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OpenAI and Microsoft, Bitcoin, and Planes

Nov 20, 202338 min
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Episode description

Ed Ludlow, host of Bloomberg Technology, joins to talk about OpenAI, Sam Altman, Microsoft, and the events that unfolded this weekend. Mandeep Singh, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Tech Analyst, also joins, to discuss how this impact the opportunity for other AI models. Jim Anderson, CEO and Beacon Software and former CEO of Social Flow, joins to discuss his opinion on “slowing down” AI, the effects AI has on technologies like Cruise, and other views on Ai and Elon Musk. Matt Sigel, Heads of Digital Assets Research at VanEck, joins to discuss Wall Street’s bullish outlook on Bitcoin ETFs and how the Argentinian election could impact Bitcoin prices and risk assets. Ali Ben Lmadani, CEO of ABL Aviation, discusses the Dubai Air Show and airline industry. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

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Speaker 2

Welcome to the Bloomberg Markets Podcast. I'm Paul Sweeney alongside my co host Matt Miller.

Speaker 1

Every business day we bring you interviews from CEOs, market pros, and Bloomberg experts, along with essential market moving news.

Speaker 2

Find the Bloomberg Markets Podcast called Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, and at Bloomberg dot com, slash podcast open AI. This is the story of the morning. I'm going to assume most people will figure it. I have kind of seen the news right now. It looks like Microsoft might be a little bit of a winner here. So we're going to round Table to sing ed Ludlow, he's host to Bloomberg Technology and Mandeep saying he's our

senior technology analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. So Mandib at this stage and it's still a very fluid situation, I'm not even sure where the employees are going from open Ai, whether they're staying at the existing thing or whether they're going to go over to Microsoft. I'm not even sure where Sam Altman is. But it appears that Microsoft hired by Microsoft. We'll see. I'm waiting to see, like triple confirmation.

Speaker 1

Zatcha n Adella confirmed it. He's the CEO of Microsoft.

Speaker 3

It can be going.

Speaker 2

I don't know where these guys.

Speaker 4

It's Silicon Valley.

Speaker 2

The kids don't know what they're doing. Mandib, it seems like it's a win win win for Microsoft here, what's your take.

Speaker 5

Actually, we sort of disagree with that consensus. Few that nice for Microsoft simply because you know, when you are acquiring talent like this, it's not the best way to you know, build a new product. And in this case, the IP still remains with open Ai, so it's not as if they can poured over the large anchorage model, which is really the key to building the ecosystem, they will have to build it from scratch. And remember, when you're training AI, you need, yes, the infrastructure, but you

also need large amounts of data. And Microsoft mader like three months to make Rock Well. So Twitter had a lot of their own data. So that's what it comes down to. Can they build a model just based on being data? The answer is no. And that's where.

Speaker 6

I think why not?

Speaker 1

Because Bing has a lot of data.

Speaker 5

Look at how long Bing had had integration with open ai Chat GPT. Still they haven't been able to take any share from Google, and Microsoft's CEO admitted that that despite the integration with open Ali and and so clearly there is a lot more to open AI's IP than what we know. And that's why it's a proprietary foundational model, unlike Madawslama, which is open source.

Speaker 2

So there all right, So I want to bring in Ed Ludlow if for no other reason then he's literally in Silicon Valley and Ed, your job right now is explain to me why I or anybody else in this country should care about what's happening it opened ai and Sam Maltman.

Speaker 1

Have you cared about anything else all weekend?

Speaker 6

Yeah?

Speaker 4

That's well.

Speaker 7

I mean, you know, to my credit, chaps, I am on almost every single byline that we've written since Friday lunchtime. So forgive my dower mood. But look, this is what's at stake, billions of dollars of value in the private markets. The elimination of a company that is the clear market incumbent for both consumer facing and enterprise tools that are powered by a large language model and are presented in the form of a chatbot or generator of AI tool.

Speaker 4

And third of all, there will be a.

Speaker 7

Massive spotlight on my Microsoft because the question will remain do they buy the rest of it? Well, what we reported over the weekend is that when all of this wrangling was go on, and we can get into it, I've got some great gossip for you guys. But the principal consideration was Sam wanted the board to resign. They didn't.

They dug in and he did not come back. But one offer on the table was whether Microsoft or not took a board seat, And the reason that they didn't, I'm told by sources, is that there would just be too much scrutiny from an antitrust perspective, too much concentration of influence of a company that is leading the direction of AI in the real world.

Speaker 4

That's what we're talking about here.

Speaker 1

Well, now they get most of the company for free, right. I mean, I'm interested to hear what you've been hearing, and I know that you. First of all, Ed, I've been reading everything you've been writing, and thank you for the work. I can't believe you've had any sleep, and you look amazing.

Speaker 7

I apologize for that because I haven't had any sleep.

Speaker 4

That's why I'm.

Speaker 1

Secondly, to me, it looks like Microsoft now gets that's Altman and Brockman and maybe five hundred other employees pretty much for salaries.

Speaker 8

Right.

Speaker 1

I guess maybe a signing bonus, but they don't have to spend eighty six billion dollars or even if you take out their thirteen you know, seventy three billion dollars. Isn't that a huge win?

Speaker 4

Right?

Speaker 7

Open AI has seven hundred and seventy employees. Five hundred of those have signed a letter to the board this morning, which I've seen, saying that if the board doesn't resign, those five hundred will resign and they will go to Microsoft. When Satya Nadella posted on X last night, he buried the lead. It was a very long statement. The idea that Sam and Greg Brockman, the former chair of open AI's board, were joining Microsoft, was right at the bottom.

But there was very clear language there, and I'd ask the audience to go and look out for it. It said those two with others joining from open Ai.

Speaker 4

Satya said it last night. So that's a very real risk.

Speaker 7

And what I would say is that at the core of this story is the open aies almost the entirety of its value. And Mande may disagree here, but the entirety of its value that the investors outlined to me is its intellectual capital. If you take those top ten data scientists and the top product guys, which is Sam Outman, and you take them somewhere else, open has ai has nothing left. That's what we're talking about here.

Speaker 1

Okay, I'm looking at the ip that mandplay.

Speaker 2

That's what I'm saying. Many if I'm looking at Microsoft stock, it's only up seven ten to one percent, I would have thought it a up ten percent or more.

Speaker 6

Why do you think that is?

Speaker 5

And look, Opening Eye has a lot of other investors too, So granted Microsoft owns forty nine percent of the company, but there are other investors, the private rounds that they had before Microsoft got on board.

Speaker 1

And so I think, by the way, can I just ask clearly clarify the Microsoft owns forty nine percent of the for profit unit in the nonprofit structure or do they own forty nine percent of the whole thing?

Speaker 5

Forty nine percent of the whole thing? But Ed can confirm if that's he has a different point of view.

Speaker 7

Well, on paper, on paper, the on the balance sheet of Microsoft, it will show that the open aillc or the incorporated for profit business.

Speaker 4

But again the audience, there's a.

Speaker 7

Ven diagram or a diagram out there, sorry, not a ven diagram that sets it out. And you can say, but man Deep is right, forty nine percent Microsoft holds. I'd make one observation that the other fifty one percent on the cap table. My understanding is that even the biggest individual shareholders from a venture firm perspective own less than one percent each, which is another reason that this is so chaotic right now.

Speaker 6

Right an Alman says he on none.

Speaker 5

Well, so, I mean, look, at the end of the day, there is a lot of ip within open the eye. If the employees leave, they can't take that IP. And that's the thing about a tech company is you know, if I have an algorithm or a model that's within a company until unless Microsoft ends up buying that company, they don't have rights to the open ai foundational model and for employees to recreate that. Let's say the five hundred employees recreate that model within six months, what is

your IP? I mean any other company can do it then. So it puts Microsoft in a tough spot because one, on the one hand, it could show that AI large arid models are a commodity. On the other hand, they may have to buy the whole company for eighty billion because the other fifty one percent want a good exit. They don't want the company to die.

Speaker 2

Act at third thirty seconds, what are you reporting on? What are you guys working on today? What are you chasing today?

Speaker 4

Okay, the big thing is going to be private markets.

Speaker 7

There was a tender that was open for hundreds of billions of dollars for employees of open ai to sell shares to thrive capital. My understanding is that is very much in doubt. Friday, the market for private open ai stock was incredibly liquid, very.

Speaker 6

Un in doubt. It's probably a way to say it.

Speaker 7

Yes, that liquidity slams shot Friday while I was having lunch with a so who is trying to buy in that market, look out for that. People are going to get burned. These are transactions that were pending and will now not go through.

Speaker 6

I'd say got burned. Yeah, story is over ed.

Speaker 2

Thank you so much for joining us, and I know you're busy ed Ludlow and your team out there for Bloomberg Technology man deep seeing senior technology annels for Bloomberg Intelligence. Appreciate getting you two folks together as we continue to report on this dynamic technology story.

Speaker 8

You're listening to the team Ken's are Live program Bloomberg Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business app, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2

All Right, So Matt and I were just talking like one of the key fundamental issues here in this open AI seems to be the debate within open AI and within the tech industry and with I guess just kind of the tech world in general about AI weighing commercialization versus the fact that this in could end civilization. So that seems to be getting a little bit lost here in some of the reporting here today. Maybe our next guest can help us out. Jim Anderson. He's the CEO

of Beacon Software. He joins his life here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brooker's studio. So, Jim, how do you, guys, you know, in that space, in the software space, how do you think about AI in terms of commercializing it but by also being cognizant of the potential risk it could posed.

Speaker 9

Yeah, Paul, it won't surprise you to hear that we think first about commercializing it, right, Because if you can't commercialize it, you don't have anything to really worry about, right. So in the eyes of a sort of capitalist or a private sector person, you tend to focus on that first. I think one of the things social media has taught us is, hey, let's not collectively be so naive about the negatives. Let's not wait a decade and see what damage we've wrought and then see if we can undo it.

So I do think there's including with private sector, capitalistic companies, there's a lot more willingness to try to anticipate those negative effects. But you know, the open eye example is an extreme example of a capitalistic company worth reportedly eighty billion dollars according to Microsoft, run by a nonprofit with a very different sensibility. And it's not really surprising that you ended up with a very different view of the world.

Speaker 1

Well, and as we know, with social media, you just can't put the genie back in the bottle, right. And the problem is where social media seems to now in hindsight, be a cancer on society that we can't cure. AI could be like a massive cardiac arrest. I mean, it could just kill us all. But no one can care about that anymore since we can make money on it today. It doesn't matter if it's going to destroy society in uh, you know, decades.

Speaker 6

Yeah, I don't know that. I would agree that nobody can care about it anymore.

Speaker 4

But you can care.

Speaker 9

But you can't do anything if you can't stop stop, right. But I think it's it's interesting. I mean, you know that we could have a debate about Skynet and whether you know the end of humanity, how likely that is to happen. I think the risk of that is it misses you know, if everything is the extinction of humanity.

Speaker 6

Or or or not.

Speaker 9

I mean, you know, you've you've sort of dialed it up to eleven, right, there's nothing less than that. I think there are plenty of near term harms that are much more likely that will happen much more quickly that we run the risk of glossing over and think about it, right, remember the early days of email, right, you know, Wow,

this is amazing. I can communicate with people, and then scammers, grifters, fraudsters, and marketers decided, hey, I can send a billion emails for the same price as one and all of our inboxes started being flooded. Well now, basically content creation is effectively free with the chat, GPT and those kinds of tools. With AI, now, I think the entire Internet runs the risk of being flooded with spam, misinformation, and just garbage. And we're all going to have a very pragmatic challenge,

you know, sort of managing through that. Never mind the terrible potential long term use cases. Just in the near term, we're going to have a lot of real problems because bad actors are going to take these tools and do bad things with them.

Speaker 2

So open or just AI in general, I mean with open AI, I guess as we speak part of Microsoft. Now what are the competitors out there and just an artificialgens? What are the competitors and does it change? It seems like it's got to change the competitive landscape.

Speaker 6

No doubt it will.

Speaker 9

I mean you you want to say, okay, what are the chatbot competitors who are building large language models that you know Google's got Barred Anthropic was a former AI person. Uh, you know, there's a there's a couple of them out there, but you know, building your own large language models like a billion dollar proposition. So it's not going to be dozens of these things. It's a it's a big tech

kind of investment. But I think what's interesting is you raise a point about you know, we all tend to think of AI in terms of chat, GPT and chatbots, and that's really amazing and it's got some really interesting use cases, but think about other worlds like transportation, healthcare, manufacturing.

AI has the ability to transform those industries. Traffic, Like, imagine a world where autonomous vehicles and those have their own sets of challenges, can untangle traffic in big cities and we no longer have to sit in traffic jams. Imagine a world where you know, radiologists don't miss scans

on X rays or MRIs and things like that. I mean, you know, there's plenty of use cases where AI can truly help humanity and substantive powerful ways that have nothing to do with chatbots that are powered by AI and these underlying large language models.

Speaker 1

So the large language model or the data set, I guess is the most important issue that you deal with. How do you look at this from Beacon software perspective? Like what data sets are the most important? You know, which ones do you want to get a hold of? Which ones can we not touch? Yeah, it's such a huge.

Speaker 9

Issue, right, Yeah, it is, And we've specialized in transportation, right, so we're working with state dots Georgia and other states to say, okay, how are you going to untangle traffic mainly in your big cities, which is where you've got it.

Speaker 6

Well, they're actually a wash in data.

Speaker 9

They've got more data than they know what to do with, than they can effectively store, than they can effectively harness. And what's AI great at taking a massive data set and making sense of it? And these connected vehicles now, think about it. Every time you've got a Tesla on the road. Every time you turn your windshield wipers on, there's a signal right there that's been captured.

Speaker 6

And you say, well, who cares? Well, guess what if you harnessed every vehicle on the road and you knew when they're winch wipers were on? At what level?

Speaker 9

You now have a hyper local precipitation map that's the likes of which nobody else has.

Speaker 6

Right, It is awesome.

Speaker 9

So those times are that right, But you've got to be able to capture the data. You've got to be able to intelligently use the data, and you've got to not be able to drown in the data, which is what everybody is facing right now. And AI, to oversimplify, AI has the AI ability to keep you from drowning and data like you have been.

Speaker 2

Is there who's thinking about how AI should be managed?

Speaker 4

Regulated?

Speaker 2

Is anybody thinking about that out there?

Speaker 9

There's lots of thinking that. The question is anybody doing anything about it? So I think, you know, again, let's give credit where credits do. I think regulators, legislators, and even the companies themselves are thinking about it, are talking about it, and I think there's legitimate criticism. Great, you just want to think and talk about it and never do anything as a way of deflecting.

Speaker 6

You know, the EU of course takes a leadership.

Speaker 9

Role and a lot of things around privacy and data protection, all that would stand a reason they might take a more aggressive and they already have, you know, started to take steps towards a more aggressive position than the US. I think you're going to ask the big We're going to ask the big tech companies to be more responsible and maybe sign up.

Speaker 6

To a higher standard than we would have a decade ago.

Speaker 9

Okay, Microsoft, Okay, Google, Okay, Facebook, Meta, you know those types of companies, We're going to expect more out of them. But I think at the end of the day, especially in the US, ultimately Congress is going to have to get involved in Yeah, that they have a few.

Speaker 2

Issues questioning coming from our Congress.

Speaker 1

I won't mention there are a few I can definitely imagine, but it's a horror show thinking about it.

Speaker 6

So how long, Jim.

Speaker 1

Until we have real leaps forward in like autonomous driving? And I mean the real question is how long is it going to be until we have far fewer deaths from traffic accidents?

Speaker 9

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because We've got forty three thousand people a year die on US roads.

Speaker 6

It is a public health crisis.

Speaker 9

I mean, people don't typically think about it that way, and those are human driven cars, so there's a crying need for that. But we saw lost over the weekend in all of the open AI news cruise. The Robotaxi company CEO stepped down. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah, yeah, but controversy because they were not open and transparent. There was an incident involving a robot taxi in San Francisco. Somebody was seriously injured. They didn't really quite disclose what happened,

and so they lost trust there. And so it's striking to me this sort of everybody wants to move fast, but if you move too fast, you end up going slower, right, because all you're going to do is create a backlash. You're going to set the entire industry back year or two.

I don't know what the timeframe will be, but I think it's critical that companies involved in Tesla is being maybe the most notable of this around US autonomous driving is running the risk of sort of poisoning the well and setting things back because they're being too aggressive and to the beginning of our conversation, right, what does big tech do? They just know how to do big tech right. They go fast. I'm a private sector company. I've got

to grab adoption while it's there. I've got to move fast. You know what's the famous line Facebook at move fast and break things right until they realized they broke something to maybe signific.

Speaker 2

Exactly all right, Jim, thanks so much for joining us. Jim Anderson. He's the CEO of Beacon Software. His job is to fix the traffic in Atlanta, Georgia. Good luck with that.

Speaker 8

You're listening to the tape Cat's are live program Bloomberg Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.

Speaker 1

We have Matt Matt Siegel in here. He is the head of I guess cryptoanalysis over at van Neck. What's your official title at van Neck, head of Digital assets Research?

Speaker 3

You got it.

Speaker 1

I was pretty close, and I mean before we get into anything else, when are we gonna see these ETFs finally allowed by the SEC? Because it doesn't even feel like Gary Gensler's dragging his feed anymore. It's like he's grasped on to a chair and people are trying to pull him.

Speaker 3

What's the deal.

Speaker 10

The final deadline for approval of a number of these spot bitcoin ETFs is the first half of January, So there's a lot of logistics that has to go on behind the scenes at the SEC, with various divisions talking to each other and communicating with issuers to button up all but it's going to happens very high percentage by the first half of January next year.

Speaker 1

So what does that mean for the market? I mean, even beyond bitcoin, Bitcoin itself is trading above thirty seven thousand dollars, which to me is just absolutely nuts because I started covering this kind of as a joke in twenty twelve and it was like, you know, ninety dollars, So the fact that that same string of code could be worth thirty seven thousand dollars is nuts to me. But a lot of people still look at this as kind of a failed experiment, which.

Speaker 6

Baffles the mind.

Speaker 10

Well, let's start with the impact of the ETF. When an investor buys bitcoin on coinbase a retail investor, they're paying an average of two point five five percent in transaction fees. When an ETF buyer buys a bitcoin ETF in Europe, where these spot products trade, they're paying ten to twenty basis points in spreads and commissions and fees are often zero. So what we have is an order

of magnitude decline in costs for the end user. And essentially you're mainlining a bitcoin only exchange into the brokerage account of every investor in the US.

Speaker 6

Can you arbitrage that, by the way, as a trader.

Speaker 10

Well, that's why we have That's why there's a functioning futures market, and the CME's market share of that futures market has recently reached an all time high. So it is the regulated flows. Bitcoin ETFs have seen one billion dollars in flows in the last month. That's eighty percent of the total year to date that we've seen. So the flows are coming from the regulated side. It bitcoins

up thirty percent in the last month. When it's one way buying in an illiquid asset like this, the price impact can be large.

Speaker 2

All right, there was an election in Argentina. Please explain to me why this has a connection to bitcoin.

Speaker 1

Pretty shock result as well. I mean looks like Elvis. Javier lives with his mom and six dogs. One how do you pronounce his last name?

Speaker 6

Milay Malay.

Speaker 10

Javier Malay is a libertarian who has been very vocal about his desire to eliminate the Central Bank of Argentina. Argentina has the worst performing currency in Latin America in the last three decades. It's had the most number of recessions, it has the least amount of foreign direct investment. So sticking with the same path is kind of the definition of insanity, keeping the same thing going and expecting something to change. This new leader has plans to dollarize the economy.

He has been very outspoken about his belief that central banks are a scam that impose an inflationary tax on regular citizens, and he's I've also been very outspoken in his admiration for bitcoin in restoring money and value to its original creator, which is the private sector. So we've been observing for some time that crypto adoption in Argentina, both bitcoin and stable coins, is the highest in Latin America. And the highest among the highest in the region.

Speaker 2

Go into that inflation you were talking about.

Speaker 10

Yeah, folks are holding tether in order to maintain dollar purchasing power. The other thing we've noticed, the largest private oil and gas company in Argentina just announced plans to mine bitcoin with the excess gas and methane that's a

byproduct of their existing production. So it's very rational, we think, for countries to use their stranded energy, monetize it to earn bitcoin, and in the process give their citizens a hedge on the Fiat imposed inflationary tax that Melee has spoken so much about.

Speaker 1

By the way, I'm not an official libertarian, like I'm not racially anything, especially in a day and age when you only vote against someone and not for anybody. But aren't the founding fathers, Like, isn't this country kind of libertarian? Isn't that the point of America?

Speaker 2

Exactly? And you're in a great state of Ohio, that's where you're from, So it's yeah.

Speaker 1

So, Matt, what's your take on the rest of the twenty thousand other coins? I mean, bitcoin is something we could talk about all day and I think, you know, even Gary Gendler doesn't think bitcoin is a security, but everything else has a question mark. Are there are there like ten that you like and the rest are junk? Are there a hundred that you like and the rest are junk?

Speaker 3

How does the whole thing look to you?

Speaker 10

We think the vast majority of the value in this ecosystem is going to accrue to a handful of protocols and thus tokens, and it's very early stages in those days, and there's still a lot of regulatory uncertainty.

Speaker 6

So just focusing.

Speaker 10

On bitcoin because of the huge number of catalysts for next year, including the lack of supply. More than seventy percent of bitcoin supply has not moved in the last year. That is an all time high. The bitcoin having which is an algorithm change, occurs next April that will cut

the amount of bitcoin by half that is generated. We're in the middle of an absolute boom in bitcoin fees, so transaction fees on the bitcoin blockchain are now fifteen percent of all bitcoin minor revenues, which is an all time high. That's been turbocharged by these NFTs on bitcoin and with the ETF coming and the institutional adoption.

Speaker 6

Via state affiliated actors.

Speaker 10

Right, So my call is that Argentina will become the fifth country in the world to mine bitcoin for its own state reserves, joining El Salvador, Bhutan, Oman and the UAE. And with that regulatory certainty and the existence of the ETF and the US government and G seven's continued overspending debt and deficit problems, that they'll be large institutional buyers that will migrate to bitcoin.

Speaker 4

You know.

Speaker 10

The history is that the rest of the coins benefit from that, but that usually happens after the having which is next April.

Speaker 1

All right, So while we have you here, tell us what your thought is on world coin, because we've been talking about Sam Altman all day in regards to his position at OpenAI or now Microsoft. But he started this like biometric cryptocurrency. I don't know how it works, like measures your eye and keeps the data. But what's the story with that. It's a layer two ethereum based coin.

Speaker 10

So you can see from the regulation being passed in the UK and in Canada around what can be said on internet platforms that there's a huge desire to differentiate the humans from the bots.

Speaker 4

Right.

Speaker 10

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley was in the media last week saying that everyone needs to be verified in order to participate on social media. I doubt that's going to happen in the US, but if it were, and we wanted to preserve some user privacy, than a cryptographic network that can verify user identity without revealing the name would be an attractive product. And at the that's essentially what orl

cooin is trying to do. So we do think that over the next year there's going to be some innovation that allows AI to be differentiated, whether it's generated by human or by a bot, and that crypto has a role to play in preserving privacy while enabling those functions.

Speaker 8

That's cool.

Speaker 2

That's Siegel, Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 3

Matt Sigua.

Speaker 2

He's a head of digital assets research for Vaneck, joining us live here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio, and John Tucker is going to come up prepare executive summary of what we discussed in this segment. So everybody's on this minute exactly right.

Speaker 8

You're listening to the tape. Can's our live program Bloomberg Markets weekdays at ten am Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the tune in app, Bloomberg dot Com, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station Just say Alexa playing Bloomberg eleven.

Speaker 4

Now.

Speaker 1

We have been talking a lot about airlines on this program and the difficulty that the manufacturers have making enough planes. There is just a huge order right for three hundred of the was it the seven three seven or.

Speaker 4

I think so?

Speaker 8

I don't know.

Speaker 6

In any case, a bunch of them.

Speaker 1

If you order a plane today, your chances of getting it soon are very low. I just got a message from Ali Ben al Maldani, the CEO of ABL Aviation. He said he was at the show and putting some orders there too, and he could come on and talk about it.

Speaker 6

So I was like, great, come in the studio.

Speaker 1

He's in New York for one day only.

Speaker 4

Oh, we got him.

Speaker 1

We get him on set. Ali, thanks so much for joining us. Tell us about the state of aviation in terms of ordering a plane right now? How difficult is it? You know, what are the prices like and when can you expectually? When can you actually expect to get delivery?

Speaker 11

Look at so much much we'll have being or pleasure. It's always an issue, I think to get aircraft today. As we said last time, we have seven years to eight ys wait for both manufacturers.

Speaker 3

Bowling go Evers.

Speaker 11

You have some issues, of course with the engines. You saw what's happened with pattern Witness. We have a few issues on the engine side that we need to fix and that's been fixed by the OEMs.

Speaker 3

You saw Dubai.

Speaker 11

Airshow last week was the biggest order since I was seventeen. So the other book on in Dubai was insane. You had emails that's made a huge order, fly Dubai. Ethiopian made a big order. So there's a big demand. There's not enough supply and that's the first issue. And Evan, since a lot of aircraft during COVID got so tired, it's extremely hard today for airlines to find aircraft that they can operate, and that's one of the biggest issues.

We spoke about it last timer we were here. We keep on seeing it more and more and even the order like seventeen eight hundred and the classics are being asked to come back to the markets because we need them to fly them. And we see again during the casemas season where there's a big need. You saw it last summer we spoke about you guys going to Europe. What was the cost of tickets was going high and higher because of the demand and the lack of aircraft being provided.

Speaker 2

So I envision a desert in Arizona, New Mexico, and a lot of seven thirty sevens. A lot of seven fifty sevens are sitting out there because they were decommissioned for whatever reason over whatever recent period of time. Can I just go grab one of those planes and refurbishing and put them back in the air.

Speaker 3

It's not as easy as you think.

Speaker 11

So if you want to get what we call an aircraft a water again, you have a long process to go again to put those aircraft back into service. You're not going to just come and flies again. It needs an inspection. It's need was we call an agyan inspection. It needs a few inspections to get back, which are very costly. So the difference between the cost of getting it back and getting on your aircraft, that's why there's

not a bit hard to be made. And we saw it in the last two to three years where the cost of leasing to seventeen seven eight hundred on eighteen twenty not a kno, but another generation went to the OOF.

Speaker 3

It went so expensively.

Speaker 11

So today if you lease in aircraft it's almost about forty to fifty percent then it was a few years ago. So there is a big demand, and that's unpacs. Of course, the ticket spiices.

Speaker 1

So by the way, the big order was for set triple sevens, the seven seven seven. That's the amage order that you're talking about seven x triple seven x, and that's what it's a much bigger plane.

Speaker 3

Right.

Speaker 1

You like the single aisle, You like the seven three sevens in the eight three twenties.

Speaker 3

I like the twenties.

Speaker 11

I love the eight to twenty, which is a single the smallest one that delta opates a loss. We have lots of them with delta on the airplanes. I love this because it's very liquid. You can move them very quickly. You can the cost of fixing them to Differense airlines much less. If you need to have a white body fisted against with the Differense airline, the cost is very high.

It was become most one to at least million of dollars to make its fits for basics, to make it fit to a new airline, versus when it's a smaller one when all economy class I can move them very quickly between one airline and another one.

Speaker 2

What is the state of the oe MS, the Airbus and the Boeing. Why are they having such a difficult time ramping up production?

Speaker 1

Yeah, I don't understand that, you know. I a couple of years ago I ordered the Mercedes G five hundred and it took about a year for them to make it. Now they only had have one factory in Rocks in Austria, right, So I get that, and they're not making more than like twenty five thousand a year. These airline manufacturer airplane manufacturers are like the biggest companies in the world. They have factories all over the place. Why can't they just get more people on there and make more metal.

Speaker 11

Well, first of all, they don't have if you look at Boingois, they don't have faxies all over the place. They have certain amounts of factory, each assembly line, it's a factories assembly line. Each assembly line have a certain amount that they can produce every months.

Speaker 3

It's seattle.

Speaker 11

All of them have certain amounts that they can produce. That's the first issue. So they can not over produce. They produce what they can do. They're producing a max of course max capacity. They're doing their best to supply as much as they can. But the second issue that you have to remember that it was a COVID start doing COVID issue is a supply chain. And if you look at all the supply chain, because you have to remember EPs and Boeing assembler, the assemble everything that is

provided to them. So all the bug supply chain is a big issue. So it's not only in aircraft. It's as you said, in cars. If you want to other cars, then especially in car Matt, there's a big issue of.

Speaker 3

Finding a car.

Speaker 11

If I tell you today go find a G four hundred diesel, it's almost impossible to find because us the guys saw this and the cost of a car on aircraft is about twenty percent and before COVID.

Speaker 1

Right, so you've seen that huge inflation amount as well. What are margins like for you? I mean, does that inflation eat into your margin or is the demand the least aircraft still so strong.

Speaker 11

The amount to these aircraft is very strong. There's a big demand. But you have to remember all of us, of course lovers, our deals.

Speaker 3

We need to get debts. The cost of deaths is what kills us.

Speaker 11

I think on the deals because you have seventy eighty percent of deaths on issue.

Speaker 2

Where does that that come from? The regular the JP Morgan chasing get one.

Speaker 11

Yeah, JPYM Morgan is actually that market. So you have two types of deaths. Of course, secured and secured deaths on You have other the banks, the banks that come and provide you a death on it. You know, all the players from back of America to GIPM Morgan, the city, to the Japanese banks, to the Chinese banks. And you used to have which is a lot less active today, the capital markets. So before that you can do an ABS secuvization and use as capital markets money which was

at that time cheaper. As of today, the capital markets for aviation is not very active for the last two years. It used to be a lot more active on the ABS side. I think in the next year or two it might come back. But the capital markets was a very competitive way of financing aircraft.

Speaker 6

Is private credit does that play a.

Speaker 3

Role, Yes, of course it's very active as well. Private credit.

Speaker 11

Life insurance a lots of insurance life insurance companies land because the leases are seven years, eights, twelve, years. So it's much as the maturity of the insurance the life insurance companies.

Speaker 2

We heerd from some of the just folks in the industry that India is going to be is a big growth market, will continue to be a huge buyer of aircraft as they look to expand their fleet. Are you seeing that?

Speaker 11

Well, if you see the last order, this was a four months ago of Erindio, it was the biggest order was ever made. I think it was aboust five hundred acap that the orders. Wow, so that order was huge. Look India, with a few airlines out there is an amazing jurisdiction you can lease aircraft that The issue that you have with India is how do you process aircrafts? Because in aviation you have what you call a cape town counties. So those countries that signed the Keep County Kept On treaty allows.

Speaker 3

You to a process with aircraft process.

Speaker 11

Yes, it's similar to Chapter eleven kind of treaty where you can go to those counties and they possess those.

Speaker 2

So if an airline doesn't make its least payment to you, you can literally go to that country and repossess exactly.

Speaker 3

Okay, But in India it's it's harder.

Speaker 11

I don't believe as of yet they're not the signature of the Cape Son treaty.

Speaker 3

You need to check, but I don't think they are.

Speaker 11

So that's harder on those countries that didn't sign the kept creaty to go poss aircraft. That's the hardest part was if someone doesn't make payments, similar to a car in America, you goss car and leads it to someone else. That's what's in aviation. You can move it from one airline to one airline. It's a chapter eleven. You do oppossession, you fix the corw the aircraft and new movies?

Speaker 2

Can you what is China?

Speaker 8

Is that?

Speaker 4

Are they signatory?

Speaker 8

Yeah?

Speaker 3

It changes on the monthly day.

Speaker 1

I know that Russia, the Russian War in Ukraine through kind of a wrench into that in terms of that region. What has the Middle East been like since Hamas the Hamas Israel conflicts started?

Speaker 3

Has that?

Speaker 1

Has that been notable?

Speaker 6

In the business.

Speaker 11

Innoviation within nices? You know most airlines Ivan what doing the best. If you look at Emirates flight by all the airlines Indision are very active avail operations like the p officer advantages and those airlines are really booming, so there's no impact.

Speaker 3

If we look at.

Speaker 11

One of our clients in Israel, yes there's little bits of umpacts, but l Al was very open with us. They tell us every day what's going on. They give us a feedback. The government is supportive, so Havan. For one of our clients, which is l in Israel, which with whom we have five seventy sevens, they're very open. They tell us everything and they will always open in business. They always told us during COVID about payments, how to

fix it. So the rection with is amazing, the very open airlines to work with.

Speaker 6

But how closely are you watching that?

Speaker 1

I mean if things broaden out to eleven and Syria, if God forbid, Iran gets involved, I mean it's going to be difficult for every business, but.

Speaker 11

Not only aviation. And look, Mattwinami, I'm a very optimistic guy. I hope that this will never happen. I hope that people will come back to the reason and it will be fixed. You know, as a guy from local that's the business. Of course, with all religions, I think that it's just a political thing and I hope you to stop. I don't believe on the long term, it's a good thing for any of us, and not only in aviation.

Speaker 3

It will be an umpact for everything. So I really hope to stop.

Speaker 11

And it will have If that's happened, it will have a lot more impacts than the OSHA can in my view for aviation. So because the vision is very sensitive, it's in the middle between Asia and Europe. It's a Asian that is extremely important for us in aviation in business. So my hope is that it will stop and come soon.

Speaker 2

And all right, Ali, thank you so much for joining us here again, Ali Ben l Madonna. He's the CEO of a bl Aviation gives us a good view into the world of aviation and aviation fans.

Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Markets podcasts. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm Matt Miller. I'm on Twitter at Matt Miller nineteen seventy three.

Speaker 2

And I'm Faull Sweeney. I'm on Twitter at pt Sweeney. Before the podcast, you can always catch us worldwide at Bloomberg Radio.

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