announcer: from the heart of where innovation, money, and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is "bloomberg technology" with emily chang. ♪ emily: this is "bloomberg technology." ge, toshiba, and johnson & johnson announcing a breakup.

we will discuss. plus, a disney plus stumble puts the damper on the birthday party, how less subscriber growth overshadow the celebration. carson block is back, talking about elon musk and retail investors. what he has to say about meme traders. markets climbing. inflationary pressures continued to reverberate through the markets. ed ludlow is fear. -- here. ed: no worries. we get past those concerns and technology leads the way. nasdaq 100 outperforming the s&p 500. also strengthen the m

egacaps, google, facebook, tesla. inflation is the name of the game. the strongest print in october, the fastest pace of inflation growth since 1990. i wasn't around in 1990. you look at the categories in which prices are rising, there is concern. why? because the u.s. consumer has been driving economic recovery, supercharged spending, but with energy rising, goods like televisions, what happens if the american sumer cools off? if inflation is overshooting, could we see tighter monetary policy? the federal reserve could be more aggressive with the way it tapers asset purchases in the great path going forward. u.s. 10 year yields are not at the highs of march or mid october this year above 1.7%. u.s. technology stocks rising,

the equity market is sanguine. johnson & johnson splitting, spinning off the consumer business to become two separate entities. it had a mixed week, trading lower, then jumped 1.5% friday, an interesting reaction, but this is something we have seen before, toshiba, ge, and in the pharmaceutical space. emily: thanks. i want to stick with the split of johnson & johnson. alex gorsky joining bloomberg earlier saying both businesses will have mid single-digit growth potential. take a listen. alex: both businesses have the potential to be growing at least mid single digits and above going forward. we think this will better position our consumer business in this evolving environment to be more agile, flexible, and innovative to reach more consumers. emily: this is not the only company that announced a split.

ge enters she but this week announced they are splitting up. -- and toshiba this week announced they are splitting up. there have been lots of calls for breakup of big tech, but is it something we could see from facebook, google, amazon, going down the route of these companies paving the way? >> i don't think we are there yet, but they are increasingly diversifying their businesses. facebook renamed itself was now a meta-verse company. last quarter, it said it would be splitting up how it reports its revenue and expenses for its virtual reality division and separating that from how it reports social media business statistics. we have google investing in health care, amazon, it's e-commerce business and services

business. so the more these companies try to pursue these disparate lines of business, the stronger the case becomes for the spinoff. emily: how difficult would it be for a facebook or meta to breakup? with the rebranding, they are paving the way to make a break cleaner. >> yes, would facebook tried to split off instagram from facebook or whatsapp. the company has been increasingly intertwining the services for functionality, but also behind the scenes. this virtual reality business is different. it really depends on how much these companies decide to interlock those services makes

that proposition harder or easier. emily: the big question is, will regulators forced their hand? >> they could. we are not there yet. facebook is in a battle with the federal trade commission over its acquisitions of instagram and whatsapp. the agency said the company acted anti-competitively and has sought to unwind those mergers. we had stayed pressure on that level for facebook. google is facing a lawsuit from the justice department over its search business. we reported not too long ago that the doj is looking into its advertising business, so the more that drumbeat increases for these tech companies, the more pressure they are under to make that move and essentially spin off their businesses. emily: ok.

thank you for your viewpoint. meantime, morgan stanley says the meta-verse will only get real when apple decides to join. facebook and google have been investing in artificial reality, but a note says mass-market adoption of either technology will not happen until apple enters the race. it estimates the hardware market for new gadgets could be $100 billion by 2030. coming up, when one door opens, another closes. zillow leaving the home flipping market. i have a conversation with the cfo of open-door about how it can succeed where others have failed. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: zillow may not have made the home flipping business profitable. opendoor has. more than 15,000 homes in the third quarter, a 79% increase. zillow ending its flipping business in selling 2000 homes. joining me now is the cfo of opendoor. how will opendoor avoid what happened to zillow? carie: thank you for having me. there is a lot in being purpose built. all of what we do is taking the

traditional listing process and move it online to make it simple and convenient for home sellers. that is all that we do. it is our business. we have seven years investment in the team to do that repeatedly at scale with a lot of growth behind it. emily: what do you think they did wrong? why couldn't they get it right? carie: we are focused on what we can do right for customers. no one is working harder for customers right now, giving them an alternative, than we are. courts are what we do is -- core to what we do is pricing, and two, having a flexible, low cost by form that allows us to do things like acquire 15,000 homes last quarter. emily: 15,000 homes is more than

160 a day. i would love you to walk us through the logistical challenges of buying, renovating, and selling that many properties. how do you do it? carie: one thing we did a couple of years ago that served us well is we centralize operations. being able to operate at scale, that comes with the fact we have built the automation, the tooling command platform to do things like repair homes at scale, manage the vendor network remotely, let us understand what quality controls we need to have, and do that so that we can acquire and sell through homes and realize the margins we need to. emily: bloomberg has reported more than a quarter of the homes opendoor sold were acquired by investors. i'm curious if helping institutional landlords convert owner-occupied homes into

rentals, does that resonate with the company's core mission of adding liquidity to the market? carie: our core mission is infusing liquidity into the home market. our target homebuyer, that is who we sell homes to. we want to make sure we're putting as much liquidity into the market as possible to give people the ability to buy and sell homes with a lot more ease. there is uncertainty in the traditional home selling and buying process. emily: how much can it become? carie: today, when we get a seller with high intent, someone who wants to sell their homes in the next couple of months, well over a third of those buyers accept our offer, and that

number has picked up consistently quarter over quarter. over time, our ability to be nationwide, offer more homes, the surface area we cover in the market, and you think about that conversion rate north of 35%, we can have a huge portion of the real estate market over time. emily: cfo of opendoor, thank you for sharing your viewpoint with us. just days after disney came out with less than expecte r subscriber growth, it has reviewed its among those, theater hits on disney plus, and new offerings from the biggest franchises, marble, star wars, pixar. will it work? chris: i don't know. they did a press preview thursday. part of the problem was the stuff was stuff they announced

in december year ago, so they got it made, which is good, but it seems kind of familiar. one of the issues is people are criticizing disney plus, there is not a lot for adult, people who don't have kids, and if you're not a marvel or star wars fan, compared to the delusion of content available at netflix, not much surprising in the lineup. emily: we had a guest yesterday, talking about the problems he sees with disney and disney plus. take a listen. >> they could have a comprehensive service they could be driving subscribers at far higher prices. instead, they are stuck in their silos and trying to balance all the legacy businesses with disney plus, and balancing this dabbling balancing, they are

losing. they are not winning the way they could. emily: what you think of his criticism? chris: i think he is spot on in some way. one of the dilemmas disney finds itself in is that it has three services in the u.s. in addition to disney plus, and some say let's put all that together. they already have a bundle price for $14, and hey, by the way, the reason everyone went to streaming as they were tired of that big cable bundle price on the right -- price, right? so they are still working on an à la carte service, but clearly the focus is on disney plus, one hundred 18 million customers worldwide. they think it will get to 260 million. to get to that, you have to get beyond just the families in the star wars fans. emily: what are you hearing that

disney is doing about this? are they listening to people like rich greenfield or not? chris: they are focusing on their lane. they were asked wednesday if they are where disney plus needs to be, and he said more, and he said preschool, which is not exactly the direction most people are saying they should go . obviously, disney should have a lot of preschool content, but people want to see other content for adults, if you're going to keep subscribing. they say they were more than doubled the number of countries they are in. that will add to growth. they have 340 programs in the works, 9 billion dollars in spending across all the services, so they are creating more content, and whether it is more family-focus channel works as the big business they help, that will be the test. emily: thank you for your

reporting on this. coming up, how air table will help you build apps, even if you don't know how to code, and what opportunities that is opening up and opposed pandemic world. -- in a post-pandemic world. next, a quarterly report from a number of big-box stores, and see how e-commerce is playing into the business strategy. all the details here on bloomberg. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: cloud collaboration company air table is out with the new application make app building easier to help companies digitize operations, especially amidst the shortage

of tech talent. let's talk about this with the ceo of air table. great to have you with us. how do you allow people to build apps without knowing how to code? how does it work? >> we started with this data base project attract customers, inventory, and this now allows to create on top of that and simplify the workflow. now they can see the data they want and perform their work as part of this broader business model. emily: we are moving into a post-pandemic future. more of the work force is hybrid or remote only. how game changing can this product be in that environment? howie: we have been big beneficiaries of the shift towards hybrid work. you could get away with ad hoc

ways of tracking data, sharing data from a meeting with people, emails back-and-forth from tap people on the shoulder. today, when you have people distributed in different places, that doesn't happen anymore, so we have seen this attempt to consolidate information workflows, not just timor user level collaboration, but tooth re-think how the content production process works, or the marketing campaigns are orchestrated, those are the things that are up for grabs. we have seen this increased appetite for our product, 100 30% growth on the enterprise side, doubling large accounts in the last year, so it has been a big shift. emily: there are other productivity tools gaining traction on the notion, monday.com, how do you differentiate yourself from them? howie: there are two buckets,

notion and other products are products that are almost a reimagining of taking these other products and mashing it up into a new fluid experience. there is a lot of value. microsoft recognized it and came out with a product call loop to deliver on the same value proposition. ultimately, it is an organic and smaller teams-oriented nature of usage. what airtable is doing is going after businesses to create their own structured applications and tackle entire departments. that is something others are going after, but with airtable, we have tried to become this true application platform, so our advantage is to scale up to

more complex deployments, large enterprises building company-white processes onto airtable. emily: microsoft and facebook have announced new workplace products in the meta-verse. what is your take on the meta-verse, and is there a play for airtable? howie: there are two extremes of how you interpret it. one is this virtual space where you put on this headset and go in and you are immersed in this 3d environment with an avatar, etc. there is something to that. i will not dismiss it. there is a lot of promise, but it is probably a long way off before the technology is good enough and there is an ecosystem where we are spending our days living in that reality. emily: you are saying the

meta-verse is overhyped? howie: it is about creating a digital represents an asian -- representation of yourself. we are seeing that with other products, lighter weight avatars, other products where you're able to collaborate within this virtual space. the actual 3d vr aspects of the meta-verse is still a while off. emily: speaking of the path forward, airtable has become a bigger company since we last talked. what is the path forward to you? are you going public? are you open to a big deal? howie: we have been committed to building a large, independent business. the opportunity to change the way hundreds of means that people work and empower all these creators to build useful applications and share those with other users, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and the winner of this category

will be a multibillion revenue business they could trade in the public market in the $100 billion plus market cap range, so we are trying our best to become that winter. we think we have a good shot, so we are firmly focused on building the largest independent business we can. ipo is on the horizon. we are at nine figures in revenue, growing quickly, so we very much could be in the realm of being a publicly tradable business, but for now, we have no pressure or anxiety to do so too quickly. we are focused on executing really well. i think ipo is at least years down the road. emily: ok. that is not too far. we will check in with you before then. thank you for sharing your ambitions with us. the cofounder and ceo of airtable. coming up, a game changer.

i will speak with one of the cofounders of the game that pays you in crypto the play, next. this is bloomberg. ♪

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emily: welcome back to "bloomberg technology." i am emily chang in san francisco. let's look at crypto with ed ludlow. ed: we track so many other coins, but at the end of the day, bitcoins did well in terms of volume. five days of bitcoin, we end of the week 65,000 u.s. dollars to the token. two days ago we were nearer to

69,000. a lot of the news flow that the sec decided against listing the etf is a snob. they are turning up the heat on these cryptocurrencies. i like to extrapolate. have a look at this chart of bitcoin over a longer time horizon. this is the 14 day rsi, the redline being undersold territory. the green line, oversold. it is just hanging out in that territory. a lot of markets look at technical saying, what will happen with bitcoin? do we go up, down? it does not really matter. we have been hanging out in this spot for weeks at a time, yet to bitcoin cannot continue to climb higher or stay where it is.

in the middle of the week, everyone panics, volume down in the third quarter, volatility down, a selloff. everyone, just chill out. we end the week on a high. we see the same trend as cryptocurrencies rise broadly, which we saw over the last couple of sessions. the cryptos follow suit. don't just look in the short term, extrapolate to the bigger picture and try to find a direction in these markets, which is hard to do. emily: we will see if they chill this weekend or not. we will stick with crypto. the key is expanding into more avenues, including gaming. the idea of playing games and earning money is catching on. no one has done it better than axie infinity, owned by sky mavis, founded in 2018, and

valued at three dollars billion. --$3 billion. joining us is cofounder jeffrey zirlin. do you think this is the future of gaming, and if so, how big a part will it be? jeffrey: this is way more than the future of gaming, it is a shift in the future of work. we are creating new types of jobs, which is important, because we are seeing the main types of work automated away, destroyed during the pandemic. we need to figure out, what are the opportunities accessible on a global scale to anyone anywhere in the future? believe it or not, gaming will be a huge aspect of that equation. emily: for people who have not played or do not understand, what do you mean by new jobs being created? jeffrey: within our product,

axie infinity, players can battle, correct, earn tokens of real value just by playing a game. this is creating opportunities in places like the philippines, venezuela, indonesia, places where people are surviving on dollars per day, they are able to earn more than minimum wage in their country by simply playing axie infinity. emily: it is hard to dive in. onboarding is not easy, you have to download all these things just to start earning money. how do you make that process easier, and do you think that will be a critical part of scaling? jeffrey: definitely. it is still hard to get started. we came from the generation when we played starcraft as kids, we could not take phone calls at our house. new technology always has an entry barrier.

there is friction that gets fixed by builders. that is what we are focused on at sky mavis, that you have what you need to get started. over the last three years, it has gotten easier, but still has a long way to go. emily: does the volatility of the crypto market impact you? jeffrey: i will say one of the advantages we have is that we started in 2018, during a bear market. that toughened up our community and made it a group of missionaries, long-term thinkers, not just thinking about short-term gains. that is difficult in this market where people are seeing a lot of opportunity, and their way of looking at the market is different. i think the future of consumer apps will be built by builders

and communities that are impervious to market conditions. crypto is about empowering people to take back ownership of their data, of their digital items. it is about so much more than market fluctuations. that is the amazing thing. it creates an accessible window into crypto. if you are not just interested in truly financial applications, it is more accessible. emily: everyone is talking about the meta-verse. how we lou of airtable told us he thinks it is overhyped -- howie liu of airtable told us he things it is overhyped. when do you think it will materialize? jeffrey: people have different definitions of the meta-verse. i think it is the culmination of a trend where our digital lives take more and more importance

over what is happening in the physical world. we are starting to see these platforms, these real digital economies, where you are able to form relationships both social and economic, with anyone anywhere in the world. hollywood has planted this conception of the meta-verse that is harmful in that people think it might require 3d technology, vr glasses. i think the meta-verse needs to be accessible to anyone, anywhere, regardless of the hardware they have. on axie most are using android devices, the most accessible in the world. that is important. i am against any definition of the meta-verse that requires people to have advanced, expensive equipment. emily: appreciate that advancement -- perspective, jeffrey zirlin, of sky mavis and behind axie infinity.

we will take a look at digital optimization company amplitude, third-quarter results, and how things have changed since going public. we will speak with ceo spenser skates. this is bloomberg. ♪

♪ emily: the data analytics company amplitude posted its first earnings earlier this week . third-quarter revenue growing seven due to percent. year on year announcing a partnership with the data cloud company snowflake.

i am joined by amplitude cofounder and ceo, spenser skates. you had a solid first-quarter, but shares tumbled. what do you make of the investor reaction? spenser: we will have volatility in the stock. there are two things from my standpoint. i love prices, they are a great aspect of capitalism. people can make a lot of money if they know what the right price is. the second thing, people are over focused on where the price is. we opened the stock when we first lifted at $50 a share. we have gone up a bunch since then. it is set to come back down. i am glad we are done with the process and can focus on execution and growing the company. what i tell the amplitude team, it is equivalent of having highly paid vegas bookies speculating on your future performance. a data point, but not much

beyond that. emily: what is the outlook for q4? what will the bookies be looking at? spenser: we are excited, we updated our q4 guidance. the increase relative to when we first looked at the company. i want to highlight our customer growth. i was happy to be sharing that on our earnings call earlier this week. our customer base grew 54%, year on year. we shared awesome stories. spirit airlines, which grew their relationship with us, they used us to increase mobile check's and are pacing ahead of their year on year goal. another is square. we were talking about crypto earlier. we are seeing a lot of customer-facing teams. it is not just the data science and product teams. they are having a lot of customer usage. it shows how much -- how

important data is across all parts of the company. emily: you released a report on digital products and trends. the use of digital products is up 50% over the year. how did you come up with this list and what did you find most enlightening about it? spenser: one of the awesome things about amplitude, we have a unique lens into how people are using products. we collect data from over 6000 different companies and have unique insights into how consumers are changing their digital trend. one of the big things that stuck out is, since the start of the pandemic, average usage of products overall has gone up 54%. the average product had a 54% increase in daily active usage since the start of 2020. intech has had the biggest lift of all -- fintech has had the biggest lift of all.

many companies, including paypal, square, chase bank, they have seen their usage skyrocket since the start of the pandemic. they are up over 330%, on average. first product-led digital companies are leading. it is interesting to see the comparison. emily: the 10 hottest products in the u.s., some names i had not seen before. we will keep our eyes on them and you. spenser skates, ceo of amplitude, thank you. the richest person on another list, elon musk of tesla, number one on bloomberg's list of 15 billionaires. his fortune comes from a company that is revolutionized transport and is meeting with the demise of the internal combustion engine. it may take more time than musk's green ambition to short

sell the cio of muddy waters, who did not mince words when talking about him as part of our analyst development series. >> i used to be very negative on him. as a person, he lies a lot. please don't push back on that. we could get into the examples. every now and then when i say that, people said, if that were true, people would have sold the stock. [laughter] >> go on. >> what are the good things about elon? he built the car, he built the rocket. that is something that a lot of these managements in the companies are not going to do, like lords town motors.

at least to date the people initially with the company when it ipo'd, several of them are gone, and they were pretenders. we shorted a company called excel fleet, in the vehicle electrification space. when we do something like this, looking at this next generation green tech, whatever hot technology is, we play the man, not the ball. playing the ball would be using technology, does it work, let me get my scientists out here. are scientists arguing publicly with the company scientists? if you play the person, ok. what is this person's background? what are some of the agree things they have said that are core to the thesis, that if you

scratch the surface, these are not true, or are massive exaggerations? if we see exaggerations and misdirection and lies that are significant enough, we say, this is not elon musk. this is not a guy that is exaggerating, but in the most fundamental ways delivers, this is basically the same sort of guy who has existed since stock markets existed, a promoter that sells a dream that ultimately has no substance. that is how we play it. this does offer opportunities for us to do it. it is pretty crazy when you look at nikola and lordstown, they still have massive market caps. that goes to the phenomenon, now and again i joke that $700 million is the new zero.

there are all these companies that are valueless that have real cap. emily: he never holds back. he talked about other short seller operates around meme traders. >> the good thing from our perspective, or one good thing, they are loud. let's get back to that point we were discussing about position sizing. we don't run a lot of money in asset management. between the two funds, we are like 250, a little less. we are able to get out of the way of most of these things. when you look at what happened, last week, another short activist came out on company casava. the day after that came out,

that stock was up 550% and i think it has been up since then. the bottom line is, you cannot be large in these positions if you need to get out of the way quickly of the reddit crowd and meme traders. they don't necessarily start with the question, what is a really good company? they sometimes start with the question, who do we hate and who would be punished by my buying this? when you're in that environment, be small, be nimble. just manage risk. on the short side, it has always been about risk management, but never more so than now. >> there has also been a huge trend with a discussion about moving to esg and putting money into greener companies, greener types of technology.

i think about some of the electric vehicle companies that have gotten completely pumped up. not just tesla, but another one that ipo'd. it has a market cap as big or bigger than before, even though it only delivered a couple cars. is this a concern, or is it specific to the moment? carson: we have done some shorting in that space. the trick with shorting something like in the ev space or a technology that might have a future and that future could be important, is, it is separating the ceo's or founders who are going to do something substantive, from those who are

total pretenders. emily: muddy waters short seller, carson block. coming up -- >> ♪ i love you baby ♪ ♪ >> ♪ falling in love ♪ >> ♪ stand by me ♪ emily: how china is taking the connected car to a whole new level. what happened when our reporter took one for a spin. this is bloomberg. ♪ ♪

emily: our pool karaoke has been a hit in the u.s. for some time. in china, some electric carmakers are trying to make it part of every dairy -- everyday life. john liu reports on this, as well as social media. >> ♪ i love you, baby ♪

>> ♪ falling in love ♪ >> ♪ stand by me ♪ >> may be is enough. >> china is the world's most important car market today. every day, 25 million cars sold here, more than any country in the world. brands like volkswagen, bmw, gm, have had great success year. it is clear that in some ways, they are starting to fall behind local competition. one factor that stands out is the connected car. you have a cohort of up and coming chinese companies increasingly allowing chinese consumers to live their digital lives at home and on the road. that means in the car they can have their social media, their

gaming, and things like karaoke. >> ♪ darling, darling, stand by me ♪ john: it is not your usual road trip. some companies are at the forefront of this trend, offering models with karaoke microphones. >> they are showing some of the functionality in the car. there is a qr code, you scan that, and it takes you to your phone. >> we are here. >> this car by default, the entertainment functions of the karaoke, the gaming, the moving's, are not -- the movies, are not able to work while you are driving. after purchase, you can change the settings so passengers can enjoy. for many chinese drivers, the car is more than a way to get

from a to b. it is also a place where parked they can enjoy with friends some karaoke or even a picnic. they are competing for what happens inside the cabin, with voice recognition software. but car digital technology -- as you are shopping for a car, how important are these functions, wechat, karaoke, and your decision of what to buy? >> [speaking non-english language] john: electric vehicle sales

have surged in china, more than double the 3 million units this year from 1.37 million in 2020. >> ♪ so it goes some things are meant to be ♪ ♪

>> in a battle between a hot new electric vehicle company and hot new inflation numbers, i am afraid inflation wins. this is "bloomberg wall street week." i am david westin. larry summers on inflation. it turns out larry may have been right. larry: it is important to avoid excessive certainty. david: a big announcement that three giants, ge, johnson & johnson, and toshiba would brace themselves. and, a famed investor on how overheated