♪ announcer: from the heart of where innovation, money, and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is "bloomberg technology" with emily chang. ♪ emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco and this is "bloomberg technology.” coming up in the next hour, the musk mission to mars. he's about to announce the progress for his starship that is one day going to carry people to the red planet.

we are live from texas. plus, twitter's new ceo says investors shouldn't expect major changes in a product or growth strategy. we will catch up with ceo ned siegel for post quarter results. and crispr is now 10 years old. the nobel prize winner behind it will join us to talk about what the next 10 years of biomedical innovation looks like. all that in a moment. first, stocks falling today with inflation spiking to record highs and rate hikes looming. let's bring in kriti gupt for details. investors got the jitters. kriti: yes. you mentioned it. cpi coming in hotter than expected, no surprise that it will increase the rate hikes for the fed to be even more aggressive to tackle this. each share, on top of that

-- the chair, on top of that -- the cherry on top of that hawkish sunday, the idea that james bullard comes out and says that 50 basis points is on the table, as is a 1% rate hike increase by july. he sees it as a kind of consensus leader of fed policy when it comes to what his themes are, though he is considered a kind of ultra hawk. you can clearly see the nasdaq took it on the chin and gave their volatility higher but i think that the biggest move in the market has to be the 10 year yield, up 10 basis points on the intraday. this is not 2020 one anymore. higher yields don't scoop attack but the bigger yields like what we saw today will spook the nasdaq and you saw the red on the screen. earnings here are where you saw the pockets of green with twitter coming out with earnings this morning, lackluster numbers and actually announcing a higher buyback, $4 billion worth with twitter shares actually rallying and investors looking past lackluster earnings. going up two years since the pandemic era, social media stocks have been making a round trip.

meta, snapchat, pinterest. a major rally, they are now turning around but the question is, can they redeem themselves going into the rest of the year ? expedia reported strong numbers after the belt and it came to bookings with the rebound of travel despite the last quarter being dominated by the omicron variant. does it continue into the summer? we will have to wait and see. emily: thank you so much. elon musk is planning to outline progress on starship. it is a massive launch system that plans to one day carry people to mars. ed ludlow is in texas where he plans to make the presentation. that the stage for us. ed: it's madness, rental cars are sold out.

every hotel in the nearest city is sold out. there have been hundreds of cars parked around starbase. over my left shoulder is the starship spacecraft on the top with a super heavy booster on the bottom. 349 feet in total. people have been going up to it. i just got kicked out. they kicked me out because they are doing a security sweep but they will let me back later tonight. emily: what are we expecting him to say? ed: he starts with rocket science, ends with human biology, talking about the quantum realm, all kinds of stuff. but the main one we want to hear is when are we going to mars? right? that's the future of the starship system, to carry the heavy payload to mars. o'er 100 passengers. in 2019, he said in a few months

we will do an orbital test but it never happened. remember last year? lots of fireballs and crashes after that six mile hop and in may of last year, it made a leap into the air and landed itself successfully back here. where have we gone since then? we want to know. emily: what do we think the answer is to when? is this years, decades, centuries? ed: we have a few milestones that we know about. we think it will happen in the first quarter. the faa has to conduct an inspection of what is around me, a wildlife sanctuary, so they have to do a wildlife and environmental assessment. then what spacex is talking about is an unmanned mission in 2024. remember that japanese billionaire who had a ticket to the moon and back, hopefully a

ticket that is a return trip, we want to know if that is going ahead. emily: what about man to mars? when does that happening? or woman? ed: this is classic elon musk, right? everything he said in 2019, respectfully he misted the deadlines by a long way, but clearly they have made progress. what's astonishing is that when you stand underneath the full back, the sheer scale of it, it is not a falcon nine rocket. it is next level. it is enormous. all the engines they had, each one can generate 450,000 pounds of thrust. it seems so real that we just need to see it go into space. you know what i mean? emily: i know what you mean. we will be waiting for the details and more from you. ed ludlow. waiting for elon musk. thanks. plus, the biden administration

plans to spend $5 billion over five years to install chargers for electric cars. most of them will be placed along interstate highways in an attempt to convince more drivers to buy electric vehicles. the money coming from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by congress. coming up, the new twitter ceo is aiming to move faster but not changing course. we will break down the results, that is with the cfo ned siegel, up next here in the studio. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: maintaining the status well -- status quo seemed to be the theme of the twitter fourth-quarter quarter earnings call. the ceo promised to push projects through faster but told investors they shouldn't expect major changes under his leadership. ed siegel, the twitter cfo is with this -- and ned siegel, the twitter cfo is with us in person. great to see you now here in person in the studio. >> it's awesome to be here in person. emily: it has been a while. this is your first report without jack dorsey. waiting on the numbers for a second, i want to know how it's been under new leadership. >> it's been great. he has been at twitter for 10 years. he knows the people. he was an important part of building the strategy and has been a teammate too many of us. though when he was promoted to the job and made fast changes

around structuring, it felt natural. this was someone who you knew came from a position of deep understanding of the work and who cared a lot about the people. it feels like he is off to a great start. emily: is there a change to the existing plan, the strategy? ned: we feel that we know the work and we need to move faster to drive more accountability and be more metrics focused. some of the changes we have put in place are really designed to be in service of more accountability and being more metrics driven. emily: let's talk about the numbers. ad revenue and user growth and the forecast came in light. you are reiterating this, you call it realistic, this number of users. if you grew 30% last year, doesn't that mean you need to grow 40% over the next couple of years? is that really possible? ned: we came in in line with the outlook we provided for that quarter and we are pleased with

our results for the fourth quarter. as we look ahead, we shared metrics that we hadn't shared before, 35% growth year-over-year in sign-ups on witter in the fourth quarter. we have seen 25% growth in sign-ups plus reactivation. at means we are getting more people coming to the front door of twitter, giving us more opportunity to convert people over time. those insights, those early indicators give us confidence that we can accelerate the growth in the united states and internationally over the course of the year and be on track for the goals. emily: 45% over two years? ned: i think you are compounding it. it's 20% more growth compounded over this year and next year. emily: let's talk about rebooting, dormant accounts, people coming back to the

platform. what's different between now and say, 2019? ned: so much has changed on twitter. just think about the onboarding process. 40% of the accounts during the quarter were created using single sign-on. people are using their apple or google id. they didn't have to create or remember a new password. they didn't abandon the sign in process while they were in process. second, we are asking people about the interests they have when they go through the process of creating an account. if we know what you care about, we can make better recommendations then and overtime. we can turn that into a loyal audience member because we have shown someone right away how useful twitter can be. these are two good examples of what we have done but there's always more that we can do. emily: i always love the baseball metaphors. the buyback, what's the rationale? ned: we added another billion early in january from the proceeds of the sale. so with $7.5 billion in cash,

he felt like -- we felt like we could commit to buying back shares overtime and $2 billion in the near term while executing on our plan. hiring, growing our headcount this year, we will continue to be inquisitive, bringing technology and talent to the company and building the infrastructure that we need to deliver twitter. emily: you recently started allowing users to use nfts for their profile pictures. how is that going? how popular do you think it will be? how much traffic you think it will drive to the subscription service? ned: so, for a few dollars a month you get access to the twitter blue, top articles organized in your network, undo a tweet. there are other features as well. one of the cool other features we announced was that you can use an nft as your profile picture. every time we launch a new feature into twitter blue, we learn more and more about how people want to use the service, where people find value and what the right audience is for a

service like this. we will continue to iterate on the price point and the features included to get it right. emily: everyone seems to have a view on the metaverse, overhyped or not. what is your view and do you have a strategy? ned: twitter is about what's happening in the world right now. if there is a topic or event that you want to learn about from others, we want to make sure that the tweets are available to you wherever you are. whether you are on your sofa, on your way to mars with elon, or in front of your computer screen interviewing someone, we want the tweets to be there for you. some of that will happen through the app, others will happen through the apis. we will just continue to work hard to find out wherever people want to find tweets, we are there for them. emily: do you expect the metaverse to be a thing someday and does twitter need to be a part of building it?

ned: virtual-reality is inevitable. whatever it is, we want to make sure that the tweets are there and that you are a part of the conversation. the super bowl is a great example of that. so many people use twitter as a companion when they are watching something, at the event, on tv. arch madness and others are -- march madness and other events are great examples as well. emily: the super bowl, you have mentioned this before. the olympics, is it still the case that traffic is more consistent or do you see the bumps happening over time and do you see new ways to draw people into the platform and reactivate the dormant accounts? ned: big events are a great way to grow the audience, show people how much better twitter

is than the last time they came to the surface, and help advertisers find new customers. as big events are happening all over the world. it could be a cricket match in india or an election in brazil. more than 80% of the people using twitter are outside the united states. at means that the events that draw people to the service are happening in the united states. emily: twitter spaces, how do you expect that to be built out? ned: it's not just spoken word but text, video, pictures and so on. we came on today to talk about the quarter. the nfl and nba have included them in their recent deals. i hope you will join one of those soon so that we can talk about what's going on in the technology landscape in the bay area and beyond, but it has been off to a good start so far. emily: i will see you back there soon. ned siegel, so great to see you. coming up, sonos shares jumping

in aftermarket trading, beating estimates and apparently the supply chain crunch. patrick spence will be with us, next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: speaker maker sonos made managn pain thanks to the rise of remote work with consumers increasingly building out new audio experiences at home. joining us now to talk about latest results, the sonos ceo. i want to talk about the supply issue, we have seen weakness in so many companies because of the chip crisis and lack of

supplies. how did you navigate this so well? >> it's an incredible amount of work by our team to reengineer our products so that we can use the components available into our products, and spot buys, shaking the trees to find those components, and nag of a gating as navigating container shortages, the congestion at the ports, covid, omicron kind of coming in. our team just did a tremendous job and as you saw we were able to deliver more for our customers and exceed expectations. i'm super proud of the team and i think we put the toughest quarter from a supply chain perspective behind us. emily: it sounds like there will be a surge in demand and a lack of supply for the rest of the year. can you continue to do what you did for the last quarter for the next three? >> that is definitely the focus.

we left the quarter with a huge backlog. our consumer was really strong into january, february. we still have some backlog and still need to fill the channels with inventory, but we see it getting better throughout the course of the year. so i think the worst is behind us and we are looking forward to an exciting rest of the year. emily: how much has the pandemic roosted sales? -- boosted sales, and if the pandemic is moving into the rearview mirror and people have the speakers they need, does that mean that a slowdown could be ahead? what does longer-term growth look like? >> we are not a one and done product, right? the interesting thing about our business model is our existing customers come back and buy more over time, so last year, 45% of our sales went to existing customers returning and adding another sonos to their system and we grew the average number of products for customer to read. we believe over time that we can grow that to four or six, but

the other important thing about those existing customers coming back to buy more is they go in tell their friends to get sonos. they are a number one source of new customers. all those new customers that we added over the last couple of years, we know from history they will come back to add more products to their system over time. we feel good about the way we are positioned over the next few years. emily: so let's talk about adding new products to the portfolio. everybody ones to know about those sonos headphones. anything you can share? >> we have a lot of exciting products, especially as we go back inside. we have two products that i think will be popular products, and of course i will come back when we have new product news ready to share. emily: you'd fans of sonos -- huge fans of sonos here. i'm also wondering about a voice assistant. you are competing with syria,

with siri, alexa, google. why not launch your own given that you have got the equipment? >> what a great idea. a couple of years ago we did acquire a company that specializes in voice. stay tuned for more on that. we do think that there is a real opportunity in really addressing kind of audio specifically, music specifically when it comes to voice. there's a lot of kind of great ask anything broad solutions out there, but we have some ideas on how it could be even more interesting. emily: you were recently the winner in a lawsuit against google in kind of a david versus goliath story and i'm wondering if you think that these bigger tech giants have too much power, too much dominance overall? >> absolutely and i have spoken to congress and the white house on this front when they reached out. because, having been in the industry for 25 years, we have never seen companies really generate this much power and use it then as well to really

squeeze the oxygen out of new competitors coming up and one of those things is that some of these big tech companies are really using their profits in one part of the business to predatory price the smart speakers that copy what we do and these kinds of things. that's why i think it is important to speak out on the issue. emily: you talked about apple having too much power, too. what's the solution? i mean, is it a breakup? >> i think, we have rules on the books about predatory pricing and address some of these issues. they need to be enforced. with the new administration, the new leadership, doj, ftc, some of the bills that senator klobuchar and grassley are ringing through are heading in the rice direction in terms of -- right direction in terms of spurring a whole new generation of innovation into the united states. i'm optimistic based on where we

are today, but we will have to watch and see where that develops over the last year. emily: 30 minutes left, what's the long-term growth map? >> we have a huge opportunity ahead. we are in about 10% of the homes we could address over time. we play in a space with $90 billion in annual sales. though we have so much opportunity when it comes to sound and being the sound of the your entire life, and that's where we are going. emily: no plans to be acquired soon? that's often the speculation. that you are a acquisition we are putting off g . we are acquiring companies and feel that we are in a great spot and i'm all for a lot more independent companies. i think it's better for innovation in the country, so we will stay focused on doing everything we can to build this company into a multibillion-dollar one. emily: patrick spence, thank you. >> thanks. emily: coming up, 10 years since

the discovery of the crispr gene editing technology. the biochemist and nobel prize winner behind it joins us next to talk about the next 10 years of implementing and commercializing this technology. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: welcome back. crispr codeveloped a technology that is turning 10 years old. the discovery that it can be used -- drugs based on this technology have been accelerating ever since. now affirm is bringing on a chief science advisor to help with the technological development.

10 years since crispr. i'm curious about the next 10. how is gene editing technology going to affect us? >> the next 10 years. it's very exciting to think about what's ahead. we are seeing a lot of advances right now in clinical medicine, diagnostics. we will see doors opening in synthetic biology as well. i am excited about the ways that genome editing is going to intersect with computer science, artificial intelligence in ways that are hard to imagine. in 10 years, we will see crispr woven into many aspects of our daily lives. >> jennifer's expertise is unparalleled. how do you hope having her on

board will help guide and inform your investment decisions? >> we have been very successful in the past with our investing. a theme would not be long short equity. a theme would be convergence of health care and data. to be a credible partner and to take full advantage of what our investors give us with their capital, we need deep expertise in the field. that is going to make us better investors as well as better partners. her unparalleled expertise, this

is a magnificent golden age of biology that is daunting and we are thrilled to be collaborating with her. emily: what does the commercialization of crispr look like to you? >> the technology is at a point where its demonstrated potential is vast. we are poised at a time when increasingly we will see opportunities for real-world applications of crispr and i think it's appropriate to make that an investment. i can't think of a better partner. they have deep expertise in the financial world. with marty's expertise in computer science and data analysis, it's going to be an exciting opportunity to make sure that opportunities that have to do with genetics and genome editing are appropriately capitalized. emily: you use the word appropriate. there are major ethical concerns about how gene-editing technology can be used for

better or for worse. how are your views evolving on the appropriate use of the technology? is it ok to choose the color of your babies eyes? >> as you know, i have been involved in the ethics of crispr. there's are so many applications that don't involve any of the things you just said. i think we will have plenty on our plate. in the meantime, it's important the global scientific community continue to work on appropriate transparency as the technology advances.

emily: given that you run health care and tech initiatives, what are the opportunities that you see? what are you most excited about in terms of the implementation of this to you? >> fundamentally, what drew us together is a shared vision. in one of our early conversations, i remember back over the summer and the fall, jennifer and i got incredibly excited about this convergence of computer science and biology. i feel like i have been waiting for this all of my life. i majored in biochemistry because professors told me the future of it was computational. i worked on ai and medicine 30 years ago, but the computers were not fast enough. now, they are fast enough and we have enough data to build high fidelity digital twins in software that accelerate the process of scientific discovery and that intersection is what got us excited to bring her expertise and the science and bioethics and our flexible capital, put them together to make people better.

to make crispr a reality in people's lives. emily: the lack of diligence around cyrano's have captured the fascination of the world. i wonder how that impacted the scientific investing community. if you think investment firms like yours need more people like jennifer educational and academic backgrounds to make these kinds of decisions. >> there are many things that went wrong at other companies. we keep our focus on ourselves and one thing that has worked for us as i mentioned is thematic investing. a deep rigorous process as well as deep partnerships with the domain experts. there is no substitute in that in the due diligence and

partnering with the management team. it all leads to a cycle of better returns for our investors and making people better bringing the science and translating it into better health care outcomes. emily: you have been a pioneer in mrna technology that has worked with our covid vaccines. do you think we can prevent the next pandemic before it happens or is this a cycle we will see over and over again over the course of history? >> there's no doubt there are a lot of lessons learned in the current situation. i hope we can if not completely prevent the next pandemic, be better prepared than we were for this one. the combination of innovation, investment in fundamental science over decades to bring about the mrna vaccines that many have benefitted from is a wonderful example of how science stepped up and i think we need to continue to invest in that

kind of fundamental innovative work that is going to prepare us for the future whatever it brings. emily: thank you both for joining us. we are excited to see the bets you make and we will be watching for your next move. coming up, we are going to be speaking to robinhood's chief legal officer for an update on robinhood's roadmap ahead. plus, crypto wallets. that's next. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: the u.s., u.k., and australia are warning about new ransomware threats. tell us more about these threats. >> take a look. this is from a blockchain platform. the scope of how much these attacks have jumped. they are likely to be higher when the data comes in than what you saw in 2020. that could surpass $700 million easily and that is more than

quadruple what you saw in 2019. part of this is a jump in the average payment. you saw $118,000 when it comes to the average payment per ransomware attack. it is exponential in the total number of ransomware attacks as well as per attack for the average payment for each of them. >> what are you learning about where these attacks are coming from? >> now you have global coordination coming from the u.s., the u.k., australia and there is a lot of worry about ransomware attacks coming from russia, eastern europe, and the cryptocurrency associated ransomware groups. still learning more about those groups is going to be key for regulators to coordinate. emily: i want to stick with crypto with robinhood launching crypto wallets.

we want to bring in their chief legal officer. great to have you with us. putting your regulatory hat on, what of those 2 million people should they be waiting for in terms of tax rules on their digital assets? >> don't make me put on my regulator hat. it is a rollout of crypto wallets a big event at robinhood. the refrain we heard from customers time and time again in social media and elsewhere was

when wallets. we were hard at work behind the scenes of trying to put together the technology to offer this to customers. finally rolling it out is great excitement. it's a good feeling here at robinhood any time we are able to get our customers what they ask for and need. emily: there is also great uncertainty about what regulation lies ahead. anyone who owns a digital asset, what should they be preparing for in terms of tax rules and other issues? >> tax status is something that you have seen played with in congress and various bills that work germane to cryptocurrency. there have been various tax implications with crypto that have risen over the years. with robinhood, our main business is brokerage. we are fully compliant in the way that we rollout tax notices and all of the tax documentation our customers need and we apply that to our crypto offering also. we feel well-prepared to serve our customers and other platforms will have to catch up when tax reporting requirements

are applied to them specifically. emily: you were also talking to regulators. what regulations are you preparing for as to how it's going to impact robinhood and across the platform? regulators have a lot of questions. >> is unchartered regulatory territory. a lot of interest, a lot of customer interest. you see rise in crypto with investors. an important asset class to pay attention to. an important asset class not to kill in the crib. they don't need to bring their hammer and look for every nail. we obviously strive to rollout a safe product to our customers,

one that has the guard rails around and education, transparency on fees and the like. notably, quality execution which is something you don't hear about too much in the crypto space. we bring that dna from our brokerage side crypto and we are focusing more more on ensuring our customers get great execution. on the regulatory side, the one thing that is interesting, you have heard the sec say to you crypto platforms, come talk to us and register. i spent a lot of time at the sec and i wasn't sure what the contours of that registration might look like we have engaged with the sec and we are trying to flush out what would this look like to be an sec registered platform? i am not sure where it's going to lead us, but they have been very receptive and we are engaging in substantive discussions with them about what it might look like.

emily: it has been a year since the gamestop moment. in a blog post, you said you never want your customers to be surprised with trading restrictions again. what is the message to retail investors who are considering robinhood now? how can you give them confidence that won't happen again. >> there was no bigger trauma in the history of robinhood than having to stop the buying of popular meme stocks year ago. it's antithetical to our whole mission and purpose to cease trading. our customers let us know how they felt about it. they didn't like it and reputation lie, it was not a good look for us. we felt it, we hear the pain of our customers and we have done everything in our power to make sure something like that never happens again. we are sitting right now on five times the amount of regulatory net capital in our clearing firm

than we had last year at this time. we had 500 million then, we have $2.7 billion now. that puts us in the general vicinity of some of the mega-banks on wall street. we went out, raised the money, that is committed effectively to our customers by locking it up in regulatory capital and ensuring that we have the massive backstop to ensure that restrictions never need to be applied again. emily: the price of robinhood shares have declined recently. what is your general response to these class actions? >> robinhood like other fintech and financial services and tech firms have encountered some macro headwinds. if you look at the performance of the sector generally, we largely mirror that. these things work in cycles. for me and the rest of the

management team at robinhood, we get it. we are playing the long game. we are building great products that customers want. we are focusing on customers and products and safety first. we are not looking at the stock price worrying about that. on the class-action side of things, this is life in america as a public company. you have firms that live for stock movement in a negative direction and they will come in and i feel very confident that we will prevail on the merits that there is no justification for it. emily: meantime, there is still sec interest in the gamification of markets. >> we had to litigate with massachusetts but they had to drop an unfounded complaint against us making allegations that are true. one problem we are facing at robinhood as a disruptor is we -- technology that has -- we have brought in a whole new generation of investors.

the rise is incredible. the diversity of the investors is incredible. that tracks closely to the rise of robinhood. we feel good about bringing those people to markets that have been shut for years. we think regulators whether it be massachusetts or elsewhere, they need to get with the times. emily: maybe the almanac still does. i see that one behind you.

it is our amazing producers who have those eagle eyes. thank you for joining us, great to have you. coming up, youtube has big plans for 2022. it involves the metaverse. all of that and more. this is bloomberg. ♪

emily: following competitors investments in the category. what is youtube's metaverse play going to look like?

>> youtube says it is still early days, but gaming is an important category to start with when it comes to making immersive experiences. this company has not decided to bet the farm the way facebook has. it means more virtual reality videos on the platform which have been there since 2016. emily: how does it fit into google's track record on virtual reality? google could always say that they were there quite early. they created the cardboard platform known for its distinctive cardboard box that you could place your phone into. after a while, the interest tapered off. they have instead focused on

searching, maps, youtube. google always says whether it's the head of the company or the head of youtube, they always say it's early days. emily: we will be watching. thank you. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg technology." tomorrow, we will be speaking to the ceo of uber after the earnings report. you don't want to miss it. this is bloomberg. ♪

>> the following is a paid program. the opinions and views expressed do not reflect those of bloomberg lp, its affiliates, or its employees. >> this is a paid advertisement for csn. >> many times i been out here with the new coin release and i've asked for a drumroll. in all honesty, in the past it's been nothing but hyperbole but this time i really would like a drumroll. i don't know if i'm going to get one. this is i think the singular most