emily: this is bloomberg technology. coming up in the next hour, we will talk to microsoft cofounder bill gates about his new book, how to avoid climate disaster. how tech can help solve the biggest problem the world has ever faced. and bitcoin mania.

plus, tuesday marks the house hearing. expected to testify on capitol hill. we will have the latest. a bumpy monday for bitcoin. cryptocurrency falls below $50,000 for the first time after elon musk is that prices seem high -- says that prices seem high. walk us through the day. >> it looks like a risk off session. look under the hood and you will see those tech major averages. looking at the chart in front of you or the index in front of you, the nasdaq is taking it on the chin by the most in three weeks. all of those grouped together. flip up the board and i want to

take a look at the semiconductor index. you will really see that you have started to pair back some of the gains that you saw it earlier this month. the biden administration helping out, getting a little bit of a reality check. you can look at some of the individual stock stories. as much as 19% for churchill capital. that was reported as soon this week. one of our reporters, ed ludlow. tesla really taking a hit. they seem a little bit high. that tweet itself is taking a hit. a quick nod to those stay-at-home stocks. let's go to that bitcoin chart. look at what it is doing.

coming off a record high after elon musk tweeted that tweet that the prices seem a little high. it shows the power of what one man's tweet can do. emily: thank you for walking us through that. bitcoin falling as much as 17%. elon musk tweeting his can learn that the largest cryptocurrency has risen too far too fast. katie, is elon's tweet the only reason that we saw this slide, or was there something else going on? katie: it is such a volatile asset. throwing cold water on the rally was a factor in why we had a dramatic drop. elon musk tweeted that prices in bitcoin and ether seemed high.

just below $59,000 a coin before dropping today. the thought is that bitcoin trading on the weekend is individuals and day traders. institutional traders tend to follow traditional market hours. monday morning would be the first chance that they would have to react. that could explain the delayed reaction. another theory that we heard from janet yellen today, she says that bitcoin is an inefficient way of conducting transactions. that is in addition to elon musk's tweet. katie -- emily: katie, what does this mean for tesla? katie: that is the interesting

part of the story. they are always a little -- elon musk's tweets are always a little bit bizarre. they want bitcoin to move higher. they made waves after announcing that they purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin, following the likes of microstrategy. that endorsement alone from tesla was a big reason why tesla is still up 58% in february, even with today's drop. given that they have bitcoin on their balance sheet, you would think it would be in their interest for it to rally again. elon musk has done things like this before. he tweeted in may that they were too high. it is not out of the ordinary for musk to tweet something like this. emily: katie, the story is not over. i will ask bill gates about this

later, in the show. that interview with microsoft co-owner, bill gates. houck -- how tech can solve the biggest problem the world has ever faced. and how to avoid a climate disaster. that is next. this is bloomberg. want to save hundreds on your wireless bill? with xfinity mobile you can. how about saving hundreds on the new samsung galaxy s21 ultra 5g? you can do that too. all on the most reliable network. sure thing! and with fast nationwide 5g included at no extra cost. we've got you covered. so join the carrier rated #1 in customer satisfaction. and get a new samsung galaxy starting at $17 a month. learn more at xfinitymobile.com or visit your local xfinity store today.

emily: microsoft cofounder bill gates is a self-described optimist. his octant -- optimism is needed when confronted -- confronting the grim reality of climate change. in a new book, he offers practical advice and says how

technology can be deployed to fight. i sat down with bill gates and asked how much worse than the pandemic climate change could be. bill: the deaths will just go up over time. the inability to go outdoors and do farming, anywhere near the equator. it will get worse and worse. the temperature rise is based on the co2 that we put into the atmosphere. you will have all of these ecosystems. no beach will be around. there will not be a simple solution.

it is the entire industrial economy responsible for these emissions. emily: i know you are optimist and you say it will be hard, but i want to hear from bill gates, the realist. is there a visit -- percentage that you can give me? bill: unless the younger generation adopts this, important to them beyond their individual success, and they are loud about that and all the rich -- in all the rich countries, unless we have them putting it first on the agenda, i do not think so. i do see signs that it is coming into place. what could be more important than improving the livability of these ecosystems? my rule is to say yes, this goal

is a good one, but hard. talk about how to accelerate innovation. make people realize that because we are trying to get to zero, it is every sector of the mission. kind of ignoring agriculture and buildings, then manufacturing, including cement and steel. also, a roadmap to help people, i think it is possible. emily: you mentioned you 50. many people say we have nine years left. they said we had so many years left back in 2009. bill: 25 is sunnis that we could get emissions near to zero. -- is the soonest that we could

get emissions near to zero. it is bad when it warms up. for subsistence farmers, they are already seeing it. we see events in the u.s. the ability of cold fronts, in an -- come in and cause disaster. that is creating an awareness. i wish that we could get it done before 2015. the next 10 years, we have to do a lot of invention. scaling up deployment, globally, will take the next 20 years. emily: let's talk about

inventions. you have been talking about scale and reliability. where should investors be placing their bets? bill: this will change a lot of industries. the car industry for one. all of these manufacturing businesses will have to change their processes. about 2 billion in to a variety of things. both indirectly and directly through ventures that i created, trying to make sure that there is high risk capital for every area of the mission. the failure rate will be fairly high. there is promising work. we talk about green premium,

which is the extra cost. premiums are very high. -- green premiums are very high. that is actually the best indication. will the world be able to achieve this very ambitious goal? you can make reductions and not solve the hard part. we need all of the parts. emily: so much of the problem includes big things like steel, cement and fertilizer. i wonder if individual decisions really matter. if i stopped eating burgers, would that make a difference? bill: yes. your carbon footprint would go down, if you do not eat meat. one way is to be a customer,

some portion of the time with these new ways of making ground beef. as demand goes up, they scale up their factories, improve the quality and get the price to come down. that demand is catalytic because we are trying to re-create what we saw with solar panels and lithium-ion batteries. it actually brought the cost down. for the passenger car, all of these improvements, what you give up with electric car, that will go all the way to zero. the market will be green without the government having to impose regulations or tax credits. those things are key to help us

get to that emd state -- end state. emily: what do you do when you get a craving? bill: 50% of the time when i have a burger, it is one that is made with impossible foods or beyond meat. they improve their products, and they are quite good. i recommend that people try those. i will get to the point that i am 100% buying those burgers. i am spending money on capture and other things to offset my carbon footprint, which is very high because of the way that i travel, and i have more than one house. i am come in a sense one of the most guilty come but i am

pioneering ways that are more honest. emily: you are planning to give meet up 100%? bill: the cow beef meat -- some people are trying to change the cow's diet to reduce methane. there is a lot of ingenuity, but the protein-based approaches have surprised me, by how far they have come in. emily: some of the critics said you do not focus on the political obstacles enough when it comes to climate change. you are solely focusing on technology. if there is one thing that the biden administration could do to solve this faster, what would that one thing be? bill: r&d funded by the

government. the u.s. has done a brilliant job with the national institute of health. it creates private companies that take that and offer products the u.s. and the world. the energy r&d is -- budget is way too small. that has to go up dramatically. some of the tax credits to help green steel and energy storage, we need to apply that tactic there. the government is a big purchaser. they can buy more of these green products. we really need to get going, and push the innovation and the demand side for those innovations. emily: we saw a major shock to the electric grid in texas.

you mentioned the energy plan should have been weatherproof. what changes would be -- should we be making now before this happens again? bill: one thing shows and one thing does not. renewables where the problem in that case -- were the problem in that case. there were shutdowns. the two things that do show are that we are going to have more extreme events. we need to be ready for that. we need to invest in resilience. if you do not build storage and some nuclear, which is not weather dependent, you are going to have a lack of reliability, when there is tough weather. transmission lines, we need to

come up with a way to make that more attractive. there is a legitimate issue of reliability. it was not the problem in this case. emily: your fellow tech ties in -- titans like jeff bezos and elon musk are tackling elements of the climate crisis. i'm wondering if you should join forces, like the climate avengers, to take this on. bill: elon -- tesla pioneered the electric car market. jeff bezos has made a gigantic commitment with his climate fund. i am talking to him. we will end up doing some things in partnership. i agree, as we get more people engaged, figuring out, what is the path for innovation?

we should brainstorm more. our individual ideas are part of the strength of crazy entrepreneurs, working on this problem. jeff bezos has funded a lot of the key organizations. he is part of breakthrough ventures. how you create a demand side, even in the early stage, that scenario, where we need something. all the missing pieces -- we talked about it as being catalytic in nature. we want to bring countries and governments in on that. emily: jeff bezos has made that $10 billion commitment, but the amazon cardboard boxes and the trucks for delivery.

shouldn't a company like amazon be able to figure something like that out? bill: you cannot put every problem on amazon. they are part of the economy, delivering goods. there scope for emissions is gone -- is large. there is jeff, as an individual, where that 10 billion is even more than i have spent. in both cases, i think you will see thought old ways of spending the money, but this requires all of society to get engaged. it is not one intervention or company that can fix this. emily: the first part of my

interview there. part two coming up, including his thoughts on the covid-19 pack -- pandemic vaccine. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: some tech related stories we are following this hour. discovery plus streaming service has passed a benchmark. more than 50 original programs and a library of over 55,000 episodes. twitter is on a roll. it permanently banned president trump from its service. the stock is now up 33% this year.

last week it set a record. coming up, microsoft cofounder bill gates shares his take on tesla, bitcoin and the 5000 covid deaths in the u.s. all of that, next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: welcome back to bloomberg technology. in a new book, bill gates has said technological innovation is the only solution to the impending disaster, but one could argue that technology is standing in the way. the second part of our interview, he addresses the responsibility of companies like facebook, twitter, tesla, bitcoin, the pandemic and more. bill: in the case of the pandemic, there are a lot of

crazy conspiracy things about that. climate to get back, particularly as we succeed in getting government to have aggressive policies. understanding why some people do not see this problem or feel a need to deny a problem -- the problem -- we need to be thoughtful about who to trust to be convinced. who can go out and look at coral reefs or the heatwave, just look at the model it shows. the beaches and a lot of places will be gone. being shrill may not be the way to get it going. that is the goal of the book is

to get people talking. if we are going to commit, there should be a real plan, not just things that seem important. it is a fine thing to do, if people feel like that, but to actually reduce emissions, you have to change the way you feel. there is no metric that will get rid of those. emily: you have never wanted to pull up -- pick up the phone and call mark zuckerberg to say, hey, this is slowing me down. bill: he has to maintain the platform. on vaccine things, they have stepped up. i have a good dialogue with him. i think he has been put in a

tough position to let debate continue while eliminating the extreme stuff that pulls people into a non-reality position. how do you distinguish those things? you have millions of messages an hour. emily: you recently said that trump should eventually be let back onto twitter. why support that when he spreads misinformation about things like climate and the vaccine, which you care about? bill: there is a question about whether labeling things is better. those messages are likely to show up somewhere. do you want to have one party have one social network and one party have another social network? i am talking to the best

scientists. the way that we draw the boundaries on social networks, i do not have that solution, but i know that we need smart people at facebook and universities, trying to say, how do you draw the line? i have not heard a proposal where it says, if you do that, the crazy stuff goes away. i look at every idea. this is a societal challenge. emily: while you are pouring money into vaccines, other of -- your colleagues are pouring money into rockets. his mars what will save the human race? bill: i think that we should preserve this planet and make it hospitable to human life. the idea of mars or artificial

planet, it is great that other people are doing that, but i do not see that as part of the solution. they are in the climate game in a constructive way, so i am glad that they are putting some of their resources in this direction. emily: you said that we need hundreds of elon musk's. should tesla be more upfront? bill: tesla reduces your carbon footprint. if they get an electric car, as we convert to be zero emissions, it is one of the few categories that we see a path.

it is only about 7% of emissions that come from passenger cars globally. you cannot declare victory there , but as the cost comes down and the range goes up, you will feel like a gasoline car is less maintenance, quieter -- the market will eventually take care of this. you will not need regulations to get to that point. every category needs to go through that process, bringing the green premium down dramatically. emily: i understand you own a porsche electric car, yourself. i wonder if there is any truth

to that. bill: i think tesla is an amazing company. it is great and i have a lot of relatives who own tesla, so i help to buy for them. nothing but positive thoughts for tesla and its role. emily: i am curious about your thoughts. tesla can make more money from its bitcoin investment then profits from electric cars and all of 20/20. what is your take on that? -- 2020. what is your take on that? bill: elon has tons of money and is very sophisticated, so i do not worry that bitcoin will randomly go up or down. i think people get bought into

these manias, who may not have as much money to spare. i am not bullish on bitcoin. my general thought would be, if you have less money than elon, you should probably watch out. emily: why aren't you bullish on bitcoin? bill: there are things that produce output. bitcoin happens to use a lot of energy. it promotes anonymous transaction, non-reversible transactions. the gate foundation does a lot in terms of digital currency, but those are things where you can see who is making the transaction. digital money is a good thing, and there is an approach that deals with all the money laundering and regulations, but it gives you the convenience and

low cost of transaction. our foundation is very proud that a lot of the countries were able to get money out to their citizens, very efficiently. it does not have the visibility of bitcoin, but the move towards digital money is a super positive thing that we will eventually get to the poorest countries. emily: let's talk about the pandemic. the u.s. just hit 500,000 deaths. how does that number strike you? bill: it is unbelievable. more than any war that we have been in, except the civil war. it has touched almost everybody. we count on government come

before something bad happens and after, to protect us. it did not work in this case. hopefully it is a lesson, going forward about investment in global health, that the u.s. and u.s. cooperating with other countries needs to get done to get ready for the next pandemic. emily: how concerned are you about the new variant and vaccines keeping up? bill: we were studying vaccines in south africa when the variant showed up, so we were able to gather detailed data, showing that they all had some beneficial effect, but particularly novavax and johnson & johnson. they were still a great tool there. weirdly, the u.s. did not sequence enough to see the variance, even what we funded in south africa is being remedied.

we will get on top of the variance, but we might need to look at how quickly they could get it done. it will add to the transmission in deaths, but if we get vaccination rates up by a month or two. emily: are pfizer, moderna and johnson & johnson doing enough? what is the ideal shot for the developing world? bill: the private sector, including those companies, have done a fantastic job. we have been backing the approach for about a decade now. you cannot scale it up as much as we would like. it is not cheap. mackey -- vaccines three through

five can be scaled up through indian factories, to a higher degree. sending the right ones to the right place will be most of the solution, not to take away from pfizer or moderna, but those will mainly land in rich countries. every day, there is a complex discussion about, do we have enough glass vials? do we have all these different agreed -- ingredients that come from different countries? i do think that vaccine nationalism, where people are trying to look good in their own country by coming up, blocking things going around -- there is huge downside in that. we need to get the vaccines out

in large numbers. from the beginning, we have included moving faster and this equity question. over the next four to five months, the world can behave well. it is mostly governments that are limiting how much we can help countries that do not have vaccine factories. emily: my conversation there with bill gates. you can catch the full interview at bloomberg.com. check out his new book, how to avoid a climate disaster. the solutions that we have and the breakthroughs that we need to. coming up, a lab of the future, where drug discovery can be done from a coffee shop. a startup pioneer in robotic

labs, in the cloud. that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: in the age of remote work and social distancing, scientists can conduct research experiments from anywhere, using a fully automated robotic lab. transforming the traditional technique that required researchers to work in the lab itself. it can allow scientists to collaborate virtually around the world. joining us to discuss, mark fisher. tell us a little bit about how

the technology works. >> we are excited to have a platform for the future of wi-fi discovery. science needs to be pushed more towards information science. you need the ability to generate a lot of data with high fidelity. to accomplish that, we have created a platform representing over 200 instruments, in two locations. 100,000 tests a day encompasses the full-scale capabilities of making compounds and chemistry, and rapidly testing those compounds in order to accelerate discovery. when you combine that with a promise -- sorry. go ahead. emily: what kind of demand has

your technology seen? >> it has really escalated. they have increased about 400% and we are expecting double sales, year-over-year. we have had a substantial increase in the kinds of transactions that people are interested in doing on the platform. the department of energy is about to kick off a project with us through the cares act that ties together artificial intelligence, designs things for covered. driving the validity and approach for what we are doing today and future discoveries and future pandemic. -- pandemics. emily: what are the limitations of not having scientists in the lab? >> scientists do not really need

to be there. we have the full ability to use robots and mechanization, which is common across our industry. allowing scientists the ability to hive high visibility. everything has to follow the computer code behind that. what that means is scientists can still observe online and track and watch it to make sure nothing is going astray. they have confidence that they are getting clean data. emily: interesting. mark fisher, thank you so much for sharing your technology with us. lawmakers preparing for the first major hearing into one of the biggest major -- one of the

major incidents in the u.s. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: top executives from microsoft and others are set to testify in the first major congressional hearing following a massive russian breach of the federal government. mark warner spoke earlier with bloomberg's top correspondent, kevin. >> we have seen well-known attacks over the last number of years. we saw the sony hack, the hack by the chinese into government files. we saw what appeared to be a chinese hack into equifax. they are sucking information out of individualized enterprises, closer to classic espionage.

the fact that this went fully into the supply chain, that this could have been passed into any enterprise like a daisychained effect really raises this attack to a different level of seriousness. the fact that the adversary did not use it to create multiple trapdoors. we were lucky. they got in without us seeing them. they have the possibility of doing that. one of the things that we have also found in the public press is that the adversary was able to generate this attack from domestic servers. in the past, we have some of the best cyber assets in the world, in the nsa and cyber command. our rules do not allow those enterprises to touch domestic assets. if the bad guys can figure out

-- we cannot bring our a-team, if we can launch this from a domestic server. then there is no mandatory requirement for private companies, or the public enterprises and public agencies, to report that attack to any responsible party. we are extraordinarily vulnerable. in this particular case, the forward leaning actions of the private company fireeye, doing the right thing, we could potentially be in the dark. thank goodness that they came forward. starting in december, we started to remedy this, but we are still three months in. we do not have it 100% button-down. >> here we are in washington debating a stimulus, talks starting to look into infrastructure.

there is chatter. you mentioned at the start of the interview that everyone expects for countries to participate and partake in some type of espionage for their own national security interest. we are the most developed country, technologically, on the planet. i am struck by an analogy that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. does it show our strength in cyber and digital infrastructure? does this situation make us more vulnerable? >> kevin, it does. the fact that we are more reliant on the technology makes us more vulnerable. it is one of the reasons why we have been reluctant to punch back. frankly giving russia, china and other adversaries a running field, where they could attack us with almost impunity.

we have done very little to respond to equifax. we still do not have a high enough responsibility standards for the private sector companies. this is how the living and a glass house analogy makes sense. this is not going away. this asymmetric type battle is one of the reasons why we need to create, not only for ourselves, but for our partners and allies, something the last administration was loathe to do. we need to create international standards that say, if the bad guys come in and attack this broadly in the supply chain -- other countries were affected. there needs to be, potentially, a stronger response, not just from us, but from the international community, at large. emily: senator mark warner there

with kevin. we will be following that hearing on tuesday, throughout the day. that does it for this edition of bloomberg technology. bloomberg daybreak: asia is coming up next. this is bloomberg. ♪

haidi: a very good morning. we are coming down to ages major market open. shery: welcome to daybreak asia. tech stocks fall on the valuation concerns, dragging the nasdaq to a three week low. the s&p 500 is on its longest losing streak in a year. bond yields climb as investors price in growth and inflation.