Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
In the meantime, we've got a great read on what is going in the world of consumers.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about payments, because I got to tell you, Carol, not so hard to pay for things in my daily life. Got venmo, I can send a few bucks to Bloomberg News. Colleague's doing something fun for the Super Bowl.
Yeah.
If I win, nice, Yeah, yeah I win.
I don't take us all out for pizza.
You got automatic bill pay, you got Apple pay or Google Wallet on the subway. Online you can use Apple pay, Google Wallet, Shopify. If those failies, sometimes you got to pull out your credit card, You got to type in all the info. I don't love to do that. When that happens, you still got to do that.
Yeah.
One area that I think is still challenging for a lot of people is cross border. So if my friend comes to the US, we go to a concert, hard for him to send me money to pay me back for that ticket. The question when does that get easier. It's something that Ken Moore thinks a lot about he's Chief Innovation Officer of MasterCard. He joins us from Mastercard's
tech up in Dublin, Ireland. Ken here, you know, as I was preparing for this and we were talking about this, it's not that hard to part with money these days. Companies have made it very easy. But where do you see the big challenges that still remain in twenty twenty five.
Well, first of all, Carol, Tim, thank you for having me on the show. And Tim, thank you for really helping prop up the world payments.
With all that.
Yeah, it's not so great, Well it is.
It depends on your perspective. I mean for us, Tim, it's really like when people think about MasterCard, they sometimes think about us as a cards company. You described as there as a cards company, But actually, whilst that's been a part of our past and will always be a part of our future, it's very important to us. We're actually a lot grower than that. Today. We really see ourselves as a technology company operating more broadly in commerce. So it's not just the card payment rails we have.
We've got rails in blockchain and fast ach, and we've got services like cybersecurity and solutions for park and SMEs.
So really, you know, for me in my role and what I do in MasterCards, and it's really about trying to lean into the world of change, right, So we'll come to twenty twenty five in a second, but it's really about trying to anticipate changes in the world of commerce and then building the products and services that are going to help us and more importantly are the partners and the clients that we have actually thrived.
Right the world.
Well, Ken, something interesting happening right now here in the US is Elon Musk, who has a history in payments with PayPal and even the company before PayPal believe it was called zip two, and he wants to make x dot com, you know, a payment center. Watching what's happening in the federal government, what he's doing at the Department of Government Efficiency, does that change the way you're thinking about the future of payments?
No, I mean not really a tim if I'm honest, because we believe in offering consumer's choice, and we honestly believe that that payments is evolving anyway, so we probably welcome that more than feel threatened by it. We found incredible ways to partner with a diverse set of companies from Apple through to FinTechs over the years, and I have no doubt that, and indeed with many crypto companies, so I have no doubt but that we will five
ways to partner in this one as well. I think for me, if you start looking at and maybe why is he doing this, it's really the world is starting to move faster and faster. And sometimes when we look at that, we tend to look back and we go, oh my god, it's so much faster today than it was yesterday. But really we all know changes exponentially. It's
going to be faster again tomorrow. And if you research tells us that by twenty forty, when we look outside our window, the world is going to be moving four times faster. So if you extrapolate back and you bring it to something that's a bit more reasonable, so twenty thirty five years from now, it's going to be about one and a half or twice as fast as it is today. And that's an awful lot of change, and that gives us some real kind of challenges, but also
some opportunities in payments. And that's really why we wanted to lean in because our clients don't just buy a product or service from US today by a partner that's willing to invest ahead of them and partner with them to kind of help them realize those changes in the right way because they know we care about the same things that they care about. And that's going to be
true for Elon and his company as well. So that pace of change is really going to accelerate, not just in crypto, but much more broadly across a whole bunch of different of trends.
Hey, Ken, one thing I do want to ask you, and just playing off of Elon Muskin, you know, we've spent a lot of time today and certainly over the last few weeks about his involvement in the US government and access to a lot across various departments, and you do wonder about, you know, what he's learning, what it means to kind of have that inside position, and do you feel like that that potentially puts a company like yourself, whether it comes to fintech, innovation or payments and so
on and so forth, that his initiatives could have an advantage over what you guys might be doing.
Now, I have to be honest, we don't really think about that, Caroly and Tim, I mean, we trust the elected officials of governments to do the things that are right for them, and we want to partner and we
want to respond to them. So we don't, if I'm honest, give too much thought to that just now, because honestly, there's so much going on in payments that there's a lot of opportunity for lots of actors, be they you know, semi state, be they government, be they FinTechs, or be they established kind of players, to actually all have a role in it, because that pace of change is coming at us so fast and we see it playing out
in so many areas. Right you know, we've got we've got a report which we just pushed out in the MasterCard newsroom today which really talks about seven trends that we really see playing out between now and the end of the decade. And crypto and others are part of them. So those are part of those trends, as are you know, the role and the rollout of new payment networks themselves.
But really when and that report is really available for you for all of your guests, and hopefully you've had a chance to take a sneak preview at it.
I mean, I saw the cross border payments was a theme there.
Yeah, it really is, and you know you've given some great examples already on the call here today where you know, the world we've really been focused on kind of you know, giving consumers both choice and flexibility both domestically and you know that's true of every country around the world. And whilst that's been fantastic, it's also meant that we have
some challenges in interoperability. So if you take real time payments, you take crypto, the example you gave and the example that you're using in some of your earlier conversations as well, if you take open banking, there's there's just a lot of different payment rails out there. And also we're moving more than just fiat currency these days, cryptocurrencies, ata identities,
there's there's a whole lot of stuff. So what we really see is that first trend being around moving that this kind of fragmented payment system to much more of a global intectable system by standards and regulator.
We get a run Ken Moore, thank you so much, Chief Innovation Officer. Over at MasterCard.
We've heard the twenty twenty four election be called the podcast Indeed, both Trump and Harris made their case directly to voters, Trump obviously more effectively. The fragmenting of media, though, has been happening for years. A lot has been written about it newspaper editors. They're not the ones who call the shots anymore. You've got influential individuals going directly to their audience using social media, podcast platforms like stubstack and more.
What is a newer phenomenon, though, according to our next guest, is to how conservative Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk, Peter Tiel, David Saxon Moore have used media in recent years as influence. Owen Higgins is a journalist, author, and historian. His new book, owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is out today. He joins us from Wyndham, Maine. Owen, good to have you with us. Congratulations on the new book. We were
talking about this on our editorial call earlier. Carol pointed out that the wealthy and the media nothing new. Think Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post and before that, the Graham family, the Murdochs, the Sulzbergers, the list goes on, what is new about the phenomenon that you write about?
Well, thanks for having me, guys. I think that what's new about this phenomenon is these are wealthy individuals within the Silicon Valley sphere who have decided that they would prefer to have a more subservient media, and so they have worked to destabilize institutional media to the benefit of alternative media ecosystems that they control or they at least have some investment in. I don't mean to make this sound conspiratorial or as if there's some kind of you know,
cabal all kind of planning this together. Silicon Valley's theory has often been to move fast and break things, and I think that's kind of what they tried to do here with independent and alternative media and what it's had this knock on effect, a positive effect, I think from their perspective of damaging and deteriorating these more institutional mainstream and critical independent media institutions to the benefit of an alternative media ecosystem that, as I said, is more subservient
or at least will put forward the kind of ideological points of view that they want and not challenge them in the ways that they would not like to be challenged.
You know, Owen, Elon Musk, Peter Tiel, They're in your book. You mentioned them. But there's two names that for some might not be as familiar, and that is Matt Tayibe and Glenn green Wall. They are featured prominently in the book. Remind folks who they are and why they are front and center. And I remember Matt Tayibe certainly a lot of reporting here in New York City many many years ago. But why are they front and center for you?
Well, Glenn and Matt are kind of the way that the book explores this phenomenon primarily, And the reason that they are select why I've selected them is because these guys were nominally on the left or at least allied with the left for a long time, and they have moved to the right in in kind of tandem with them working with these alternative media companies that have been invested in and supported by the Silicon Valley billionaire. So I thought that would be a good way to explore
that shift, to pick these two guys. But of course I didn't just pick two random left wing or left aligned journalists. These are pretty prominent individuals Glenn Greenwald was the journalist who Edward Stone contacted when he first wanted to reveal what the NSA spine scandal. And Matt tayebe is A was has long been a prominent writer specifically really really, I think that the peak was when he wrote about the financial christ for Rolling Stone. So these
these are kind of not nobody's there. They are pretty well known. And you know, if if if you're familiar with, you know, the kind of the last twenty years, I suppose of kind of alternative media or or at least, you know, like left wing aligned media, I think that these would be too to names be pretty familiar with.
So enter substack because that's something that has emerged in recent years interestingly enough, So the origins of substack or interesting because you know, you got a guy who years ago worked at Tesla many years ago and then left Tesla and goes on to be one of the guys who launches substack a few years later. Talk about substack a little bit and how substack is featured in here, because there are a lot of journalists on the left also who used substack as a way to get out to their audience.
Absolutely, I mean I used Substack. Many of my peers use substack. I think it's substach kind of came about as a newsletter service with a really good user interface, I think is the way that I would describe it. They filled a gap that was there. There were other blogging sites. I don't want to bory rottings too much, but one of them was called Medium. That's kind of the one whose user interface I can kind of compared to substack the most very easy, very easy to use,
looked really nice on the page, not very complicated. Substack took this kind of model and exported it to the newsletter service, where they gave you this easy user interface, and if you were a writer, all you kind of had to do was fill out a couple of you know forms, so to speak on the website, and that they would pretty much do everything else for you. So and they would take a fee obviously from your newsletter subscriptions, but if you didn't want to charge subscriptions, you could
just host it on there for free. Substack came to prominence I think after Mark Andresen, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, invested in it, and I believe twenty nineteen he led a funding ground in Reson Horowitz his his company, and after that, Substack had capital to burn, They had capital to spend on other writers. They had capital to spend on trying to get people to come over to Substack
from these sing institutional media. And if you kind of think back to what I was saying before, right, like they wanted to kind of damage institutional media and to kind of shake the foundations I think of the mainstream and a critical independent media. Well, I mean one thing one way you can do that is to invest in this company and to kind of see if they can take some of the more prominent writers from those organizations
and bring them over to a place where they're independent. Sure, and they do a lot of good work, sure for a lot of them, but they're also kind of it's a little decentralized. And I think that that was kind
of the point of it. Now Subsak kind of started to tilt right, or at least there's a perception that it was tilting right with who it was courting, and it did it for both Matt Tyde and Glenn Greenwaald, again, the two journalists who I use as the primary kind of way to explain these phenomenons they allowed both of them to leave, Matt to leave Rolling Stone and Glenn to leave the Intercept and to come on to subseconds and strike it up by themselves.
We're talking with Owen Higgins, journalist, author, and history and his book owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the latticed Voices on the Left? Owen, why are you writing this?
Yeah, you know, I was. I've written some things that have been over the years. I've written things that were
critical of Greenwald and Tybee's shifts to the right. So both type books reached out to me to ask me to kind of write about how they shifted to the right, and I said, you know, I want to do that, but I would want to kind of merge it with this discussion of how media and how tech billionaires, specifically like these Silicon Valley conservatives, have exerted their influence over the media, because I find that to be a really
interesting story. I've written about it multiple times for years, and so I think that I was eager to explore that the Silicon Valley angle, and I just as I started to write it, you know, I wrote it between primarily between i'd say September twenty twenty three and February twenty twenty four, and then went through the editing process.
And obviously through the editing process, as you know, Trump rose, his his political fortunes rose again, and you saw people like Elon Musk and Peter Teel kind of align themselves with him. It only became more relevant, and I think that the you know, the tech side of it really started to take over the narrative a lot more than the kind of the media I don't want to say gossip, but the kind of like the media minutia of the story.
And it kind of became more about tech. And I think, you know, I write about tech for my day job. I write about it. I don't write about so much the business of tech, but I write about it. So you know, I'm very interested in this world. And I think that the politics of Silicon Valley tech titans, these
billionaires are you know, I think that's very important. You know, we saw the Pallenteer earnings that came out that note from Alex Karp saying a lot of these kind of similar things to to what his fellow tech leaders in Silicon Valley are saying. This this kind of sense of ideology is kind of taking over a little bit how they are presenting their earnings, how they're presenting their company
to the public. So I think for the Bloomberg audience, I think that that kind of is a way of examining the people behind these companies that that that you follow, and looking at how they both kind of exist in this world together and this like buying this kind of media influence and pushing for how they get their message across and also like what that message is now as they kind of go further to the right.
We're speaking. We're speaking with Owen Higgins. He's the author of the new book Owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right about the Loudest Voices on the Left of the book is out today. Owen Money certainly features prominently in the book. You talked about the billionaire backers. There's obviously, and what Elon Musk has done at the company formerly known as Twitter. Back to though Matt Tayebe and Glenn Greenwald, I'm curious about money motivating money as a motivation here.
One thing that substack has allowed is for essentially the ceiling on being paid for work to be limitless. Did you in your investigation in your reporting get any idea of how much money folks, individuals like those are able to make with their substacks.
You know, I've seen, I've seen numbers thrown around. I mean, all of this stuff is private, but you can kind of get a sense probably somewhere between like half a million and a million a year through substack I think for Taybe. And now Glenn has moved off of substack, he has moved to Rumble. So just to get a little background on how that happened, so Teal and jd Vance led a funding round for Rumble in May twenty
twenty one. This was about six months after Glenn LEFTI owners up and then in August twenty twenty one, Rumble began to give paid deals out to people. So I think in August some of the first people were I think in the same day were announced Glenn Greenwald and Tulsa Gabbard, right, So these were kind of the two most prominent names. So Glenn now has moved all of his writing from substack over to locals, which is substack, which is sorry, which is Rumble's blogging platform. So I
don't know how much he makes from that. I don't know the structure of right deal. I don't know. I would assume though it seems to be a multi year deal, so it's probably pretty good. I would assume that he was making even if we assume he was making equal to what Matt was making from Susy, like he would happen that they would pay him about that or more so. Oh, I would say, that's about what.
I want to make sure. We only have a few more minutes, so I want to make sure we get in as much as we can. What would you say to someone who's listening or watching right now who says, wait a second, we need this on the right as an antidote to what's happened on the left with the rise of the media being associated with the left. You know, there are a lot of people out there who would say the media is liberal, so there needs to be sort of an antidote there.
How would you respond, Yeah, I mean, assuming that I would agree with that, or at least like not contest it that the media is liberal or on the left, I would say that I don't have a problem with conservative media existing. I think that's fine. I think that there's a place for any kind of discourse. I think
there's a place where right and left discourse in democracy. Certainly, what I'm trying to bring attention to here is the kind of decentralization of media and what that means for professional ethics and how newsrooms are run or not run in the case of people who strike off on their own. Again, this is fine. Most of my career, I've been a freelancer. I've been.
I think, oh, and I want to jump in on that, because we've only got a couple of minutes left here. I think that is an interesting point. I think a bunch of us have grown up in a world of journalism with there were layers over us, and we wrote something and there were editors, and I mean, I can't tell you how many times I would have like a two minute piece that went on TV and how many people looked at it and rewrote it and like, you know,
you were questioned. And I do wonder about the layers and so the idea of something being news and factually checked multiple times versus just someone putting something out. There are distinctions to be had in an environment when news was very clear what news was, and now news is used to denote a wide range of different things, whether it's on social media, or in kind of traditional linear broadcast or even in print.
Yeah, I agree with you, And I think that the industry right now is kind of going through growing pains, if that's the propriate way to put it, where you have a lot of independent people kind of doing their own thing, and and some yeah, some are not doing with all of those layers. And they're not and and and they're they're not succeeding, right, But some people are succeeding. They are managing to do good reporting. Uh, they are managed to do good you know, opinion, punditry, et cetera.
So I I but I think that the decentralization of media, which again I don't think is necessarily like a bad thing on the face of it. Yeah, but I think that all that is kind of leading all of it, all of it's kind of moving together to uh change the way that media has worked now personally having both like I prefer having the layers of control I like, I like having like hard fact check, hard copy of it.
Absolutely got So I think I think that there's just a I think media is changing, and I think that a lot of times when it especially when it comes to print, right or to know, like where we're going with it?
Ohen we got to run.
We get to run.
Owen Higgins, his new book owned how tech billionaires on the right bop the loudest voices on the left.