ed niedermayer in portland our bloomberg view columnists, thank you all.urning now to a story we have been following. eu competition commissioner is meeting with u.s. lawmakers defending a controversial state aid ruling that would require ireland to collect more than $14 billion in back taxes from apple. critics say vestager's is unfairly training her sights on american companies. something she denies. david gora asked her about those claims. margrethe: i do not have control over taxation. what we do is to enforce legislation that goes all the way back to 1958 because our founding fathers thought we should have merger control antitrust, and saving control in order to have a level playing field. david: apple says it paid a tax rate of 26% and the estimate you have is five thousandths of a percent. why is there estimate so different? margrethe: the numbers we have are obviously apple's numbers, because when we do this kind of work we build on the information we get from the company. i hope that we will be able to publish as much of the decision possible. it

we caught up with ed niedermayer in portland and mark gurman here in san francisco and another reportern the phone from chicago. >> we know apple is in talks with mclaren for some sort of sure if you dig investment that would mean bringing cash into the business, taking a percentage of the company and this would allow apple to really choose one of two paths they are considering for a car, either building their own or partnering with another automaker. by partnering through an investment with mclaren it opens up the door for future apple mclaren tieups. emily: lynn motors is interesting. we looked at this company in 2014 and interviewed the ceo, it is an electric scooter. why would apple want a scooter company? learned that they are really proud about the patent portfolio and have over 10 patents specific to self driving and one of the components of the project titan car project is a self driving system so the company and the patents and their engineering resources and people would be able to assist apple with that. if your building a self driving car the system behind it is critical. em