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tv   Bloomberg Technology  Bloomberg  September 19, 2022 5:00pm-6:00pm EDT

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>> from the heart of where innovation, money and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is bloomberg
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technology with emily chang. ♪ emily: i'm emily chang in san francisco and this is uber technology. in the next hour, it has been a tough year for tech titans everywhere but there is one standout and that is mark zuckerberg. his 71 billion-dollar wealth white bell and how much the metaverse ways on that loss this hour. plus, how apple is quietly backing an association that brands itself as giving a voice to small business app developers. claimant week is underway in new york city. we will take a look at one company helping other businesses fight climate change i taking a harder look at their own carbon footprint. first i went to get a look at
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the market. tech stocks pushing hire to start the week with all eyes on one thing. the fed meeting. ed ludlow with the biggest moves. ed: a picture says a thousand words. mark rising in 75 basis point hike pushing rates above 4% market did start rising. up eight tenths of 1% p the outperformer in the tech heavy index. coming off the worst weeks since january and the last five days. we pay attention to five-year yields. we come back off to 3.4 percent. a key psychological level to bitcoin at 19,005 hundred u.s. dollars. at one point, it had been the lowest level since june or the 18,000 u.s. dollars token mark. we kind of recovered throughout the session. interesting because some offoery
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specifically on the nasdaq 100, apple, so downtrodden. paying attention to nvidia, last week when we had the worst week, and video was among the worst performers. cathie wood adding almost 400,000 shares. meda, a special shout out because it has snapped a five day losing streak in which it shed $61 billion in market cap. emily: let's talk about meda here because when you're looking at mark zuckerberg's own personal wealth at 71 billion dollars wiped out, of course facebook shares have plunged as well. facebook's market cap is a fraction of apple and microsoft's but that is a lot of money. a big caused any the real world
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for his bet on the metaverse. ed: you look at the chart behind me, it is pretty ugly. you remember me being outside of what is now meta hq. there was one thing you and i latched on that mark zuckerberg said which is it is going to take a long time for his metaverse idea to reap financial rewards. emily: ed ludlow. we are going to dig in a little more. ed will be back later in the show. i went to bring in rent from jeffries. we were talking earlier about the personal cost when it comes to mark zuckerberg's wealth. when are you going -- when are you going to decide if this pivot was worth? >> it is still years out. they said the road to the metaverse is going to take multiple years. it is not just facebook. it is the whole tech system that
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will drive us forward to remember, you have the economy pulling back. when the macroeconomy gets tougher, they tough their ad dollars. all of social media, you go across the board, they were all feeling the pain as the global macro dimms. you will see less add dollars flow. combined with a headwind of the macro and i think for many in tech, it is a tough road ahead. obviously a lot of these stocks getting bad news but what we are finding in this market is the more bad news that keeps coming, these stocks continue to drift lower across tech. this is not just a meta-issue. that continues to be a big drag for tech in the short-term. emily: you think meta should consider spinning off businesses
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like instagram for example where there is seemingly a more reliable future profit engine? >> i don't think spinning is going to change anything. we have asked on amazon well they spin aws off? you don't want to lose your star student in your household because it helps the other kids in the house. you think about u.s. and amazon -- and amazon and facebook with -- you think about aws and amazon, i don't think they want to lose the star. it is a possibility. certainly you can make a case for many tech companies they could consider that but i think what we are dealing with is a global tech storm that is impacting everyone. this is not going to change anything in the short-term.
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investors right now are out of the space. they went to see signs of recovery. -- they want to see signs of recovery. this is a broader topic that goes beyond facebook. i don't think a split off is in the works. emily: but what do they have that meta-does not have? >> amazon has a powerhouse and a software. aws is their biggest source of growth. it is their most durable piece of the business. why would you want to lose that business and spin it off? we know the numbers. it is embedded in the business. i think the challenge for instagram is we do not know all the fact numbers so that is what is hard to describe a value for it. i think that is the difference at amazon. for microsoft, many of their
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calls are intertwined. -- many of their claws are intertwined. i don't think we are going to see a big shakeup in terms of spinoffs because the market has gone down. this is a global macro pullback. the tech industry has to weather the storm in the short-term. perhaps we could see it at some point but that has not been a question we have been getting from investors at this point. number one question is when does this thing turn around. many still believe we could be in for a wild ride into early 2023 before technology comes to acknowledge weakness in the overall global environment. many have not. they have not lowered the bar. until the bar is lowered, no investor wants to jump into the
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pool until they know the pool is safe. emily: i have a question for you. do you believe in the metaverse and do you believe it will change how businesses and people interact with each other in two years? yes or no? >> now. i do not -- no. i do not. i think it is going to take some time. emily: go ahead. >> i think this is a multiyear journey. this is a remaking of the internet. it is a remaking of the experiences. we can in gh -- we can engage as a business the way that doctors and patients engage. the way that contractors and their clients engage on the site. there are elements of the metaverse today that makes sense but i think it is still a long
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way off and when investors hear a new wave is coming, they suddenly think it is going to be immediate overnight. i am bullish about the opportunity but i think the opportunity is going to take longer to come into the fold. it will take time. it will take longer than two see -- two years to see it in a big way. emily: jeffries tax act there leader. thank you for stopping by. -- jeffries tech sector leader. thank you for stopping by. election betting is inching closer to a reality. big plans to allow americans to trade on which party will win congress in the midterm. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: now with the midterms inching closer, you might be able to bet on them and make we'll money. it has been years in the making and now the cftc is wearing a plan that could let people place as much as $25,000 on which political party control congress. that is the proposal from the productions market operator call sheet. the first regulated exchange for trading on events. the cofounder and ceo joints me now. why do you want to get into election betting? >> that is a great question and
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thanks for having me. election markets or elections more broadly are the -- one of the single biggest sources of -- in the country. our mission is democratizing access to hedging tools. tools in instruments that allow people and small businesses to hedge -- which relate to their day-to-day. there is nothing that exposes people and individual businesses to risk like an election. that is what we are going for. emily: you can place as much as $25,000 on which party wins congress. that is a lot of money. talk to me about how you think this plays out say this gets approved ahead of the midterms? > it is a very interesting point. i will go back to the history and how we started. the idea came from my time at goldman in 2016 where we structured derivatives that allow big institutions to hedge election risks.
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these products were trading in billions of dollars. when you compare to that, 25 k is a small number. the hedging needs of people and businesses are big. we are starting -- smaller hedging and you feel like 20 5k is -- and we feel 20 5k is appropriate. emily: there is a broader philosophical question at play here which is do you think betting on elections is good for democracy? could it influence the democratic process at all in a negative way? >> any financial innovation had ethical considerations. insurance when it came in, is it ok to bet on human lives, it was the same thing with futures in the 1900s. elections are broadly traded in
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democracies like the u.k., ireland and australia without any evidence at all of any negative impact. they have had platforms which for eight years in the u.s. -- no clear evidence of that or clear impact. the things we have seen this is why our proposals are getting a lot of support and positive comments from organizations, economic professors and academics and others. what we have seen is the markets are used because they are a source of truth about what is happening with the midterms. with average polling accuracy decreasing, there is a mechanism that will allow us to get more informed about what is about to happen and allow to reduce polarize asian. one comment i mentioned is from a professor at harvard who talked about how the administration under obama used
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of these markets to inform public policy and forecast different outcomes because of decisions they were making. emily: so you think this would be better than polls for democracy? >> i definitely think this can be better than polls and people can see the proof is in the pudding. one example is inflation markets over the last year have outperformed the economists surveyed pretty much nine out of the last 10 times. these markets are more accurate because in polls people can say anything. the samples can be biased etc. we are seeing that with elections. polls are conflicting each other. like any financial marketplace people have skin in the game. they are more incentivize to say the truth which makes markets more accurate than any alternative. emily: one of your competitors had an application for elections betting i believe was rejected
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by the cftc. what makes you think the cftc is going to improve yours and what kind of questions have they been asking you? >> our company was made in 2012 at i think over the last decade things have changed. a lot of assumptions the commission made at the time has been invalidated but a lot of the activity that has been happening in the last 10 years on the platform has shown none of the negative consequences would have been and these markets are in the public interest because of the forecast they are bringing to the market and because they are allowing people and businesses to hedge risks that tie them to the election and industries like energy, health care, climate and other types of industry. emily: all right. so if this gets approved, what do you think that happens and what are the odds? >> the cftc is set to make a
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decision by october 20. things are trending in the right direction to the comment -- in the right direction. the comments have been positive. a professor says investors are ready, the public is ready. it is a question about whether regulators are ready. i cannot talk about the odds. we are going through the regulatory process. i do hope regulators will be ready, emily: you have a sense about how the platform is today and how much bigger you think it can get by expanding into some of these additional areas? >> i feel we are just getting started. we have listed over 4000 markets so far. we are probably -- we're deftly the fastest driven lives exchange in terms of listing markets. this last month we reached 10 million contracts on the exchange. with the upcoming elections,
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these numbers are going to go up by magnitudes. really excited for what is ahead. emily: we will be watching. thank you for joining us. instacart reportedly clamps to focus its ipo on selling employee shares instead of raising capital for itself. according to the wall street journal instacart executives have told prospective investors they don't plan to issue many new shares in the public offering. the company provides online grocery shopping services. coming up, we are going to take a deep dive into apple's influence over a trade group that represents app developers and how the lobbying agenda tracks closely with that of apple. what does it mean? that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: the app association brands itself as a leading voice of thousands of apps all over the world. the vast majority of its funding comes from apple. the iphone maker plays a dominant role in shaping policy positions. bloomberg's emily birnbaum has been diving deep. talk to us why this association matters. >> i think the app association and apples power over the group is representative of a larger trend in lobbying by the big tech companies. they come under greater scrutiny from washington. they are pouring more money into
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the nonprofits, quote unquote grassroots groups, groups that represent more sympathetic characters than some of the largest and richest companies in the world. apples relationship with the association is only a small sliver of it but it is representative of how a lot of lobbying looks right now. emily: talk to us about apple's role. how much funding they provide and how much influence they exert. >> i spoke with a lead of former employees and people familiar with the dynamics within this group. they confirmed apple makes up more than half of their annual contributions. in 2020, that means apple was giving at least $4.5 million. that is a pretty large price tag when it comes to washington
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trade association. the highest are usually between one to $2 million should former employees i spoke to said a percentage of their contribution is probably much higher. in my conversations, i learned apple lobbyists and lawyers regularly weigh in on regular policy positions the group should take and areas the group should focus on. if you look at what the group advocates on the most, it is antitrust obviously as the top priority for apple, patents, certain kind of patent reform apple has prioritized. broadband, also something apple is interested in. there is putting much a one-to-one relationship between policy priorities and apple. emily: of course all the big tech companies have immense lobbying operations. how does apple in your experience differ from alphabet or meta or amazon?
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>> foot -- apple for years has distinct itself by having a much more muted washington presence. when steve jobs even was overseeing the first entry into washington, he said i think our products will speak for themselves in the halls of congress. tim cook has carried that forward. i don't think we have to play the dirty washington games. they don't have a pac. the last couple years in which apple has come into the limelight has shown they have to get engaged and they have to be telling their story in washington. now they are kind of catching up with their peers. emily: what are you going to be following especially as we get closer to midterms? there is legislation moving through congress on big tech quickly. >> yeah, so it is
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becoming clear it might come to a vote in the lame duck after the midterms. that is incredibly unlikely. if republicans retake the house, probably antitrust will fall to act of the shelf and content modernization -- moderation and censorship claims will fall to the four. emily: appreciate your perspective. thank you so much for joining us. the fight against climate change. is it gaining momentum? we will talk about whether companies are making serious changes to their operation and if not, what it will take. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: welcome back to bloomberg
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technology. let's get back to the markets. ed ludlow has been keeping an eye on netflix. ed: it was a volatile session for netflix. pushing higher at the open then swinging back down to a loss in the middle of the session. closing up 1.5 percent. the catalyst in the early part of the session was an upgrade from oppenheimer. the third upgrade we have seen this month. they are focused in on the potential for an advertising based tear of subscription. price target through into $25 raising netflix to outperform. there is a little bit of momentum behind the stock. you get some context. netflix is a stock down 60 percent. it is trading very close to the average 12 months analyst price target. if you are down 60% in trading where the street and she will be
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on a 12 month basis, there is not much room for upside. i think it is going to be interesting to keep and i on netflix and how much momentum does get behind the stock as we move toward an ad based tier for netflix. i don't know about ads. emily: it is certainly will change the netflix experience. i have to think about that one. climate week has kicked off in new york city. the summit taking place alongside the u.n. general assembly links together leaders from business, government and civil society to showcase global climate action. to talk about how tech can help with that, christian anderson, from a business that helps get 10 that zero faster pit the -- get to net zero faster. are these companies making
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compromises to get 10 that zero faster? >> watershed works with the large companies across industries come across geography. tech companies like airbnb and doordash and walmart, saw the largest asset firms and our focus with these companies is take a data-driven approach to their own supply chain. for a long time corporate clement was synonymous with low-quality offset and not with actual reduction work in the company's own footprint and that is where our customers are focusing. emily: are companies making hard choices? sometimes when you gather that data, you might not like what it looks like. >> it is definitely true every company new to climate work is surprised by something they learned in the data but actually on the positive side where for
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companies, cost reduction and investment in long-term over risk and better quality technology tend to go hand-in-hand with the climate work. it takes the data to see that but these companies i was mentioning like walmart or large asset managers, these are sophisticated businesses who are known for making business first decisions and have chosen to double down and trickle down on their claim at work because these are positive investments for the company over the three plus year time horizon. emily: you would say these companies are making those tough calls when faced with the choice? >> so i think the climate action most companies are going to take is the climate action in the intersection of good for the business and return on
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investment from the business on the one hand and also good for the climate on the other hand to the good news on climate now versus 10 years ago is 10 years ago there was not enough climate action that would end the money for businesses. a company profit motivated was not going to get far on climate reduction. that has changed over recent years. technology progress is putting climate action more and more into the money for companies where now it is the case i would say every large company with operational control in its supply chain has available to it 10%, 20%, 40% in emission reduction they go hand-in-hand with sound, business investment decisions. that is what can be ubiquitous. some companies will go out of the money. what will become ubiquitous is climate action good for the business. emily: can you give us an example of where your technology
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hub led to a business making a decision that was really consequential? >> absolutely. where businesses often focus early and where watershed directs companies is clean energy producing for the company and over time for their suppliers as well. public case studies of companies who by investing in first clean energy for their own scope two carbon footprint and second, investing in energy purchasing for tier one supply purchases like the manufacturers they work with directly. they can both reduce the carbon footprint which for most companies is almost entirely from a supply chain. people can think of corporate climate like the light bulbs. it is so much like supply, manufacturing, every materials. we redirect companies to the
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supply chain to clean energy investment first and looking for suppliers with alternate agricultural or industrial practices the company can preferentially purchase from in a way that brings emissions down. emily: what impact do you think president biden's climate bill will actually have? >> i think the impact will be fantastic because it brings more harm reduction into the money. this was a very business focused bill in a way i think watershed and our customers found exciting where it was all about subsidy of industry, manufacturing clean technology development and deployment so it expands that set of tech that is good for climate on the one hand and also in the bunny for businesses. -- in the money for businesses. it will take year ice -- take years in some cases. the decisions they are making are often about capital
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investments that will pay off or not for their company long-term. that is why the data field is high-stakes. what will be the return on investment from a financial and climate perspective? the decisions often take years to play out. on the multiyear horizon, the inflation reduction act is going to be great for bringing more clean technology into the money for businesses. emily: you're obviously facing a global energy crisis. how do you expect that to impact tech companies decision-making and some of the investments they have been hoping to make but may the energy crisis will make them think twice? >> watershed has a front row seat on this decision-making because the data we look at for our companies in their spend data and investment data globally outside the climate context as well. the energy crisis is going to be
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severe for many businesses and many geographies. the tell -- the tailwinds on climate investment at least over the past three to six months have been stronger than any headwinds and climate investment remains very high. on the energy crisis in particular, it is this two edged sword in the media term countries and companies will turn to whatever fuel source is available particularly to get through the winter particularly in europe. at the same time it is pushing companies to assess what is my carbon exposure it has to feel exposure in the supply chain? companies play an important role in new energy projects to get projects world dell and reduce the dependency in the longer term. emily: climate week this week. what are you going to be watching? what more do you want to see
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from the corporate sector? >> i'm glad you asked. the things we would love to see way more than pledges is bent more toward company progress. over the past two or three years, there has in i think it is really good news a surge in climate pledges. there has been an increase in the number of companies with science-based targets. that is great. the thing i want to see this climate week is less on the pledge side and companies that have made pledges in the past year or two showing up with numbers may be from watershed or somewhere else but numbers on the progress they have made since the past climate week. emily: christian anderson, cofounder of watershed. a big week covering
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climate week coming up. jack dorsey will be under oath tuesday against his long-term friend elon musk. he will be questioned by attorneys from both sides tuesday morning to he was subpoenaed last month by musk. coming up cryptocurrency slides to the lowest in months. we talk about the post surge slump crypto trends to watch and more. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: bitcoin at a three-month low monday. a wave of monetary tightening that has stretched from europe to the u.s. this week. the second largest token is at a two month low unwinding at short-lived jump in june. i went to break it all down with the cofounder of the d5 focus venture-capital term framework enters. what do you think is going on here? a slump in bitcoin and ether. >> we have had the build of the merge. the version was highly successful last week. now we are entering that time where we are searching for a new narrative. what we advise for all of our portfolio companies is to take a longer term horizon perspective of these markets. it is difficult when you have early-stage technology meeting market liquidity to not
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attention with the prices. it is important for all the builders to keep their blinders on and keep tilting. emily: if you could pinpoint one or two things, is there something you think is behind this whether it is valid or not? >> i think maybe one of the ideas that was floated is this is the unwinding of a number of different trades put on that led up to the merge. these traits could be basis trades or people that took out positions and options on futures related to the merge itself. i think the unwinding process in the drop of a macro sentiment market is going to have more volatility than you would expect if it was a different market from a macro perspective. emily: what is the crypto community buzzing about now the merge has happened and what are
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you excited to invest in? >> the merge was only last week so it has been a little bit of time but since we launched this most recent fun at the end of march, one of the vcs we had was gaming. it seemed the real narrative we thought would take over leading to hundreds of millions of consumers in the space with wallets and transacting these games. we think that narrative is now in the crosshairs of what is to come. over the next three to six months we think there will be 20 to 25 games that have a more sustainable model than what we have seen so far. these games are being built by people who build games before it for the first time building in the blockchain space. we are excited to see these come in. it is only going to be a couple more months until we see these games launch. emily: at ftes have been in a bust cycle but since the merge,
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we have seen and fts gaining momentum through prices. is this the rebound of the market or is this going to be short-lived? >> one of the things i think is important to note about the merge and this is one of the success points. this is the fact that you have the shift representing the amount of energy in the size of the country of finland. that reduction in energy consumption are break the network is a major change. think the art world has been one of the most negative against the group of work consensus model because that is what has been required to use and transact in these marketplaces. now we see the shift and the market, we are going to see a lot more activity in the market because the negative sentiment is gone at this point. most are transacted after last
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week. emily: i'm curious given your former life at snapchat where you were a product manager what you think about the future of monetizing the metaverse. we were doing a story earlier about how meta stock has plunged. investors are not excited about the metaverse or are skeptical about the metaverse. what do you think the opportunities are to monetize in the metaverse? are you excited about it? >> absolutely. the definition is a bit of a nebulous one. this is why we are excited about games. games represent not only a new platform for game developers to build on top of the what that means is a new monetization model where free to play games which have monetized at a rate are probably going to have a different model altogether just based on the facts and worry in
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viewing value into an nf which can be represented in the gamet. you are not just spending to be able to spend in the game and the second you leave you lose the value. the abilities for developers to think creatively about how these monetization models can interact with any type of ecosystem which we might want to call the metaverse, that i think is a fundamental shift so when we say we are excited about gaming, what we mean is we are excited about the new business models because those have been changing rapidly over the last couple of years. emily: lots to continue to watch. cofounder of framework ventures. thank you for stopping by. uber says a hacker responsible for last week's data breach is affiliated with a notorious extortion group. the group has targeted other tech companies and samsung.
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uber says it does not believe the hacker got into its public facing systems like user accounts or databases that store sensitive information. the ridesharing company says it needs to the fbi and department of justice to investigate. coming up, is it a wrap for nfts in hollywood? why the craze is dwindling despite a bit of a rebound. and why executives are still not giving up. this is bloomberg. ♪
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emily: the nft craze was sweeping hollywood but with crypto sinking, the enthusiasm seems to be dwindling. joining us now, bloomberg's lucas shaw appeared post -- lucas shaw. post ethereum merge the prices have ticked up a bit how is hollywood thinking. -- have ticked up a bit. how is hollywood thinking? >> some has to have an idea and they have to sell it. and they have to actually make it. hollywood got very excited about the potential and web three late last year and early this year. there were a lot of different projects either using nfts as a fan engagement tool or as origin intellectual property or
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character upon which a property can be based. some of those are still going but as one person told me, most of the projects dried up overnight earlier this year. emily: who were the biggest celebrities who were rarely in on this and does it seem like they are not into it anymore? >> yeah, i mean you have a mix. there are celebrities who bought nfts. reese witherspoon was someone very into it. it is a mix. as in the broader market there are some celebrities who are interested in trying it out because it seemed like a quick way to make money or everyone else was talking about it. and there are some people who are true believers in the potential. most people were probably looking to try something out. reese witherspoon strikes me as someone who maybe they are not going to end up being able to sell it but they will keep
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exploring to see if there is potential. sean mendez, he was on the screen. he and his producing partner did option an nft as a central character. i have yet to find out if they are going to make anything from that character. emily: your sense is some folks in the entertainment industry will continue to try to explore this but as of now attention is being diverted to other projects? >> most of these media companies have far more pressing issues when it comes to slowing growth on streaming services, whether we are going to enter a recession. there are some of these issues that make sorting out emerging technologies less of a big issue. there are people like dave brew who is the greatest of the biggest loser, and he thought --
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and he stopped making tv and has devoted himself full-time to an nft. company. emily: thank you for joining us. we will keep monitoring how the celebrities and entertainment companies continue to weigh in on nfts. tomorrow we have a conversation with california's attorney general. his thoughts on state to state antitrust against amazon. why that is a big deal. don't forget to check out our podcast where ever get your podcast. i'm emily chang in san francisco. this is bloomberg. ♪ at fidelity, your dedicated advisor will work with you on a comprehensive wealth plan across your full financial picture. a plan with tax-smart investing strategies designed to help you keep more of what you earn. this is the planning effect.
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