Apple's Glucose Tracking and Tesla Comes Back to California

Elon's improving relations with a Golden State class. We stick with autos for an exclusive conversation with the CEO of Mercedes from evs to automos driving will cover it. All that and so much more coming up, including earnings that finally come from Nvidia. Let's get into Apple because as when we saw some gyrations throughout the stock on the day, look at this peak high at about two o'clock that was New York time. Why because we've got a scoop.

We got indeed some exclusive reporting coming from Markman, who broke a story all regarding the next Moonshot coming from Apple, the focus on glucose tracking. Mark German, you're with us, just talk us through what indeed this is going to be. It's all about the watch, right all about the watch, all about healthcare, all about glucose tracking. Really the holy grail for a smart watch to be able to tell

you all of your health metrics. And one of the most important health metrics, as we all know, is blood sugar or blood glucose monitoring. You want to know how much glucose is in your body because that's an indicator of pre diabetes or type two diabetes or other health conditions. And today getting that data requires the prick of a skin,

right or a blood draw from your veins. What Apple wants to do is it wants to create a system using chips, sensors, software, algorithms built into the Apple Watch to get a read on how much glucose you have in your blood without needing a blood sample. Okay, everyone that views this show wants to understand the innovation, the actual technology behind this. What is new? How is this

different from what's already on the market. Well, two terms, I'll give you one, optical spectroscopy right in the other silicon photonics. Those are some pretty hardcore types of technologies that Apple's working on to make this happen. Right. This means that the technology will use a chip that can output light or lasers right into your skin and read how much glucose is in your what's known as interstitial fluid. That's the fluid that comes out of your blood capillaries,

and everyone has that fluid across their body. And it could use lasers shoote to your skin, and then it has sensors that could read right the concentration of light in your skin to know how much glucose is there in order to get that reading innovation hit right there for US mark interesting JP Morgan saying, for now, this isn't a threat to device makers, but what about the

people behind this mark he's building it. Yeah, it's definitely not a threat device makers right now because this is not going to hit the market probably for another three to five years. So I would agree with JP Morgan that if something is not hitting for three years, it's not going to have an impact. And also after it arrives, right there is such a big market share already from Abbott, index Com and other providers, and it's going to take time for Apple to penetrate that market and get the

regulation they're looking for. So you know, I would agree, at least in the short term in terms of who's behind this. Apple has a secret moonshots team called the Exploratory Design Group, and this is the team developing this moonshot, along with other projects, as well as Apple's health team and hardware engineering and software engineering teams. Fascinating. One of the most read on the Terminal dot com. Mark German, as always, we thank you. Let's get to the breaking

news that just came. Finally, we've been tracking in videos, earnings, postmarket reaction as well to deep dive on the analysis of why it's rising after as bloomugg intelligence, as man Leap saying, is here with us more than seven percent rally. We like the forecast well, so clearly the data center was the focus and they did quite well. Although it was below consensus, the guidance suggests the data centers spend will hold up. And remember data centers directly tied to

the enterprise tex spending and their CAPEX spend. If all the cloud providers are investing, you know, in building more cloud capacity, a lot of that spending is going towards in videos data centers spend, and I think that's where market is excited that, you know, you're not seeing the sort of inventory correction we see on the PC side

with Intel, you know, cutting their forecasts. That's not the case with enterprise chips, and so far, enterprise tex spending has held up across the board, even when it comes to you know, software side, and that's what you see on the chip side as well. So so when I think data centers, I think artificial intelligence. I look at the statement and it says AI is at an inflection point setting up a broad adoption reaching into every industry.

How much is the video set to benefit? Well, so they are the leaders when it comes to developing these chips for whether it's for chatchee PT or for automotive or anything that has to do with you know, parallel processing. A GPU type of chip, you can find a lot of use cases and that's what they've done well in terms of diversifying that top line. I think Intel's biggest problem is the fact that they were never able to

go beyond PCs. Guess what, Nvidia has done that very well, and they're able to find these new use cases for their GPU chips. Even the gaming segment actually did better than expected. Yes, it declined, but you can see once the market has a cyclical rebound. Their position very well on the gaming side, So that's why you see that stock reaction. Although I don't know if Nvidia should be trading at five times market cap of Intel, even though Intel's revenue is two times bigger. So time will tell

if evaluation could be a question. Valuations mandy, but notable the Intel today. The news was the slashing of the dividend at a time that we are worried about boom bust cycles. Anything in Nvidia that caused you cause for concern, Well, so one is gross margins is very important. This quarter they went back to mid sixty percent. Anytime you see a chip company trading at mid sixty percent ross margin, I'm worried because guess what. As a sector, chip sector

doesn't command those high gross margins, those high ESPs. Over time, it gets commodit highs other players catch up, and it's very hard for a chip company to sustain those kind of gross margins without layering on software, which is what NVIDIAs plays. They want more software on their chips. Interesting, we've got breaking news coming from the coal The CFO currently sagment Invidios saw orders pause as a timing issue. This is to do with the cloud service providers pausing

orders in the fourth quarter. What does that signal to you? That is direct CAPEX spend from the cloud providers. And that's the other risk with Nvidia is the customer concentration. A lot of that data center revenue, which is a fifteen billion dollars run rate, is driven by these hyperscalers, which are four or five customers. They are the ones who are building cloud capacity. And we all expect a

digestion phase and it comes to cloud spending. It's not as if it's not going to come back, but because these companies have been spending, you know, CAPEX, growing it at elevated levels, there will be a pause and it could be a two quarter pause, it could be four quarters. I think that's where they're talking about. Probably order growth sline. We'll let you get back to the cool and everyone will digest it. Always great to get your remedia analysis

for the man intelligence is man deep sing well. The challenge for the industry in the next three to four years is to absorb the additional cost of electrification, to protect affordability and make sure that middle classes can buy pure evs at an affordable price. Does that mean job cuts? It means that we are not excluding anything from the

task of absorbing the cost of electrification. The Lantis see Carlos Tebreras saying that the company that makes jeeps makes them as a raalties may have to further adapt its industrial footprint in the United States and indeed in Europe as a consequence of the expensive shift to evs. That's nothing off the table, of course, even additional job cuts to further cut down on costs. So now let's talk to another key player in the industry. Probe plea to say, ed,

you're standing by with the leader of Mercedes. Yeah, we joined by all the Collonne as chairman of the management board is of Mercedes. We're here in the heart of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale. Why why have you come all this way to talk to me about software? Where we're here at the tech center in Suny Vale from Mercedes pans that we have had now for more than twenty

five years. So we have always been here in the valley working with innovative tech partners, and we thought it was a fitting place to actually describe what the future of software and the corres corresponding hardware looked like. In Mercedes, we have a lot of grounds to cover. But I want to start by asking you how high does software rank as a priority for messees and all of the things that you're trying to achieve broadly and electrification, but

also in autonomous driving. Software is absolutely a core competence for the car of the future. So we have been building up our software competence gradually over the last years. But this is a space that is so broad that even if you make yourself the architect of your own operating system, you don't have to do everything yourself. You need partnering as well. Well, let's jump into that. So you have announced a deeper relationship with Google, and it's

a license agreement. You pay Google for help in building out your operating system. Why did you do that instead of taking advantage of open source software or just doing it yourself. The core of the relationship with Google, the strategic partnership that we have formed, is our joint vision of taking technology to the next level. Everybody knows Google Maps, Google Navigation, and of course YouTube on the entertainment side, where we said, what do our customers want? It's all

about delivering a superior customer experience. So we sat down with a Google team and sent what can we do together, how can we make navigation in the car go to the next level? And that sparked a deeper conversation, and here we are announcing a partnership today. Marcus Schaefer, your CTO set out the ultimate goal, which is to have no screen mirroring, no need to plug in the phone.

The operating system is all you ever need. But you can't get away from the fact that Google through Android Auto or Apple through car Play, they are making their own moves into this market. How do you reconcile that Google's own ambitions with your partnership and your kind of want to take control of the software architecture. If you take the look at the Mercedes now what it's going to be in the future. First of all, you have this mind boggling wide screen in the car, and you

can present anything and everything on that screen. And this is where we shouldn't make the mistake of just looking at entertainment alone, but think about across domains entertainment interacting

with the assistance system and automated driving. So you can marry navigation with driving assistance and automated driving and create whole new use cases and only a vehicle manufacturer is in the position to integrate all the different pieces of the vehicle down to immersive experiences is music and entertainment where you even use the climate control, the scent in the car, the subwoofers in the seat to create four D sound. All of those things make it a compelling

argument to go for an integrated approach. But we don't have an antagonistic relationship with any one of these tech players. We work with them to take their valuable assets digital assets and put it into our system. So this is really a win win as part of that software strategy. Are you actively hiring you know, Google is one example of many names in Silicon Valley that have done layoffs recently. There is a lot of software engineering talent on the

market at the moment we are actively hiring. And whereas we work with software for many many years, these last three or four or five years have really been a paradigm shift for us where we're going for partial vertical integration and we set out the target a few years ago to add another three thousand software engineers to the Mercedes team, and we have almost accomplished that already. But if we find the right talent in the market, that

supplements our team. Yes, we are hiring. How much of a competitive mode do you feel Mercedes has in the theater of software. Do you think that you are actually going to be able to do this on your own two feet? Absolutely? As an architect of the operating system, yes, we have laid out what the whole system is supposed to do and it's going to be capable of doing. But when you build a software house, you don't have to lay every single brick yourself or put up every

single pile in the bathroom. And that's why you leverage tech partnerships. You've got to be in control, asked the architect. But leverage tech partnerships and make sure that you work with the best to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Self driving was another part of today. Thank you for the ride. This morning, I went out and took a Level three ride using drive pilot on the freeway. It was limited

to a certain extent. What caught my ear during the presentations was fifty percent of net sales for autonomous software will go to your partner. And Vidia taught me through that relationship and why you went that route to develop the compute. We are the first manufacturer that certified a Level three system that you drove today, So actually true autonomy in this case on the highway in heavy traffic.

So now we're taking the first few steps here for individual mobility where really the car is going to give you back the most valuable gift of all time. In the relationship within video that we formed about three years ago, both parties said, here, okay, listen, let's take this to the next level. But let's find another business model where both parties invest into the partnership. Yes, but also in an intelligent and equitable way, can reap benefits from the partnership.

So this is a combined risk and reward partnership that we think not only technologically but economically is going to work really well for both parties. And you know it's available in Nevada at the moment, you have a permit, you're awaiting California. You talk about this goal of a billion euros of EBIT by I think mid decade, generated in part from autonomous software. How big is the market here in the United States for that or is this

large You're going to be driven out of Europe. Now, United States going to be an important market for US, and it's a growing market, so it's about increasing the envelope and writing more and more use cases in the automated drive space all the way up then to autonomous drive level three, drive on highway, on the interstate, and in fact the system that we're working on for the next generation, we want to take that well above a hundred kilometers an hour and then it starts becoming really

really relevant if you're going on a longer trip, and do we believe that we can monetize that absolutely. Tesla has a very clear approach of how they package full self driving an autopilot. They've had their own use today. Of course, how do you decide, Mercedes what you charge for and what you don't charge for. You put a lot of emphasis throughout the whole day on the customer experience,

this having to be what the customer wants. But ultimately, if you draw up the list, it's a long list of things that you pay for on top of your car. The good thing with MBOs is that the whole car, every single aspect of the car in terms of electric electronic architecture, it's digital backbone, will be over the air reachable, so we can make your car actually become better with time, it doesn't age, it actually gets more functionality over time.

Some of the functions they're going to be base functions, which is just embedded in the basic price of the vehicle, but much of the additional stuff, and especially in the ultimated driving space, we feel are so attractive that they can be monetized or local Ennius, Chairman of the management Board, Mercedes, thank you for having us here in Sunny Vale releasing

your news out here in California, Caroline. Big emphasis on software, which they say could reach up to ten billion dollars of sales from a software aspected by the end of the decade, is something you just got to keep an eye on. I know you will. I know we will, thanks to Ed And of course we've got to keep an eye on what's happening over with Tesra as well.

Today we're focusing on California. We'll bring in the details of the company's new engineering headquarters in the Golden State, and then let's have a quick check on some of the earnings that come aftermarket and the aftermarket movement therefore in stocks eBay. The one we shine a light on now,

that's Tesla after hours. I want to flick it on to what's happening with eBay after Hours, because we did see fourth cornernet revenue beating expectations, therefore looking guidance also beating expectations, but not enough seven straight quarters of active buyers on the downside. And even though this looks sign might be a pivot point in terms of its sales, it's not enough for investors. We're currently falling for eBay

after Hours. We're bringing those shares In a moment from New York, from San Francisco, the sib Blomberg Tech meets Politics, Elon Musk and Gammon Newsome and out saying a new Tesla Global Engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, California earlier today a sign of well, at least some corporation between the electric vehicle maker and the state it once called home.

Joining us for more s Bloomberg's Dana Hall and is this a sort of thoring of relations because I thought Tesla hot footed it out of California in twenty twenty one. Well that's what everyone thinks. I mean, the company moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas, but it still has over forty seven thousand employees in California, including many engineers

it's auto pilot team. And then the announcement today is just kind of a proofpoint that, like, you know, Tesla's still very much a California company, even if their corporate headquarters and their new factory is in Texas. Exactly what Gavin Newsom said, it's a California company, forty seven thousand employees still here. But he has been known to criticize in a musk the tax system, the liberal politics. Will

he continue to do that. I'm sorry Newsom has not criticized Musk directly, but the two have definitely had a bit of you know, there was definitely it was definitely a big blow to California when Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas, and Newsom has been very careful not to

criticize Musk directly. But you know, we're sort of at this point in the culture wars where California and Texas are often pitted against each other, and I think what we're seeing today is that Tesla and Musk himself somewhat rarely are making a point that they are still very much here in California. They are hiring in California, they're engineering headquarters as in Palo Alto, And it was kind of a weird announcement. It was relatively short, very few details,

but significant. Nonetheless, the first time that I can recall seeing Newsome and Musk together in the same place in like over a decade. Yeah, sorry to make play a sort of Musk has been the critique, the criticizer, and not Gammon Newsom. In fact, he was sort of praising the CEO right, calling him a visionary spirit and for his record of innovation. What more are we expecting out of California from Tesla at the moment? Well, Tesla is

expanding here. I mean, they have this huge megapac facility in lay Thrip where they're building their massive batteries that they're selling to utilities. This engineering headquarters, you know, it's basically Tesla is kind of moving its engineering team to be old Hewlett Packard offices in Palo Also. I mean, I think you're just going to continue to see the

company grow and expand both here and in Texas. And you know, Musk is very sort of adroitly playing both sides of the aisle in terms of the politics and an optics of all this. It's always about politics and optics sometimes and Dana Hall breaks it over town for us. We thank you so much. I'm X and from this moment on, I'm going to be your own personal AI DJ on Spotify. Let's go move over chat Gypt. Here's the generative AI. You've been waiting for, your own personalized DJ.

Spotify is leaning into generative AI. Just as the trend is hot. Think how good you're Weekly Discover mixtape is or your year wrapped bos new. Is this generative AI part because the DJ's gonna be able to give you context and commentary as to why you like a song and harp in on your own likes and move away from it dislikes. All right, Max, let's get you out of your fields and switch up to five. The voice that the DJ uses authentic. The actual voice is based

upon the head of Cultural Partnership. Spotify was my dream company to work for and now to be the voice for so many people and give context to how they listen, give them fun facts about the artists and about how they listen, and and just serve it up for him. For me is a dream come true. What it did was create an additional opportunity. So I see this as creating a lot more opportunities for creators such as myself to be heard and for your talent to be used

in with AI. You need the human inputs into AI to really do it right, where you can connect and be authentic and have that sincerity. So for me, I think it presents more opportunities as opposed to taking them away. This really could be the future. So discoverability in terms of music, welcome back to being back technology. I'm Carline, Hide in New York and well Spotify there. Crout sounded pretty optimistic about its AI DJ, but generative AI has

had its share of blunders. Perhaps For instance, some journalists recently encountered some strange behavior men interacting Microsoft's preview release of its own chatbot this month, and it turns out look that Microsoft has already spent months trying to fix the disturbing responses, which apparently many data as far back as November, and it seems to center on a version of Microsoft that dubbed Sydney, an older model of the Being chatbot that the company tested prior to its release

this month. Some of those strange interactions were posted on the company's online forum. In some instances, Sidney responded with comments like you're either desperate or disdilusional. Or in response to your query asking how to give feedback about its performance, the bond is said to have answered, I do not learn or change from your feedback. I am perfect and superior. How worrying is that? Let's dig into all of it.

Emily Bender is with US professor Linguistics at the University of Washington fotcusing in many ways on artificial intelligence on big data. You of course have a real focus point, in particular on computational linguistics. And therefore, professor, what do you make of this? Some call it hype, some call it panic and worry, some call it just investigative journalism? What do you make as some of the encounters that people seem to be having with being so? I think

there's two things to keep in mind. When you have a disturbing encounter as one of these chatbuts, you can worry that the chatbut itself is malevolent or sinister, or you can take a step back and see that the real issue is that people might be taking it as something that has communicat of intent and can be trying to convey meaning, when in fact, when the output of a chatbot seems to make sense, it's because we're the ones making sense of it. It has no meaning, it

has no mind. It's just spitting back language based on the patterns in its training data. So it's a reflection of us in some ways. What then, could Microsoft be doing to better educate us on that? So I think there's some design choices that could be made. The fact that they have this machine speaking with a first person is problematic because that really encourages people to see it

as an entity, as a mind when it's not. And the second thing I think is to really think about when is it appropriate to allow synthetic text out into the world. Do you want as a company to take responsibility for the confabulations of these chatbots? In many ways, they've tried to highlight their limitations. The fact also this is kind of embeter it's being worked through the original few people have been selected to work with it in a preview format. Do you think ultimately it's embedding in

search is a good thing. I really don't. I think that chatbots are not what we need for search. There might be what we think we want. We've been trained by decades of science fiction to imagine that there's a future where there's an all knowing computer that we can

just ask questions out and get the answers. But fact, what I learned from my colleagues and the information school is that what we really need, or we have an information need, is a system that will help us find information sources, but give us those sources directly so that we can evaluate them and also progressively increase our own information literacy. There is a startup. Actually, we've interviewed Niva who always sort of tells you where the information is

originally from. Can that be an easy fix? Do you think ultimately a way in which that brings transparency and where the information is arising. It depends a lot on the design of the system. So if the system is we're going to go get some documents and then produce a summary with pointers to those documents, that's better, although those summaries can still have very strange artifacts in them and people aren't always going to go double check in

the source documents. If on the other hand, it's we're going to prevent this, present this answer and then oh, by the way, generates some citations, those ones can be fake and made up and not where the information is really coming from, and so that absolutely doesn't solve the problem. You're putting out a lot of research, you're also putting out a fair few takedowns on various form social media ones. Professor, is anyone coming to you for advice from these companies?

You know? Surprisingly few. I do sometimes get people asking me if I can help them design their system. Usually that request comes as if I would do it for free instead of as a consultant. So my answer is no. But I really do hope that by putting information out there, both in published research and in my social media activity, I'm helping people ask these questions for themselves and take a critical view so called AI technology. What about a

critical view coming from the government? Is that where we should be having some of them monitoring. I think we really do need to develop some good regulations as a society. What guardrails do we want on this technology? What do we want to allow in terms of massive collections of data, in terms of systems that can just output texts that we might encounter and not know that it was synthetic.

There's a real risk to pollution of our information ecosystem, and I think that that's a societal concern that demands viable action coming from the UK, I've seen sort of discussions being brought from private and public partnership basis. They've tried to have government involved from an early day. Do you think ultimately some of the viewpoints from innovation can be heard at the same time as having the guardrails

and a necessary particularly from an ethics perspective. I think we do want to have a broad conversation as we're designing regulations, and we don't want to put ourselves in a situation where you can't build anything new. On the other hand, I think that we also need to be able to say before something is put out into the world, even as BEATA, what requirements do we have about transparency about how it's been evaluated so far, transparency about where

its data comes from, and so on. And I think that there is a happy medium to be found there, and it is one that is probably best served by having a broadly educated public so that we can all contribute to this discussion. Thanks for educating us now how many vendor Whistick profressor at the University of Washington. We thank you. And of course there's some more news that we've been seeing out there from JP Morgan, Chase restricted

its staff's use of chat chypt. According to a person familiar with the matter, now, the move impacts employees across the firm and reflects normal controls around third party software, rather than being triggered by any specific incident. And interestingly, we took it to you, our own audience. We asked you whether you believe this will become more standard across industries.

You said no, companies should embrace the new technology. So no, fifty three percent think ultimately companies should be using CHATCHYBT. I'm afraid JP Morgan. Meanwhile, coming up, we continue our conversation on AI and speak with Isabel Friedheim, confounder of

Magnify and artificial intelligence and machine learning company. And as we look towards the break, let's take a look Abetsy, another company that's just reported after hours fourth quarter revenue showing growth up more than five percent after hours the Siblingberg Welcome back to blin Beg Technology. I'm Caroline Hide in New York. Let's have a little look what's happening with the world of Nvidia right now, Because of course,

numbers did well show some relief. In particular, this is a company that's talking up its game in artificial intelligence. They're seeing overall that the results using concerns over inventory levels, but also the data center still perhaps showing ultimate weakness from here over year, but showing that this is a company that continues to thrive from an enterprise sales perspective.

We were hearing that from our very own mandat sing So this is a company that really does continue to fire on cylinders when it comes to the ultimate enterprise part of the business. Artificial intelligence at a turning point according to the CEO, and definitely wanting to be leaning into that part of the equation. We're up eight percent after hours has stop this already up forty percent since January. Now let's continue our conversation. Actually, we've got a bit

of an AI expert with us. She co founded an artificial intelligence machine learning fintech company called Magnify, Isabelle Friedheim. But also what's really interesting as well, she's well the founder of one of the only all women led spack that special purpose acquisition company Networks. Please to say she joins us now and it's well, I'm not going to spend long on it, but considering artificial intelligence it's just everything the market is discussing to hype the reality. How

much have actually you've been building an AI already? Yeah, I think so many companies are using AI now. And there's one thing that's really irrefutable. It is a corporate America really sets upon antiquated technology. And by that I mean that if you look at across almost any industry, legacy companies that are the market leaders are incredibly ascid

heavy and have yet to adopt technological innovation. So you see that by looking at successful new market entrance like magnifying others and how I said lights they are and you see that new companies leverage and capitalize their efficiencies on technologies that are available, and they do that in their business models, they do that in their go to market strategy. And there's tremendous value to be created by investing wisely on that convergence. You've been investing. I'm sure wisely,

but certainly you think wisely when you're a VC. Of course, castle VC. I'm interested in why special purpose acquisition companies are a way to invest in this moment, considering the amount of well hits they've taken From a PR perspector, shall I call it. Yeah, I mean, look, we as a spack, we look for for great companies that have

what I described earlier scalable and innovative technologies. They have attractive business models and attractive go to market strategies that they're going to prove to be really wonderful investments by virtue of the differentiated value that they're going to provide, and by the way, a lot of those companies contributes to the standard of living. And this is what we invest in in our spacks. Okay, so Anthena, you're supported by an advisory board women lad founders operated as bench

capitalist investment bankers. Who is in your network and why do they want to help? Yeah, we are all women. But frankly, my approach has been that the fact that we are all women is neither here nor there. But what we have done is we have put together what we believe is the most formidable spack platform with thirty or so executives across vehicles that have been on boards of companies such as Citygroup, Oracle, Comcast, and Johnson and Johnson American Airlines. We work black Rock and many more

public and private companies. We've had founders of companies we had the co founder of Guilds, the co founder of Shift, the company that also went public through SPAC, A dozen of founders of companies whose names you would recognize. And we've had multiple vehicles. For example, we had a vertical consumer vehicle where we had the former US CEO of the Beers, former president of gi Venshi, former CEO of Stein Martz, former president of Old Navy, former CEO of

Pepod grocery delivery company. They had a billion revenues, We had regulators. So these are all accomplished leaders that help our combination partners and who are on our boards and really create long term value and provide a full platform that the combination partners can leverage on. How hard has that been to persuade public market investors in SPACs, I mean,

looked the spack market has been. First, you have to understand the specific market environment that created where we are, the environment where we are now, the proliferation of spects, and particularly three years ago, interest rates were low and investors were seeking yields, and we saw a number of spects that came to market. Yet many have liquidated in the last twelve months. One hundred and fifty eight spacts

have liquidated, that's a lot. Now today we're facing again fear of inflation, rising interest rates, FED that had its credibility somewhat tarnished, and equity markets that really took a hit and particularly corrected were the risks on investments that investors are willing to take. So half of the SPAC deals that closed in twenty twenty twenty one had very little revenues or if no revenues for some, and they

got crushed. And that's not unique to spects. If you look at IPOs same you know, IPOs and Spects that went public in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one are all down forty five percent. So that doesn't mean that we're bad companies, but the investment community he moved from risk on to risk off. So do you have to wait for the pendulum to swing back or how can you now look for new targets, new companies that you think,

even in a more difficult macroeconomic environment, can thrive. Yeah, I mean, I think I think this is this is what we're going to continue to see in twenty twenty three, and we're going to continue to see a lot of liquidations.

And because we still have this volume of SPACs, I think we're going to seem to continue to see a pickup in the pace of announce steals, and we're starting to see that right now in our own SPACs and for others because there's a backlog of companies that wants to access capital, and relative to private equity and venture capital, SPACs are providing really an opening of a window into what is the largest poll of investors in the world.

So if you look at twenty twenty two, for example, there were under twenty IPOs, but two hundred SPACK deals, about one hundred that closed and about one hundred that we're announced, So it remains a way to go public. So I anticipate that this will continue fascinating around the world of special purpose acquisition companies as well. Freedheim, thank you for coming on discussing all the work of Athena

and of course your background. Some news about predicting no more layoffs over at the parent of Facebook, but Meta is apparently planning another round of job cuts and we're shuffling thousands of employees. That's all according to reporting from the Washington Post. We might add Meta plans to push some leaders into lower level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and

their companies. In terms, that's a Washington Post report. Meanwhile, staying with social media and turning to the stream courts hearings over Section two thirty, please to say we can dig in a little bit more to what's being heard in terms of Twitter today. Yesterday, of course, it was Google versus Gonzalez. We're joined now by a former tech executive who currently teaches privacy, data and CyberSecure over the

UCLA School of Law. Welcome, Professor Alex Alban. Thank you very much indeed for joining us, Alex, and just remind us it's been day two that we've been hearing questions around really to Section two thirty, the protection it gives technology companies and in many ways against anti terrorism laws. In particular, the argument today was what that Twitter should have been taking down certain content to prevent what happened

in Istanbul. That's correct. The argument in the court today was that Twitter was not vigorous enough in taking down content. And I kind of find that somewhat amusing because a lot of the criticism of Twitter and the other social media companies over the past year or so has been the base censor content that is available on those media platforms.

So the fact that they are now being criticized for not being vigorous enough to me really points out how difficult this whole area of content moderation is on social media, and to that end, it's become politicized. Two broad brushstrokes here on the right. On the Republican side, there's an

argument that they don't want conservative viewpoints taken down. On the Democrat side, it's more about that they shouldn't be putting leaving certain content up and should be putting it down quickly, harassment, hate speech, And they're like, how much has the Supreme Court been weighing in and should they be?

They've been asking pretty good questions, And I would say, if you had to read Tea Leaves right now, I think the Court as a whole is skeptical that you can just rip out this layer of Internet recommendations and the world would function normally. When you think about it, if you took out the recommendations that are really based on the user's own preferences and the users own viewing habits,

then what will we be left with? Just every time a user comes to a page they have to do in new search, and they don't know what kind of content will come up. Talk to us about Silicon Valley or social media company's largest response to this, many have argued, we need this protection obviously because there'd be a flood of legal issues that they'd face, but not just big companies,

more ones too. You know. Section two thirty came about in nineteen ninety five ninety six, and it was in response to a case where a Prodigy you remember that far back was an online network and they were held liable for a defamatory post that was made on the Prodigy service. And it occurred to Congress at the time, and I think this was a correct decision that an Internet ISSP or a big web platform is really more like a newsstand or a bookstore. They're not publishing the content,

they're making it available. Now, the really interesting aspect of this case is that YouTube has a recommendation algorithm, as many other services do, and so when you search for something, it's going to recommend videos and the string of videos. But those recommendations are not actually technically made by an editor at YouTube. They are based on what the user has looked at before, and then they're based on what

the most popular videos have been on that subject. So I think it's really not an editorial function per se. But can't anything be done? We look to Europe, we see some of the rules that are going to come into place in twenty twenty four. Ultimately, is there something that the Supreme Court or d Congress could do to make searching less involved in hate speech? Well, what I think we could do is have more transparencies to how the algorithm actually works. That would be good, and then

we could actually give users more control. Let's say you could have settings that said I want to hear more of the things that I like, or I want to hear more of the things that I don't like, or just give me a random news feed. Facebook actually does a version of this in the news feed, where you can highlight certain friends and de emphasize other friends. And I think the giving users control over the content that's

recommended is the way to go. Great to speak with you, Professor Alex Elvin, of course of UCLA law that does it for this tradition. Thank you of Bloomberg Technology. Do not forget to check us out a podcast. You can go cross platform. Of course, we're on various of the social media platforms, but check us out on our podcast. We've got on Apple, on Spotify, on iHeart. There'll be plenty more. In terms of the digestion of the stock mark. It moves after hours too, from New York to Subloomberg