three to six months, they will pick an ev partner, particularly with what -- a lot of twists and turns as we have seen from hyundai these last weeks. emily: what about the -- what will be apple's key

differentiator from the main competition, which is tesla at this point? >> in my opinion, the best brand from a consumer perspective globally. the golden brand, one million ios devices, you bring the right e.v. partner, we are talking about potentially 5% to 10% market share of a $5 trillion market. that is why i think apple is going to dive into the deep end of the pool in ev, and this could add $30 billion to the stock, even as they are just partially successful in terms of establishing themselves, i believe 2024, apple car is on the road. emily: all right, dan, as always, love your golden metaphors here. dan ives of wedbush securities. sales of the department store coals stalled -- khols, but the

ceo sees much better days ahead. she'll join us to talk about the future of physical retail in a digital world that. -- next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: the covid 19 pandemic is reshaping the retail stores, perhaps for good. even before the health and economic crisis, brick and mortar businesses had been fighting against amazon and other e-commerce players. kohl's michelle gass saw a -- with us now to talk about how the company is working to thrive during these challenging times. fourth quarter revenue fell 10% but was better than it was at the height of the pandemic, so, michelle, in addition to a partnership with the likes of amazon, you have been making

changes to weather the pandemic and beyond. of those changes, which has had the biggest impact on you being able to improve growth from where it was, say, at the height of the pandemic? michelle: yes, thanks, emily. great to see you again. i think kohl's is positioned well as we emerge from this pandemic. clearly, sales are still impacted because we are in a global pandemic but we just reported once again another quarter of sequential improvement on the top line and importantly on the bottom line so we've learned a lot in how to navigate this pandemic and i'm looking forward to driving growth more profitably as we come out of this. there's been a lot of marketplace disruption and i think we are really poised to take advantage of that. we are emerging, 10 billion business is strong on this channel and we are emerging even stronger.

we have a healthy store base of almost 1200 stores across the country. we have a thriving digital business that has been instrumental during this pandemic, and i fully expect that will continue to play a role. but stores are at the core of kohls and when i think about that going forward, it really sets us up to drive innovative partnerships and think about our stores differently. amazon is a perfect example and that launched across our stores a year ago and it is a good example of unconventional innovation and creating a win-win for two companies that have complementary strengths and to me, the abu dhabi digital, i.e., amazon meets physical at cole stores so basically how it works is we take in amazon returns. it is easy, free, seamless, the customer doesn't have to package it up. big win for amazon. what we get is newer and lots of

younger customers. emily: so you say you have almost 1200 stores, and i wonder, longer-term, do you see those stores surviving, fewer stores or more stores? you and i grew up going to kohls and jcpenney and sears, but that is not necessarily going to be the case for our children. michelle: yes, emily, i think generally, people are underestimating the importance and power of stores and there are a lot of stores that have had to close, not only with the pandemic but just with the general destruction of the industry, accelerating during the pandemic. our stores are healthy, and i think this will benefit us. as i said, we are thinking about our stores differently. we are innovating. i talked about the power of the amazon partnership. you asked what am i excited about coming out of it. we announced a partnership with sephora, which is taking full advantage of our capability. beauty is a great example where, yes, you can transact online,

but there is something really special about going in and touching a product, having a beauty advisor help you in your beauty journey, so i am fully expecting we will continue to drive the store base. we have no plans to close any stores. yes, i am fully expecting there could be opportunities down the road to bring kohls to neighborhoods that don't have them today, but we will let conditions normalize. emily: so if digital sales accounted for, i believe, 40% of net sales in your last report, do you see that number increasing? do you see the balance between digital and physical changing? or is that balance as it is today something you see for the foreseeable future? michelle: i think behaviors and adoption of digital is here to say. now, 40% a very high penetration.

i think as people, as conditions normalize and people are out and about in stores and they'll want to be -- we have customers in our stores today, but whether or not we will hold at 40%, i do not know. i think the power of our business is that customers can shop us wherever they want. if that is on their kohls app it , is kohls.com, curbside, what have you, but i do think we will see digital penetration of digital adoption versus what we saw coming in, but that is good for us, because we know our customers shop both on our digital capabilities as well as in our stores. emily: so last, quick question, michelle. we only have about a minute left. your former colleague from starbucks was promoted to ceo of walgreens, and i'm curious about your thoughts of that and what you are doing at kohl's to make sure you are creating a top line -- pipeline of women to be

leaders potentially elsewhere. michelle: first of all, congratulations to her. it is phenomenal to have another female ceo in the ranks, and i am really proud of our efforts. around diversity and inclusion. it is something we have been prioritizing for many, many years and over the last year, we have taken a heightened approach and i am extremely proud of how the organization has approached all forms of diversity. as it relates to women, 70% of our customers are women. we are doing a lot to cultivate female leadership. obviously i am a female ceo and our cfo is also a female. that combo is pretty unique, but i hope it is less unique in the future as we help develop future female leaders looking ahead. emily: i hope it is less unique in the future, too, and i am glad to see what you're doing there. michelle gass, ceo of kohl's.

thank you so much for joining us today. ok, coming up, what is surveillance capitalism? we will talk to an esteemed author and professor. her warning about big tech's role in our everyday lives in ways we may not understand. that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: welcome back to "bloomberg technology." i am emily chang in san francisco. tech companies are increasingly being put in the position of power as more and more information is gathered about their users. platforms know more and more about you than you know about them. this is the latest from a harvard professor, author of a new york times op-ed where she argues we can have democracy or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. joining me now for more, shoshana zuboff.

author of court the age of -- of "the age of surveillance capitalism." thank you so much for joining us. you think very deeply about these topics, which sometimes can be hard to distill for a fast-paced tv audience. i am curious if you can start us off by defining, what is surveillance capitalism? we keep hearing this term but i think a lot of folks do not quite understand what it means and why it can be potentially dangerous. shoshana: let's see if we can fix that real quick. surveillance capitalism is an economic logic. that is the first thing to know. the way it makes money is it claims our private experience as its source of free raw material. it translates that raw material into behavioral data. these are the data that are

flowing through social media and all the other websites and ecosystems and applications and companies you are online with or are on your phone or you are dealing with as you march through the city or go to work in your car. it claims our experience as raw material, translates it into behavioral data. that data is immediately reconceptualized as its private property. they compute it, they turn it into predictions of our behavior and they sell those predictions. that is how it works. the first big successful global market in predictions of our behavior were the online targeted advertising markets. emily: you are about companies like on facebook, like google. shoshana: surveillance capitalism was discovered, invented at google, 2000, 2001.

it migrated to facebook. it became the default paradigm for the tech sector, but it now runs through the normal economy whether we are talking about health, education, insurance, real estate, retail. there is no industry that is exempt from this. every product that begins with the word smart. every service that begins with the word personalized. every app on your phone is siphoning personal information to these big conglomerates, the googles, facebooks, amazon's, so on. emily: so why is this such a problem? the title of your op-ed is the coup no one is talking about. what coup? shoshana: when we understand how this economic logic works and how surveillance capitalist s compete, they are selling predictions. that means they are selling

certainty. they are feeding their ai's with a lot of data in order for their ai's to produce these predictions of our behavior. we know at facebook, it's ai -- its ai ingests trillions a data point every day and produces 6 million predictions of behavior every second. that is the scale we are up against. what they are doing is virtually everything we do that has an internet touch point is a supply chain interface for these companies. they are constantly capturing behavioral data from us. they have engineered ways of doing this that are outside of our awareness. they are designed to keep us ignorant because they know that we would not like it and we would resist. that is why it is called surveillance capitalism. it is designed to be hidden. what happens is all of this knowledge they have amassed about us -- think of this growing gap between what we can

know and what can be known about us. what is that knowledge doing? they are using that knowledge to target us. a range of targeting mechanisms that most people have heard about. you have heard about recommendation tools. you have heard about algorithms that amplify information specifically to you. subliminal cues, engineered social comparison dynamics. psychological micro-targeting. these are ways they use this knowledge to come back to us with targeting to get us to manipulate our behavior or attitudes, to shape our behavior , tune our behavior in ways that align with their commercial objectives. and of course, what we have learned is the same suite of operations can be rented. it is called political advertising.

it can be rented to any politician or candidate or oligarch. anybody who has enough money and knows how this works, to shift the whole thing from commercial objectives to political objectives. and that of course, we have just seen the apotheosis of that on january 6 in washington, d.c. emily: you go on to argue that tech is like the government we never elected. what should the government now do about this? the ftc, the justice department, they are scrutinizing big companies like google and facebook. it sounds like a breakup of google or facebook would not necessarily fix the problem you are talking about. shoshana: the big question i am posing to everyone who is listening to us right now and everyone that is a citizen in this democracy and all the democracies of the world, here is the question. will the digital century be a

democratic century? this is the key question. right now, we do not have our democracy and all of the world's liberal democracies have failed to shape a vision of the digital future that is a democratic future, that is a future that will fulfill the aspirations of democratic people. and so these companies, the surveillance capitalists, they own the data. they own the technology. they are deciding the principles of our social order. we need democracy to reclaim the data and technology for people and for society. and obviously when i am talking about democracy -- we need law. we need the digital to live in the mockers he's -- in

democracy's house. under the rule of law with the values that once again, we orient data and technology to solving our problems and solving society's problems. this is not the case right now. unless we do that, we are drifting toward a future that is more dystopian, that is more surveillance based, where all the power is lodged in these private companies we did not elect, that are operating in ways we did not choose. we know that from all the survey research. when people find out about what these operations are doing to us, it is universally reject it. -- rejected. but we have not had the opportunity to debate this as a society. we need antitrust, but we also need to go beyond antitrust. we need to be able to create the new charters of rights, the new legislative frameworks and the new kinds of democratic institutions that will keep this digital century safe for democracy.

we did this. emily: what do you mean by that? what do you mean by democratic institutions? shoshana: that is a great question. think about the industrial age. in the early stages of the industrial age when factories were being built, the employers had all the power. there were no workers' rights. there were no consumers' rights. there were no laws to protect people. that was the early stage of industrialization. that is where we are now. we are in the infancy of our information civilization. what happened in the 20th century? in america, it took until the third and fourth decades of the 20th century before we had those rights codified in law. for workers to join unions, to go on strike, to bargain collectively. consumer rights to safe food, safe medicine.

all these institutions that were invented in the 20th century from the institutions that oversee banking to the institutions that oversee health and safety, the institutions that oversee all of our rights whether it is fair trade, stock market, just about every democratic institution you can think of was invented in the 20th century. unemployment insurance, social security, these were all inventions of the 20th century. this is where we are now. this is the challenge that we face. the rights, the laws and the institutions that will make the digital century now safe for democracy as we did a century ago. emily: wow. certainly this is not the end of a conversation. we are going to continue to have. shoshana zuboff of harvard business school. also very well-known author.

thank you so much for joining us today. check out her book, the age of surveillance capitalism. coming up, after the wework debacle of 2019 came the pandemic, which has led to significant changes in the landscape. we are going to talk to the ceo of a community platform for the future of business and work in business. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: like much of the commercial office landscape, the covid-19 pandemic has forced co-working spaces to adapt to a new reality while facing uncertainty about future appetite. joining us now, the founder and

ceo of a community network that provides tools for women in the independent economy. the company also provided co-working spaces for women that closed operations during the pandemic. she is part of our work shifting conversation this week. tell us about what happened to the riveter and how co-working space as a business is evolving. amy: in the spring of 2020, so nearly a year ago, we had to make a quick decision whether to keep our spaces open or close them. we were in six different states. i wanted to make a decision that would resonate with the safety of members and employees. we decided to shut our spaces across the country and stop charging our members. we knew small businesses, particularly women owned businesses, were being hit hard by the pandemic. we have exited the co-working space for now. we still really believe in the future of in real life meeting and getting together as we move forward.

emily: why do you think there is still going to be an interest in co-working in a new normal, whatever that new normal looks like? any: i think that work is -- amy: i think that work is changed forever. companies that were reluctant to allow their employees to live in other cities and work remotely have been forced into this new paradigm and have seen it works. we are in an interesting economy. this is a virus economy. i do not think we really know what that means and what recovery will look like. i am a strong believer that as we move forward past the pandemic, companies will look to freelancers in new way. as they can lever up and down, whatever they need. so through that, you will see a lot of people who are working in different ways and different spaces. people who are not in that office culture, they still need community and they still want to be around people. as a mother of four girls, it is hard to work at home. i think the working -- co-working spaces will see a resurgence. emily: you have been talking about how hard the pandemic has

been on women. we have heard the same from sheryl sandberg. i think she called it a double double shift that people like you and i are doing. it has been hard for everyone to be fair. but how are women who work faring now that we are almost a year into this? amy: the numbers are horrible. we have all seen them. we have seen 3 million women have exited the full-time workforce since the beginning of the pandemic. that is pretty stunning. to me, i see it as a symptom of problems that have existed for decades and decades. we know women are paid less than men. we know women with kids are paid less than women without kids. it follows that those women are seen as the first to let go because they have other responsibilities. we still see parenting as falling on women's shoulders in this country. i am a big believer that we need to create solutions that work for all parents in the drive toward the solution where it is not just a woman's problem.

emily: there is a new small movement behind this idea that moms who stay-at-home should be paid. you have actually pushed back on that quite hard as a mom. why? amy: i did. my podcast cohost and i wrote an op-ed in newsweek last week talking about our thoughts. any conversation that puts moms at the forefront is important. as i mentioned, women are getting crushed by the pandemic. but i think any solution that hits only for mothers and for women dives deeper into so many systemic problems we see rather than creating a solution that makes change for women. what we would like to see is change that allows women to get back to work. when you look at the marshall plan during world war ii, it was to put european countries back to work. what we need to do is get everybody back into the workplace who wants to work. i think childcare tax credits or direct payments for child care are great.

that is a win-win for women because most childcare providers are women. it puts them back to work too. emily: if you think co-working will see a resurgence post -pandemic for women and everyone else, does that mean you are optimistic about a company like we work, which had its stumbles going into the pandemic, but got hit hard by the pandemic itself? amy: i cannot speak exactly to wework's business plan but companies like industrious, they have an interesting model that is more of a revenue partnership with their landlord. they share in the revenue. i think spaces like the riveter will research -- resurge because commercial real estate will be different. there are going to be so many empty spaces. we need to think, how can we use those spaces? open spaces will be very important. companies will still gather for meetings and events although they might not have those one by one offices.

there is a big opportunity for more diverse and new models out there as we move forward. emily: mark zuckerberg recently popped into a clubhouse and he was not there for very long but he did say that he thinks by the end of the decade, 50% of facebook employees will work from home. what do you think the work, office landscape looks like a decade from now? amy: i probably don't agree with mark zuckerberg very much but i do here. the changes the pandemic has brought will stay with us. i also think that has opened the door for a lot of different people. that allows people to live in cities that are affordable for them and for their families and work for companies like facebook, which was something that was unattainable before the pandemic. i also think that for parents, getting rid of the commute opens a lot of doors. there is a big opportunity to level the playing field in a way we have not seen before. emily: thank you so much for

pushing the envelope on these issues and helping us think ahead. the riveter founder and ceo, amy nelson. appreciate you stopping by. coming up, betting big on the rise of online gambling, offering a secure way to order state lottery tickets with only your phone. helpful in a pandemic. peter sullivan with us next for an exclusive interview. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: with traditional casinos and racetracks closed, online gambling has taken off. one start up wants in on the action. that is jackpocket, the first and only third-party lottery

vendor in the united states. after a successful launch in january, jackpocket is announcing new funding. peter, how does it work? peter: thank you so much for having me on. the jackpocket app allows users to play the games they love. everything from the mega millions to the powerball game. we have worked with new york and new jersey to create the first set of regulations that allows a third-party app to be in the app store and allows users to play those official games directly from their home. emily: our senior producer just shared she bought tickets for her husband for his birthday. she said it was really easy, which made me wonder, is it too easy? we are in a pandemic. people are struggling. i wonder how you think about that. peter: we take responsible gambling really seriously. unlike going into a conventional brick-and-mortar store where it goes unchecked, we have worked with the national council for

problem gambling to ensure there are safeguards on the app. players can set their own daily, weekly and monthly spending limits. they can also decide if they want to take a break for 30, 60 or 90 days or indefinitely. it is something we have worked closely with regulators on. we think it is important to be able to monitor that type of spending habit and give the power back to the consumer to decide how much they are comfortable with playing. emily: you have just raised some new money. tell us how you plan to spend that, where we are going to see you expand in states beyond new york. peter: we are really excited to officially announce we have raised $50 million, which includes some amazing investors. as well as corporate venture companies like circle k ventures, who are going to help us continue to expand into new markets. what we are really excited about is we are going to be able to

fuel the growth we need both on user acquisition and growing the top line of the company along with going into new states. just within the last month, we have seen over a million downloads. we were ranked number seven in the entertainment section on the app store. we have seen over 100% user growth from all of 2020 within the last month. it has been amazing to start up and put that capital to work. we are on your show to announce we have raised the $50 million round of financing. emily: thank you for sharing that with us. as you look forward, we are going into some sort of new normal. what is your outlook on activity when it might be easier to walk into the gas station and buy a ticket yourself? peter: we want to add a more convenient way to people to play regardless of whether there is a pandemic going on. if there is a safe alternative, we are happy to provide that to our users. that said, i think what is going to be interesting is as we start

to expand our product offering, and we get into other gaming, it is going to be interesting. this last month, the new york gaming commission approved new regulations that will allow for instant lottery delivery. you may know them as scratch offs, but from the app, you will be able to order scratch offs and we will be able to deliver those to people within the state. we don't think we're going to change all behavior. my dad is an everyday lottery player that always stops by the corner store. but if we can provide a more accessible, more enjoyable more convenient way to consumers across the country, we want to continue to evolve the product to make it more fun and enjoyable. emily: all right. we will keep following your progress. peter sullivan, thanks so much for joining us. also some new birthday ideas as well. the ceo of jackpocket. that does it for this edition of

"bloomberg technology." i'm emily chang in san francisco. this is bloomberg. ♪

yousef: this is "bloomberg daybreak: middle east." manus: global stocks still at records amid high hopes on the u.s. stimulus package and backseat -- vaccine rollout. there are questions about the so-called reflation trade in bonds, could it threaten equities? yousef: bitcoin past $20,000.