Elon Musk's Fraud Trial and Ryan Cohen Best on Alibaba

Barber risks a clash with Beijing. We look into his requests and investor activism in China, plus tenure and Hinge think users are willing to cough up big bucks. We're talking up to five dollars per month for an elite membership subscription on dating apps. Or we're going to have fun with that one, as you did on social media when we took a poll of your thoughts on it.

But first and form, as Elon Musk said to me, what star witness and a jury trial that started tuesday in San Francisco Federal court as he mentioned, and it's over his infamous tweets just all that time ago, four and a half years ago. To be is precise about a plan staying eavy maker private with quote funding secured, who makes Peter Blumberg joins us to get us up to speed with basically who's likely to win here, Peter, because they're gonna be going out to it, and we

know Elon Musk quite likes a bit of a fight. Well, he does, and it's it's really unusual for a case like this securities fraud trial brought by UH private investors as a class action too, it's unlikely to sort to go to trial in the first place. Usually they settle because there's so much money at stake, and in this

case there there's billions of dollars on the line. But as you say, Musk is always up for a fight, and in this case he's had a really unusual disadvantage because the judge ruled months ago that the tweets were false, and the judge is going to tell that to the jury at the get go. There's still other things that the jury has to decide, and it could still be resolved in Musk's favor, but it's definitely a disadvantage for him going into this. I think let's talk about mechanics.

I As you know, Pec, you've been my editor on more than one occasion covering these kind of blow by blow trials. But the jury's key here and so are the mechanics. So we're going through jury selection right now, and not a surprise, some of the potential jurors had issues of Elon Musk. Remember Elon must tried to move this trial away from San Francisco because he argued there

was bias among the jury pool. But this isn't going to happen quickly, and Elon Musk is going to be a star witness to walk us through what happens from here. Right Well, they're they're getting close to selecting a jury, and they've been very carefully questioning the jurors about their views and whether they can commit to being fair and impartial. And of course the lawyers on both sides uh get get a chance to uh speak up and dismiss jurors

that they don't feel comfortable with. But there's a feeling that they're going to reach a consensus before the end

of the day and pick a jury. And then we've got about a two and a half week trial where we will hear from a variety of witnesses beyond Musk himself, including some of the high finance people who were involved in some of the behind the scenes talks about funding this transaction, as well as UH some professor types expert witnesses who are gonna talk to the jury about their theories of how the tweets may have influenced UH investors to make trades and also to talk about UH what

kind of damage this did too, and bardsters and how much money they should collect. Page thank you for getting us up to feed. It's going to run for a little while. Let's think at least until every first. Meanwhile, Apple, it just rolled out it's new products. Have you spotted that ed has a new Apple products on them today? In fact, but we digress from various broken phones and we go back to the high end MacBook Pro, the laptops as well as the Mac Mini desks that they've

just been announced today. Let's see what all the fuss is all about, bing legs, Mark gam and they haven't announced, but they've gone on sale. Right, Mom, What do we know about these products that you hadn't already broken in the past. Yes, So, the new MacBook Pro and the new Mac Minie those were introduced today. They're available for pre order on Apple's website and they start shipping on January, so just in about a week from now. Now these

are marginal upgrades. They look identical to the previous models. The Mac Minie last rolled out in the first Mac to get the M one chip part of the transition away from Intel. The Mac Pro less updated at the end of one Now why are these so significant, Well,

they introduced the new generation of Apple's chips. So the Mac Minie gets the same M two chip launched in the mat Book Air and the low end thirteen inch Maco Pro last year, but it also gets the first M two Pro chip that adds a little bit more horsepower on both the CPU and the GPU side. So the CPUs the chip that is for the main performance, the overall speed of the computer, while the GPU handles

graphics and video editing and stuff of that nature. Now, the MacBook Pro also gets that same M two pro chip in the Mac Mini, but also a more advanced chip called the M to max, which essentially doubles the amount of horsepower you get on the graphics side. So that's really a high end machine for video editors, programmers, engineers and such that really need the most horse power

you can get in a laptop. What Caroline was alluding to Mark is this weekend, I dropped my phone and it smashed, and now I face a choice of whether to upgrade or Wait. You and I talk about this behind closed doors all the time. Anyway, we digress. What Tim Cook alluded to in a tweet was Apple silicon right, you're just talking about it there that the emphasis Apples had not just on supply chain but controlling its I

P controlling its technology. What I'm confused about is I thought that this latest gen of Mac was supposed to come out last year. Was there a delay? What happened? So there was a delay. So the M two line first started rolling out in last year. It started to launch actually at the end of July. There was a delay back then because of the manufacturing facilities in China.

They all got shut down for about a month. That delayed the rollout of the MacBook Air In the MacBook probe, that, in addition to other factors regarding the chip shortage and the overall needs to allocate more manufacturing to more pressing products like the iPhones and the iPads last year and the Apple watches, meant that something had to give in what gave was this was this new map book Pro and the Mac Mini Those were originally supposed to roll

out this past October. Alright, Bloomberg's Mark German always bringing us the latest headlines and gadgets from the world of Apple. Now Microsoft plans to cut jobs and a number of engineering divisions as early as Wednesday. That, according to a Bloomberg source, is unclear how many of the two hundred thousand workers will be affected, and it is the third

round of layoffs since July of last year. Microsoft, which declined to comment, has also eliminated open positions and paused hirings in many departments chat GPT, and it is still in the headlines, and this time because Microsoft's putting the tool to use right this after the tech John we already know reportedly as mulling an additional ten billion dollar investment in chatch epts creator open Ai. But just get

us up to speed with what Microsoft's overall plans are. Yeah, this was an interesting and curiously times blog post from the company, partly because Davos is going on and you know how things work over in Davos, but also because of how fresh that reporting was around them boosting their funding into open Ai. Right, they've already invested a billion in two thousand nineteen. But simply they're going to take

open aies tools and bring them into the Azure Cloud platform. Actually, if we flip up the boards, we can get some detail on that in some limited capacity. He Since Microsoft has often offered a very small group of its Azure clients the ability to use open ai tools if they have their own tools hosted in Asual Cloud, that all sounds very niche, but frankly so we put if you're a company that hosts your own tools on the Asual Cloud platform, you have now access to use GPT three

point five dally for example. And now they're making that more accessible. They're opening it up to a wide wider range of customers. Why do we care? When we were asking when that news came around about the ten billion dollar potential investment, what's in it? For Microsoft? There is a lot of emphasis on being their search engine, right,

how could chat GPT in particularly improve that platform? But read Dina Basses reporting on the Bloomberg Tunel Bloomberg dot com, there are other use cases as well about how the language models and the underlying artificial intelligence could improve office for example, and teams might stuff teams as well. So it's a really interesting development that are now being a little bit more open about, although there was still a

lot that they did not say in that blog post. Yeah, more questions and answers is always the way, but let's put more questions to one. Michael Dancy now his managing partner over at Compound, has a number of investments actually an AI and machine learning startups and two around million dollars in assets and the management. Michael, great to catch up with you and give us the iteration, the scale, the applications you're most excited about for something like chat

GPT or generative AI. Yeah, I think for chat GPT specifically, search is probably the thing that gets everyone really excited on a first order. You can think about how existential that is to Google and how they are kind of

economic model works. I think as you start to see more and more of these use cases has become more emergent and more professional already in areas that start off as needing kind of inspiration and move towards needing n percent perfection and eventually make their way all the way to kind of plus. You can think of like legal as an exam ample, um. And then in those middle areas you can think of areas like biology, material discovery, things like that, as well as a bunch of other

enterprise software use cases. So we really think this is something that's interesting across a bunch of different industries and it's going to cut into a bunch of different companies kind of supposed modes over time. A lot of hype and actually a lot of handwringing around some of the ethics around it all. Michael, is that developing simultaneously with the innovation you worried about basically the rules of regulations,

the steering of the road not being formed quickly enough. Um. I think with all emergent technologies, especially when they get the type of adoption that's been rampant for chat GPT, you'd see this concern around can we roll this out properly, which is ironic as Opening Eye was originally built around this idea of deploying AI in a kind of safe manner. UM.

I don't worry about it as much. I think there's a lot of open questions around kind of artists attribution, around kind of fair right usage of different types of data, where if you're pulling from a different sources, a bunch of different sources. Should you need to cite those sources, but in general, I think that the value continually outstrips kind of the the downsides, and we really should focus

on the the optimistic version of these technologies. What are you surprised as somebody tracking the space between the time that reports came out, Microsoft was thinking about boosting its investment in open ai and then last night when a blog post comes out talking about how they're going to incorporate the underlying technology into their own platforms. Is somebody that knows how these deals work and also what the utility is. What's your read on the news announcements. I

think it's just a continual um you know. I just continually am impressed by Microsoft over years now, and I think they see the strategic asset that having these kind of foundation models and large language models implemented into their products can be and also we can allow them to potentially leap frog competitors. And I think what you're going to see is um as we all know a lot of other large companies that are figuring out what are

they going to do? Google is the most notable one sideline I think they have bigger regulatory headwinds and so they are being very very careful about this. But I think all of us knew the scale of people there that care about these problems that are could have very interested in figuring out, you know, what are the ways in which we can disrupt ourselves and or disrupt our biggest competitors. And for Microsoft, it's always been about disrupting

competitors and specifically doing it from the enterprise layer. And I think what we're going to see is that Microsoft's ambitions are going to continue to expand far outside of just enterprise software, and I think that's where people should

be maybe less surprised over the next twenty four months. Michael, I'm assuming there are some parallels between the experience you're having at the moment, particularly in your inbox and mining Carolines that since this story took off, you know, lots of emails come across about startops were king in the

field of AI. It's hard to discern and distinguish the sort of those players that have genuine promise, those that have something unique about them, that have a you know, a strong underlying technology or i P. Is that your experience so you're getting pitches, you people seeking investment from you, and you're saying, God, I don't know what is real

in the world of AI and what's not. Yeah, someone who has spent you know, the better part of the eight years and AI and also in similar time, my time in crypto from I'm used to these kind of hype cycles and people adding burbiage, whether it's Web three or now AI to their UM, you know, to their pitch. I think that you have to kind of understand what are the core special skills or special sources of these founders and entrepreneurs. Are they products centric? Are they technology centric?

Are they distribution centric? And I think really most of these teams are not technology centric and kind of you're not at the bleeding edge of machine learning artificial intelligence. And if you're not there, then you have to be

elite on the product side. And so I think what we're gonna see is both a lot of people that pitch AI and never even get there, but also much people that integrate you know, Opening Eye, a p I S or other types of companies APIs and build products that UM take up quite quickly, but are kind of suffering from death by a thousand cuts are suffering by

having no real modes in these businesses. I think, is you brought up Google and I think back to a UK startup, deep Mind, that it first purchased, and the focus that the UK had in artificial intelligence. Where in the world are these companies getting built at the moment, Because we seem to be very US centric about it at this moment in time, I actually think the UK is one of the most interesting places in the world

for artificial intelligence today. I think it's the U S. It's Canada and Toronto Waterloo and the UK um and Europe has a few other disparate areas, but the concentration of talent in those places is pretty obvious. And I think the best part really for the UK specifically, were investors in a company called wave Ai, which is a self driving company using a very advanced type of machine

learning to get their cards to drive themselves. What we're seeing now, how is a kind of renaissance of news machine learning researchers no longer wanting to be in research or academic settings, and so I think a lot of people in Europe, specifically in London specifically, we're in deep Mind kind of really enjoying publishing these amazing paper as,

whether as Alpha Fold or a bunch of others. And now they're seeing chat GPT hit five million people on a couple of days, and we're saying, you know, it's it's been cool sitting around and working on technology for years, but it's time to go and build alright. Michael Densi, managing partner Compound, trying to discern what has promised what does not in the world of AI. Now coming up, the energy crisis in Europe, the potential recession in the US.

Is there still some light at the end of the tunnel? Ib and Vice chairman Gary Cone seems to think so. More in that next, this is Bloomberg over in Davos, where the World Economic Forum is on the way. Some tech leaders are actually optimistic about the economy. IBM's vice chairman Gary Cone, for example, suppose to Bloomberg's David Weston about that and the energy crisis over in Europe, have

a listen. I thought that the risk to Germany was really the energy situation going into the winter, to the extent that we had a very cold winter and they had to start rationing energy and they had to cut back industrial Germany to keep people warm. I felt that that was a really tough situation. Potentially, we're now deep enough into the winter and we sort of know where

we are, we know what's in reserve and storage. I think Germany is going to get through the winter very fairly easily with energy and I think they're going to continue to power through this. So I'm in agreement with the Chancellor. The biggest economy in Europe. Does I say about Europe in general? Every recession in Europe, Well, I think Europe is going to model through this. The UK not as clear, but it's it's it's it's not gonna be easy. You know, We've still got pretty pretty high

inflation in Europe. It's it's it's a difficult situation. You know, in the United States, when we raise interest rates and we can all handle it that the interest rate picture in Europe, the leaguard has to deal with this is a little bit different. You know, Germany can handle higher interest rates as you start raising interest rates, Southern Europe has a lot more difficulty with the reality of what's

going on. You're director of the National Economic Council, so you followed the US aunty pretty closely, But about the United States, what are the chances of hercession? I talked earlier today with Jane Fraser City she thinks second half, it's quite possible. You know, it's interesting. We've been around Davos and everyone here is negative. So the first of all that that tells me we should be positive. But you know, is it a dinner last night with a lot a lot of CEOs, global CEOs, and you know,

most of them raised their hands. They're pretty negative about the economy. Then when they talked about their business, they were all pretty positive about their business. So I think everyone thinks everyone else has a problem. My my opinion is I'm pretty optimistic. That doesn't mean we're having a bullish economy. What I'm optimistic about is I think we can muddle through where we are. I think the Feds

getting to the end of their tightening cycle. We may have a couple more twenty five basis point increases from the Fed. We top out around five percent in FED funds here. But I think we've all factored that factor that into the situation, and I feel like we're in a relatively good situation. The consumer is okay, they're not great, We're starting to see a few cracks. Um, the economy is slowing down. But I think we're going to model through modeling through the IBMS Vice chair Gary Cone over

there in Davos. Meanwhile, let's talk about crypto for a moment, because shares of the bank silver Gate, they spike today as an outline steps like shutting assets to whether the ft X collapse. That's off the posting in one million loss earlier this month. Remember look, Silvergate is a lending focused on digital asset industry what large, and it's trying to navigate the fallout from f t X, which pronto clients to draw down more than seven billion dollars in deposits.

The company has said it's got four point six billion in cash on hand. Welcome back to blom Bow Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York and I'm Ed Ludlow in San Francisco now. And it's a pretty air case

actually of an activist targeting if I'm in a Chinese company. Now, his mean stock investor who actually means stock royalty, Ryan Cohen, He's taking a state get this in Ali Baba, and he wants the e commerce giant to buy back more shares Funnily enough, if I could put Cohen maybe even at allders with China's own president, Sheinping, whose administration has kind of wiped out growth at Ali Baba and other big tech companies. But it's a returning of the guard.

Promose Yuhuan Chan is with us who's been reporting on this, and and actually first and foremost we know his power over game Stop, over bed Bath and beyond, but he hasn't had much power over the share price movement of Ali Baba on the day. Yeah, it's interesting because if you'll look at the share at the store market reaction, Ali Baba is actually down around one point six percent alongways all the Chinese A d R stocks during the

U S session. It only managed to go up slightly overnight in Hong Kong when the news initial accoun out. So it's very different from the huge rally we saw in the mean stock rail where he cuts on. So I think it appoints to something about the bigger questions

I'm hearing from invester. Is there question is because this is a Chinese company, and ask for an activist, how much real impact and the influence he could have on the board, because you know, First, his steak is pretty small thinking about Olive blah blah as this huge tech giant of more than three hundred billion market cab in his stake his positions like hundreds of millions. So that's

limited power, right. And also I think what's tricky and more interesting is Beijing's perspective is Beijing is taking off this so called golden shears. So it's a minority stake, but well allowed the Chinese government um to you know, have the rights or the control over or influence on the board or sway in important decisions. So from that perspective, you know, the activists voice could ultimately be undermined, you know, if they are at odds right. And so I think

that also points to the overall background is vary. We're in China, you see a real activists to push just Asian investor is also not much for Lola with that concept or you know, is that kind of compare. Yeah, it was only last Thursday that the reports came out that that Chinese government entities we're taking so called golden shares not just value Barba, but ten cent as well. And activism is more rare, right when it comes to

China tech mainland Chinese companies. I guess my question is you strip out all the noise and his demands, what is the outlook for Ali Barber. You know there was a bit more optimism at the end of two because there was a pullback on COVID zero, a bit more

supportive of e commerce stocks. Yeah, that's right, and so one hour the agree is right now it's actually for the activists or as an investor, uh, it's a pretty good entrying point because many would argument now we are at an inflection point for China equities, right, like you mentioned, it's because of the lots of the China reopening trades is raising hope and also on the regulator reference, we are seeing more and war science space during is finally

easing away from the regular crackdown and that's like the initial trigger that caused the brutal cell off in Ali Baba. Right, So now you know people are more conveyced the wars is behind, the hewing is over, and hopefully with this influential investors engagement it well lived the sentiments or you know, bring more attention from the retail traders um in the US.

And right, what about Ali Baba buying Pakistan stock. I mean, given them still about six and the discounted versus the highs of twenty dwying with Ali Baba's management with without Ryan Ko and think it's not a bad idea. Yeah, I agree, And actually Ali Baba has already started to do so from last year and has expanded shareholder share buy back program, So it's underway. I think, just romant to see if like they will speed up the or ramp up their effort. But it's something like already on

the table. If you're Ryan Cohen and you're trying to convince Ali Barber's board or the Chinese government of change, which demand do you think is most likely? That's a difficult question, you shim, But which demand is he pushing foremost? I what sink here? Share buy back is probably the right aspect, just given that years she was sitting on piles of cash and how to better use that part of capital is a you know, a like strategy. I think the board needs to be considered, um, you know,

thoroughly fascinating. I mean what Ali Baba is about fifty times the size the game stops, so it's quite a different ballpart that he's playing in now. You should Chen. We thank you sir so much for saying a top the news. We might we've had a little bit of news in the world of autos. Yeah, it was an interesting early start talking to GM because Chevrolet just unveiled the first ever electrified corvette. Okay, electrified kind of seventy years after the first corvette concept was unveiled in New

York City. Actually, this is a hybrid zero to sixty and two point five seconds, not a plug in hybrid though, and I caught up with GM's president Mark Royce about why they put a battery of sorts in their sports car and what this fits in with GM's transition to electric. Take a listen, the car itself is is so different, um, and it really is something that takes advantage of the whole mill engine architecture in getting power to the front and rear wheels and makes it really an all weather machine.

So we're very proud of it. It's an interestant engineering Marvel and uh, you know, today is a big day for the whole team. This is the fastest ever production corvette. The electric or electrified propulsion system is a big part of that, right In going back to basics, this is not a plug in hybrid. There are two separate propulsion systems that that work in conjunction with one another. My question, I guess Mark, is is this a sign that the Corvette customer is not ready to go full electric, to

go full battery electric. That's a great question. Um, I think you know, the Corvette customer is ever changing, and so is the car, and so i'd say, you know, this is the next step in the evolution of getting Um, you know, a hundred sixty horse power in the front and four on a ninety horse power in the rear, all to the ground, and so you know, it's a little faster, a little quicker, I should say, than there's zero six at two and a half seconds, But um,

you know it's it's very different. And so when you drive the car from a vehicle dynamic standpoint, it's at home on the track, it's at home, you know, um, every day, as Corvettes usually are on on all streets. So this is the next step. And you know, as I said, the Corvette buyer is a were changing and so you know, this is a pretty exciting time for us. And I don't think it's a question of whether someone's

ready or not. You know, I think people are when they look at the car and they discover, um, the integration of the power as you mentioned that, and then you know how we're doing it, and the sophistication and the integration of things like stealth mode and the launch itself. Uh, and then the like I said, the vehicle dynamics on the track when you actually have you know, um, the front wheels actually pulling and and doing things that you know, the regular sate doesn't do. So I think it's just

the national evolution in propulsion performance, vehicle dynamics and sophistication. Mark, let's get an update on on the electrification plan more broadly, I think, you know, there's a lot of excitement and quite clearly a book of demand for the Lyric and the hummery V. But you know from bloom Bags reporting that the output still seems quite low for those two vehicles.

What what's the situation there? Well, you know, we we've we've we've been off a lot in terms of having um lower volume vehicles until our cell plants, our own cell plants, our ultium cell plants are brought online. So we just brought our first plant online, you know, for the cells of all those vehicles in Largetown, Ohio. The next one on a volume basis comes from spring Hill, which is built just adjacent to the Lyrics. So, um, we also you know this is these are all new

electric vehicle platforms. They're not retrofit architectures with batteries. So some of our competitors have done so, um, we are doing this right. We're doing it for the next twenty years. We're not doing it for the next two years. And I think you're gonna see those cell plants come online and high volume, which are is happening right now, and you're gonna see the output of the first Ultium vehicles increased quite dramatically over the next year. GM President up early.

We'll around like great conversation. And meanwhile, more news in the auto world for you. Uber and Hurts they're joining forces for expansion plans across Europe and Hurts it's going to be making as many as twenty five thousand electric vehicles available to Uber drivers in European capital cities. By almost fifty thousand Uber drivers have rented a Tesla through Hurt since those two companies partner in last October. So

the Uber hurts expansion. It's gonna begin in London this month. Yeah, fascinating talking about demand, asking where they're going to get all those evs from anyway, coming up a new bill in the UK could put tech executives behind bars. This is Bloomberg meta Platforms President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg says the company is in a period of transition, but also in the very very early stages of that transition to the metaverse. That says, growing legislation and scrutiny is

placed on social media apps around the world. Clerk spoke with Bloomberg tv is David Weston in Davos about the transition and the threat of other tech giants like TikTok owner bike Dance take a lesson. HM. So, I think you see this huge pendulum swing from the kind of tech euphoria of the past where tech could do no wrong.

You know that the era of the Arab Spring, where all things bright and beautiful were held to be produced by tech, and now, of course the pendulum has swung pretty kind of pretty dramatically the opposite direction, and everything that is bad, whether it's an election or a referendum outcome that people don't like or individual distresses is ascribed to social media, and I think part of part of kind of finding a resting place for that pendulum, because

extreme optimism and extreme pessimism of both as foolish as he is each other, of course, involves regulation. There are issues like data privacy, content rules, data portability, the rules of of of how social media platform should operate during a lection and time and so on. All of those are rules that should be set not by technologists, not by engineers on the West Coast, but by but by legislature, by legislators elected by voters. And I think that's the

process you're seeing. It's most advanced in Europe, but you're seeing that you're seeing that debate in DC as well. It's not producing legislation as much as as as occurs, but also in Brussels, in London, in in in Australia. You're seeing this move towards regulation. I suspect some of it won't work very well and won't stand the test of time, and other bits of regulation will will make

sense and will stand the test of time. I suspect one of the reasons you have your important position in meta is you have been on both sides I mean, you have been elected to parliament, you have been Deputy Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, so you've seen the government side of it, and now you're seeing the private sector side of as well. I'm not saying there's any right answer. I'm not asking for what the regulation is, but give some principles from your experience on both sides

of it. What is the basic principles you think that should be followed? Well, I think I think the secret is in that name, the sort of the best recipes, and that's in that word principles. I think where things go wrong is when legislators who are not engineers, they're not technologists. They don't know how algorithms work, or how AI works and so on and so forth. And given that technology evolves so rapidly, I think where things go wrong is where legislators try and impose some sort of

static condition on on technology that moves very fast. I think where where legislation and regulation makes more senses when it's based on some principles which are sort of evergreen principles that can that can apply to different technology, and too, technologies that evolve over time, so to you know, look at these big companies like Metal, like Google, like Twitter, like Apple, and so on, look at their systems, hold their systems to account, but don't try and kind of

micromanage every bit of content or every change in in in you know, every every change in the code that is used to produce the product. I think that's the that's the fundamental lesson that I've certainly kind of observed so far as we sit here in domagistrates with one of the big issues not just endeavors, but for the

globe right now, is some differences and systems. Yeah, I mean there are difference between Europe and the United States and regularly learning tech for example, but fundamentally the systems are saying. China is quite different. They have a different approach to social media, including other things. Can we have a world in which those are integrated or do they have to essentially bifurkate. Do's China have to go it's away in social media and the West goat it's way.

I think they already have bifurcated. We don't have a We don't have a global internet. People keep talking about the global Internet. It doesn't exist. You have a Chinese Internet, which by its own on its own terms is highly successful. It's it's it's walled off from the rest of the world. It's it's subject to a great deal of internal surveillance.

But it doesn't it doesn't welcome. You know, for instance, Facebook is not allowed to operate in China, whilst of calls Chinese social media companies are allowed to operate in the States, tik Tak Taxica. How big a risk is that a national security risk? Because many in Washington think it really is. Look, I'll leave that to the national security experts. What I would observe though, to your earlier question, which is you know that there isn't a level playing field.

Chinese social media companies are able to operate in both in China and in Europe and America. We're able to operate in American Europe, but not in China. So you know, at the moment there's an imbalance imbalance there, which doesn't I think in the long run make a make a whole lot of sense. And they and it's partly because the the approach to data, the approach to privacy is just very very different culturally and legally and politically in

China than it is elsewhere. And then there are slightly more subtle, narrower differences between the EU and the US as well. And I think one of the interesting dynamics you have is that you have the European Union now leading on new rules, need leading on new regulation, but not leading technologically or commercially. You don't have in all the big tech giants are either in the United States or China. And yet it's Europe that doesn't have the big tech giants that is inventing the rules for them.

So it's a very interesting jigsaw where I would I would actually add a fourth element. I think India. I think you have Europe, America, China and India. Those are the four great, big sort of jigsaw pieces that make up how the the Internet operates in the modern world. Meta Platforms President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg. They're having a very global and a very legislation focused conversation there.

Let's talk about global legislation. Let's talk about the UK, of course, where Nick Clegg used to be our deputy Prime Minister, because it could be on the verge of passing legislation. Social media bosses behind bars if they break certain rules. Now Prime Minister is she soonak intends to sign the Online Safety Bill with criminal sanctions for tech executives that the bill aims to protect anyone under eighteen

from harmful content. That means, if regulators find that a platform has been pushing teams to see content and citing violence, harassment, misinformation for example, some executives could face up to two years behind bars. The Online Safety Bill is expected to be signed. It's early as spring head, and this is after what was a big backlash from his own Conservative Party members, the backbenches as they're known, wanting to take out a certain amendment that would remove any criminal liability.

And what's so interesting is basically taking a leaf out of Ireland's book, right because they've already sort of got this precedent set. You know, all social media players have been thinking about this issue for years, and I think metas are really interesting example in like of what the UK is doing, because go back to two thousand nineteen Zuckerberg's op ed in the Washington Post, we need new rules for the Internet meta. Then Facebook shouldn't be the

ones to form those rules. Then you have the Meta Oversight Board, an independent body brought in. It's always been that someone else should act. Well, now they are acting and this is actually a pretty sort of severe course of action the UK appears to be taking. It's interesting. I think the Irish legislation, for example, it does have checks before that isn't suddenly you're deemed legally culpable and

you're put behind MARS. I mean you get apparently a series of checks, including if they do not comply with warning notices from the country as Online Safety Commissioner. And in fact these rules are already applied to certain industries in the UK. Think of builders for example, the construction companies. Banks even do have a layer of accountability up to the highest executives. It's just going to be interesting how

this is kind of navigated, both legally and in practice. Yeah, and social media is just as societally important of those things that you just mentioned, so it will be slow moving. We'll see. Can you put a price on love well hinge the dating a phone by match? I think so they're going to be offering a new subscription level at fifty to sixty a month. The idea go after gen z app users who are quote highly motivated datas and in return offer them enhanced features that boosts their profile

and their chances of finding a match. But it's quite a jump from Hinges existing thirty five dollar a month offering now match teas the new Hinged here in their latest earnings reports, saying it would be targeted it quote the most intention users who have a higher quote propensity to pay fifty to sixty dollars a month? Can you predifice some love? Can you? Did you? I mean, I know that you're a man who's well, many have found love right through for certain dating applications, And would you,

in hindsight, spend six thousand a year? But it is kind of an amazing way to be amplifying your margin at this particular moment. Right, but these are two different products, right, So you have Hinge sixty dollars a month palatable, You've then got Tinder thinking about five hundred dollars a month. Well, we asked the audience, right, what do they think? I think the results are pretty well they speak for themselves. Caroline.

I mean we threw in sort of are you sitting on the sense on the fence or do you think this is all ridiculous? And it seems as though it's all ridiculous. Romance is dead? And think that seven percent said yes, sign me up. I feel as though this is trying to take on those sort of elitist, elite dating apps where you do pay an round, but you get perhaps a little bit more of a specific targeted audience. Do you at least right full disclosure? I met my wife on Hinge all those years ago. Had I known

them what I know now, cough up the cash. Probably do it? They work, That does it. For this edition of Bloomberg Technology Wednesday, we're going to be talking all things crypto and Bitcoin's bullish run and d y d x he d Yeah, don't forget. There's so much recap the podcast on the terminal Apple. I heart Spotify. This is Bloomberg