Frances Haugen, One Year Later

one year after her fiery testimony on Capitol Hill. We'll talk about what's changed, what hasn't, and what stayed the same, and is the blockchain the answer to get everyday people to invest in private markets. One funds ends to tokenize its investments could open the door to the masses. I want to get back to our top story. Musk's about face agreed to buy Twitter at the original price, but the judge in the Twitter trial saying show will go on for now. Let's break it all down with Bloomberg.

Sarah fryar So from a legal perspective, Sarah, Twitter hasn't dropped its lawsuits. They're still going to court as of now on October sevente Right, Well, we know that the parties are meeting today. We know that Twitter is talking with Elon Musk. But yeah, I mean they have not said sure, we we trust that this offer that you've made is is legitimate and we will do this. Um. We haven't seen any joint statement. We haven't seen any end to the saga yet. I think we're still staying

tuned for for what they might decide. And and hey, if they don't come to an agreement, um, then we might see must opposed in the next couple of days and we might see, um, this go to court as scheduled on October seventeen. Our understanding is that Twitter to ask the court to provide a consent judgment if you will, and you know, create an agreement between the court and Twitter and Musk, not just between Twitter and Musk, uh,

that would be enforceable in a court of law. We are getting a glimpse into his vision for the social media platform. What do you make of this x the everything app thing? What does he mean by that? You know, you've talked a few times about the idea of having an app in the US that would compete with the likes of we chat in China. Um, I think we've we've seen this ambition before. We've seen this from Mark Zuckerberg, We've seen this from Evans speakl. Nobody had quite pulled

it off, though he's talcumented everything. App Um. I think that that is is a big ambition of a lot of folks that just the Internet. Um may not work the same way here. We'll have to see meantime. You've been doing some maths, and I believe the calculation is if Elon must gets rid of all the boxs and spam on Twitter, he might lose their teena and a half million followers on his own. Yeah, I think I

think a lot of people will lose followers. Listen, And it really depends on what you think of as a bought. There are a lot of automated account on Twitter that that people love, like such as once I tell you when an earthquake has happened. Um, I don't think that

that's what Elon Musk is talking about. Um. His account in particular tends to be disportionately affected by folks who want to to take his identity to try to to do crypto scams, for instance, So I think that um that those celebrity accounts um do tend to be more overrun by bots, and if he were to get rid of that kind of of account on Twitter, would it would affect the biggest names like Elon Musk, like Justin Bieber,

especially the longest standing accounts on Twitter. All right, well, interesting that we're starting to see his vision and take more shape. Of course, if the steal does indeed go through Bloombergs frya thank you as always. One year ago, former Facebook employee Francis Hogan shook Silicon Valley and the world when she blew the whistle on Facebook. She turned over tens of thousands of internal documents from the social

networking giant to the media and the SEC. The Facebook Papers, as they've come to be known, contained disturbing facts about the effects that social media platforms, including Instagram, we're having on teens and kids. After testifying before US Congress, she went on to speak around the world. The question is what is Facebook doing to amplify or or expand hate? What is it doing to amplify or expand eathing violence? I mean, Faceboo didn't invent hate, but you think it's

making hate worse. Unquestionably, it's making hate worse. So in the last year, what has changed, what's improved, and what's left to do? Former Facebook employee turned whistleblower Francis Hogan joins me. Now, Francis, thank you so much for joining us. It is one year to the day since you testified before US Congress, and I'm so curious what you feel has changed for the better since then and how much work is they're still left to do, you know. And

it's some really basic ways, Um, Facebook has changed substantially, right. So, Facebook had ten years to release parental controls for Instagram and it never got around to it until after my disclosures came out. Uh. There are other things like Facebook has never had any public programs around trying to be more inclusive on its languages, and they launched something called No Language Left Behind UM, which is still only a you know, a drop in the bucket, but at least

they're trying UM. Internationally, we've seen some amazing progress legislatively, so there's a law called the Digital Services Act, which is the first law that has ever required the major platforms to disclose what risks they have, Like actually, they would have had to disclose the risks to kids. For example, had this law they passed before that finally got across the finish line in Europe after a four or five

year year push. The information my disclosure is was credited with giving the last gas and the tank to get across the finish line. So some things have changed, but we still have a lot more work to do. Facebook has also changed its name to meta made this big pivot to the metaverse. What are your biggest concerns about the new meta today. The way they got here with Facebook was because of a set of incentives and and a lack of oversight. Those incentives have not meaningfully changed.

Facebook is still a private company. It's still driven to have to increase usage, increased profits quarter after quarter. We Facebook set its initial launch of the metaverse, we're going to do safety by a design up front. But from what we're seeing over the last you know, last year, um is that they're repeating the same problems that they had with Facebook that the first time they let journalists

into the metaverse, immediately women started gang grouped. Why didn't they talk to some women beforehand on like what might be dangerous that that that they could face in a space like this, So we need to see meta actively engaging with the pulp engagement experts and saying, let's design for safety from the certain So they just said today they're going to ask users for more direct feedback on what they'd like to see in their feed their algorithm is that a good? Is that a positive step? In

your view that it might have been? And there's a lot of ways to do this that would have huge opportunities for change. Many people know of kids who struggle with mental health issues, eating disorders. Um. Part of what happens is Facebook's algorithms have a tendency to push people towards more extreme content. You know, you might start something like healthy eating and get pushed to pro interacts the content.

Imagine a world where kid who's trying to fight against these things, who knows this is a negative venture uh influence on them. Imagine if Facebook actually said, hey, we noticed you're looking at a lot of content that other users have said makes them feel blue. Do you want to keep looking at it? Imagine if we have that ability to influence our feeds, probably a lot of kids

would be a lot healthier today. Interestingly, he told Joe Rogan this story about how he rejected the idea of an angry emoji and then said he wasn't here to design a service that makes people more angry. Do you think that's a little bit of rebusionist and history. It's interesting. So when you look at the documents around emojis, the reason why they added them was they wanted people to um. People felt bad putting like a thumbs up on something that made them really angry. They don't want to be

sewn is endorsing that idea. It's one of these things where Facebook didn't think about the uninterested, unanticipated consequences of some of these design decisions. When you make an avenue where you could do it actively solicit more anger, you're going to get more angry content. So I haven't seen anything that documents saying that Mark said say no to the angry face um and, but I can imagine that he wishes as he had. Now now you testify that

only Mark Zuckerberg was holding Mark Zuckerberg accountable. And I'm curious what you think of Cyril Sandberg's departure after fourteen years. Do you think her leaving will change the internal culture? And if so, so, I have a so so the fact that Mark remains, I think is a much more significant issue than Cheryl leaving. You know, Marcus surrounded himself with people who tell him the same kinds of stories over and over again. You know, Facebook is just a mirror.

It doesn't have responsibility. All these things that we're complaining about have always been present. We're just showing them to people who don't. We don't play any role in this. We have no power. And Cheryl was a voice inside the company who said, Hey, we have to get in front of issues. We can't just be reactive. We can't wait for another story to leak. You can't wait for you know, another UN report saying we caused an ethnic violence incident, um, like what happened with men more um.

I worry that because we don't have Cheryl's voice inside of the company, that the number of senior leaders who raised these issues has has gone down in a meaningful way. Elections are coming up. What are you watching? What's your take on how Meta is handling uh this new election

so far? I'm deeply concerned about the upcoming election. UH. Other news sources, I believe in air Times have reported on how Facebook shrunk their election team from around three hundred people to sixty people UH later earlier this year. That's a huge deal. When I was at Facebook, I watched I worked in threat intelligence for the last eight months I was in the company, and I watched some catch over and over again, things like Russian influence operations.

There are a number of foreign nations, Russia, China ran even smaller countries than know that as an open society, as these unregulated, underinvested in platforms show like there's ways that they can go in there and manipulate our elections. And before Facebook was really trying, they were giving. They were giving, perhaps not the best they could do, but they were truly really trying to blunt those edges. And I can't imagine that they can do an effective job

with fewer people protecting our elections. I know you've been talking to lawmakers. We've got the American Innovation and Choice Online at from UH Senators Club Buchar and Grass. We've got Lena Cohn being more aggressive at the FTC. You have the Supreme Court looking at Section two thirty. What is one way the law could change to have the

most dramatic, potentially positive impact on big tech? In your view, I am a strong advocate for the platform account of the Platform Accountability and Transparency act UM because right now

we can't see behind the curtain of social media. We were able to push for safety features and cars or found in the partner of transportation, you know, reducing the fatality from automobile automobile accents by effectively three and a half times, because we could actually control cars, you know, we could crash test them, we could take them apart, we could understand how they were built and what what shortcuts have been made. Right now, we can't do any

of those things for social media. We can't crash test it, we can't confirm how it could be safer, so we don't know what to demand. So I hope they passed pat in addition to an equabahar. All right, we're to continue this conversation after a quick break. Former Facebook employee Turn whistle blower Francis Howgan to stay with us. I want to hear so much more, and especially I want to hear your thoughts on Elon Must potentially taking over Twitter.

Will be right back in a moment. This is Bloomberg continuing our conversation now with former Facebook employee Turn whistleblower Francis Howgan Francis, I want to get your thoughts on, of course, the biggest news rocking social media that is Elon Musk saying he'll take over Twitter. After all, what are the risks in your view of the world's richest

man owning such an influential communications platform. The fact that Elon Musk can make a decision to buy one of our public spaces, um and be able to unilaterally make that decision really shows us how vulnerable we are right now and listing critical pieces of civic infrastructure to private corporations now they're not even though they functionally work as large parts of our information ecosystem, we have no ability to influence them. They can be bought and sold by

anyone who has the money. Um So, I think they're a great illustration of how we've really put a lot of trust and a lot of um responsibility into the hands of a private company. He could own Twitter in a matter of days. Right before its from election. He has said he wants to reinstate former President Trump. What are the biggest concerns about that and and his approach to quote unquote free speech in general. M hm so, I think it was some big opportunities with regard to

how Elon Musk is approaching safety. So the fact that he came out across like straight off the bat and said we need to be worried about bots means he's talking to someone who's at least talking to some people who know what they're talking about. Because the number one threat to our elections are bots. You know, there are large influence operations that act as amplifiers for them for whoever owns those networks, and often in the case that's

foreign foreign organizations like Russia, China, um Iran. The fact that he's stepping in before the election is a big opportunity. At the same time, I hope he takes time to listen to the security and trust, trust and safety professionals inside of Twitter, because every single social networks different and they all have their own quirks and their own struggles, and so I hope he takes the time to really understand what those teems have done over time so that

we don't disrupt things before the election. Now, according to the SEC, UH and the Information also did a big piece on this, and you there's been a huge spike in the number of whistleblowers that have come forward since you came forward. One of them is Peter Zachco, a former Twitter employee who talked about the egregious um egregious

flaws in Twitter's own security. What do you make of the rise in these whistleblowers and the role that they can play in providing transparency where Congress has failed to regulate. There's if if if viewers take away only one thing today from the time that we spent together, it's the idea that more and more of our economy is driven

by opaque systems now. So you know, back when we had a more industrial oriented economy, you know, you could buy the products of those factories, you can interview workers who worked in those factors and understand what was happening. But now we have more and more systems where the important details all live on data centers. You know, all we get to see is our own strings were limited in understanding how these systems work, or like, what choices

were made? What are the consequences. Whistleblowers are only going to become more and more important because in the case of things like trust and safety online, you know, there are no academic classes you've been taken this today. You know, there's like a feel on content moderation of places like Stamford, but that's that's about it. We're reliant on professionals like like Peter Um to understand what the limitations are in these things. There are first lineup to us, and we

need to be protecting them. What do you think of TikTok? Is there a unique threat posed by TikTok? In particular? I'm particularly concerned about TikTok because TikTok is intentionally designed to be manipulated. You know, it's a system that originally originated in China. Um with the end. It's a system that's it's architected from the beginning with controlling what messages are distributed. There are it's they're famous um um. When you get there are control rooms you can go into.

We can see the most important, most popular content TikTok. And there have been scandals where things like if you're visibly gay or visibly disabled, your video has got taken down. We should be deeply concerned that, uh, this is a

Chinese company. You know, let's say China invaded Taiwan. I guarantee you we would not see any pro Thailanese messages going across TikTok, and because it's designed to be incredibly sticky, being incredibly addictive, Like you can't passively watch TikTok, like it polls you and you have to engage in order to get the next video. There's like a little hit

of dopamine over and over again. You know, it draws his kids, And so I strongly encourage us to look at do we want to have China having so much influence over our information environment, particularly for our children. Now, I know you've been on a year of public speaking engagements, testifying before other governments. You also moved to Puerto Rico. You got married, I moved. I moved two years ago. In profit booked two years ago, Yeah, two years ago. Okay,

so you were in Puerto Rico. Um, you launched this new nonprofit Beyond the Screen. Talk to us a little bit about how how has your life changed since becoming a whistleblower quote unquote, and do you have any regrets? Interesting? I think the biggest way in which my life has changed is you know, I can I can sleep at night, you know, like before I came out. Um, I think anyone who's ever had hold of secret where you thought other people's lives were on the line. Knows how hard

that is. And you know I had I had to get a new passport right about the time I left Facebook, and I had to get a new driver's license this year because I had lost my driver's license. And I looked at those two photos and I was like, oh, my goodness, I aged backwards ten years. Like that's not how it's supposed to work. UM. And so I have been so grateful for the experience over the last year

because I know how few public figures that are women. UM, I have easy life online and like I have opened d ms on Twitter, Instagram and no one harasses me. You know, I've I've I've only felt supported and I'm I'm so grateful UM to be able to give people hope about the idea that we can change social media. You know, we were going to figure out how to do this and we can do it together, all right. Well, thank you so much for obviously sharing your story with us.

Everybody check out Beyond the Screen, Francis Halgan's new nonprofit, UM Francis, thank you for taking the time. We appreciate it. Welcome back to Bow technology and Emily changing San Francisco Elon Musk wants to turn Twitter into the everything app. Here to explain what that might mean, are Ed Ludlow So, Ed, what kind of clues do we have about what he's

really talking about here? Yeah, you know we have clues and shameless plug I kind of put a piece out on Twitter this morning about some of the things Muskas talked about changing. We're certainly at a stage where there's more questions and answers, right. You see that reflected in equity markets. You know, Twitter is down after a ginormous game twenty four hours ago. Tesla down on concern Musk will have to sell down Tesla stock to fund this deal that he's distracted. But this is this idea of

X the everything app. And you know what Muscar has talked about in the past on stage and tweets is growing Twitter from a user base of around two dred forty million currently to one billion, And I think a lot of the street are looking for signs of what that means. If we bring up this chart and look at sort of Twitter's revenue growth relative to Tesla, Twitter's growth has been underwhelming, right, and there is hope that

Musk can inject some new ideas for Twitter itself. That's about opening up the algorithm, open sourcing it about dealing with the box issues, having a time limited edit button. But he's also talked about this idea that Twitter can be a one stop shop for other things, more video functionality, making it more akin, perhaps too a we Chat in Asia. You know, there's many more users in China alone using we Chat and various functionality on it than are using

Twitter globally. So I think there's a lot of optimism they can do that. But I go back to the discussion we discovered between Dorsey and Musk in those court filings and the text that were released as part of discovery. They want to enact changes and they felt that the only way to do that was to take the company private.

There's optimism on the street that will happen, and there's also optimism from the cell side that Musk will unlock the new functionality that will help Twitter's user based grow but also help its top line growth as well. The kind of wild card. Musk isn't interested in ad based model. He wants to kind of move away from that and monetizes in other ways. So it's gonna be really interesting. But again, let's take a reality check. M I think we're a long way away from knowing what's going on.

Am I going to Delaware? Are you going to Delaware? Nobody knows, We do not know, And boy, what I love to know if you and I are going to be in Delaware in two weeks? Okay, thank you? And I want to dig into this a little further with Lead Edge Capital founding partner Mitchell Green. Mitch, you know, I know you're an investor in Uber, which has aspired to this sort of super app idea. We've seen ten Cent really succeed at it. What do you make of Elon Musk's idea to try to turn Twitter into an

everything app? Look, Um, it's hard. There hasn't look we're not We don't only lub anymore. But we do own byte Dance, which obviously on the very popular TikTok app um. We do all. We were early investors in Ali Baba Group, which is obviously uh and then as well as Aunt Financial, which is building super ap Um. I think he's got his work caught out to him, but we're sure going to talk about it. And then three to five years, we're gonna know, Um, you know, did it work? Look Ellen?

Is that I totally agree that he can't accomplish this. What he wants to try to do is in a public company. Um, surely, I'm sure it's not. Having not spent a ton of time looking at Twitter, I'm sure it's not the most efficiently running business. I'm sure there's tons of ways he can fix it. It will take a lot of time. He's amazing at sending rockets into space and he proved the world wrong. Um, you know with his car business. He obviously started his career in payments. Um,

time will tell if it. Uh, if he's successful and turning around Twitter, I think he's It's it's it's a very um tall order. Uh. And it's not like Facebook and Bite Dance are gonna sit around and doing nothing while the well, you know, while he tries to do it.

So from a bigger picture, you know, I find it interesting that we could potentially see this massive deal, you know, him buying Twitter for forty billion dollars happened in the middle of you know, potentially you know, drop into a recession where we also saw Adobe agree to by Figma for twenty billion dollars and we're waiting for this big Microsoft Activision deal. What do you think about how the M and A landscape is keeping up pace despite the

fact that the economy is so bad. Well, it's a great question UM corporates around the world to have You know, these tech corporates Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cammazon, keV, you know, Ali, Baba, ten Cent have ginormous sums of cash UM by Oracle you can add in their step. You get in there at some point. I think we're gonna wake up over the next twelve to fift eighteen months and there's gonna be a heck of a lot more M and A than we've seen in a long time. I don't know

when it's gonna happen. Maybe I don't think it's starting yet. I also think you're gonna see a way of a biout activity to UM the problem. I think where the buyout by the by where the body WI Bio fund activity, propequity fund activity right now is pretty slow, and you've seen busted deals UM just because the credit markets are

not in good shape. UM just related you know, like there's a huge back, there's a huge we're not credit investors but there is a huge like log jam right now with the citric steal within these banks are going to take ginormous losses on them um and so like the credit markets for a lot of this activity is

super slow. So I don't know how much leverage that Twitter is going to take in this buyout and things like that, but like anything that requires lots and I think that's why you're seeing spreads lots of the potential deals like trade pretty wide because the credit markets are so uncertain right now now that it isn't impact strategic Okay, let's talk in a little bit about venture and the private markets. Venture firms seem to have a lot of dry powder that is piling up and not a lot

of places to put it. Some folks have told us they're waiting for evaluations to go down before they deploy anything. Of course, there are a lot of companies UM struggling and suddenly their balance sheets don't look so attractive to investors. What are you seeing? How are you evolving your strategy? As macro economic concerns remain good economy bad ecoun. I

think nobody knows where the economy is going. I read an I S I survey that said, like investors think that there's gonna be a recession in the crowd is usually wrong. It's not like we're all sitting around in February of three, you know, sorry, in February of twenty thinking, you know, COVID was gonna happen a month later in August of oh eight, like all the world's about ten because lemon Butter is about to blow up? Who knows.

Like the crowd is usually wrong. By the way, I'm probably myself in the crowd um in terms of like the venture landscape where growth equity landscape right now, and I think you could you can expand it to private equity lands escape or real estate asset landscape, just specifically in like the venture and like if you're thinking, like, hey, companies with fifteen million revenue to a hundred million revenue that are software and internet or fintech businesses, there's just

too big a spread between what the buyer wants and what like a private aquor venture funds gonna pay because it's driven by public markets and in companies right now for the most part. And I think the spread is already started to come down, Like it's definitely tightened up from today where it was six months ago. You just have to make the assumption that public private markets lead

public markets, are public markets lead private markets. And as a result, like tons of companies raise money in the back half of twenty one and early in twenty two, and like there raised like two years of money, and so like your company right now that raised still has a hundred million plus in the balance sheet. Your last route was probably done at too high a price. But like, you don't have to raise money right now. Fast forward a year, you might be intercession. At that point, you've

probably burned a bunch of money. We think it's going to take another six to twelve months for a lot of this stuff to work through, and that you know, the back half of next year in the twenty four will be super busy because then a bunch of these companies are going to raise and those companies that hit or beat their numbers might raise up grounds um, but those companies that miss their numbers will probably be raising

death rounds. But again, who knows, maybe not maybe pull the markets go back up, but if cops stay where they are today, which is kind of near historical averages. So what advice are you giving your portfolio companies right now. Great question. Don't panic. Um is one thing. Run your business like, you know, keep your best employees, keep your best employees happy. Um. You know, layoffs are not always bad.

You know, some of the greatest companies on Earth over year over time, and like laid off percent other people every year, like g was like, well long for doing it thirty years ago. Is trimming Like all these companies are run with too much fat, every company on every software company that's been funded with venture funding. So what are we telling them? That's a great question. I think we're telling them. Look, make sure you're you've got capital

for the next like eighteen months. Make sure unit your unit economics work so like you know, you don't need three or four year customer paybacks. You pay back and you know eighteen months are under um. But make sure you're invested in the future, like don't freak out like the great We're gonna look back in five or ten years from now and like great companies will have been created during this time period and you need to be bold.

You just won't want to be smart about it. And make sure you're not standing on the cliff, you know, with your pants down. If the tag goes out. Okay, don't panic, don't freak out, and don't stay on a cliff with your pants down. Those are all tensible pieces of advice. Mitch. All right, Mitch Green, thanks for giving it to us straight as always. Appreciate your thoughts on all of this, Thank you. Okay, Coming up, how the blockchain could help everyday people invest in some of the

world's most popular private companies in the world. This is Bloomberg time now for our crypto reporting. Today we're covering the so called tokenization of funds, which could potentially expand access to private markets to a broader set of investors. For that, I want to bring in Bloomberg Shanali, Bossi,

Shanali take it away. Thank you, Emily. You know, whenever I go around to investment conferences more and more, this gentleman named Carlos Domingo, the CEO of Securities, is often there and he is joining us now to talk about this because recently today really they announced the deal with Hamilton Lane, recently another deal with KKR. Carlos, when you're talking to these large fund managers, Hamilton Lane alone has

more than eight hundred billion dollars under supervision. How quickly are they starting to look at blockchain as a way to expand their investor base and bring more people into their funds. Any thanks for hiring me. I think it's been a journey for these asset managers. We started talking to them, you know, back into thousand eight into some of them like they care, and you know, they've been

basically building out the internal capabilities and the knowledge. And at the same time, the industry has evolved as well in terms of, you know, making locking easier to use, in terms of like you know, wal It's performance of the underlying blockchains, et cetera. And also more importantly the regulatory quality of what does it mean to actually recognize a fund on the blockchain and the COO can manage those securities and who has license to do that, et cetera.

So it's been kind of a journey. But I think at this point in time, and I think that the fact that Kker and Hamilton language are too massive privativity firms have decided to do that, I think it signals an inflection point in the industry where we're gonna start seeing massive adoption going forward. So let's say KKR as an example, because an everyday person can't really say, hey, let me put ten thou dollars into a KKR fund.

But now they're making a private acquity fund available through tokenization. What does that mean? How is it different from a traditional private equity fund? Is there a key separation between that and the normal fund that you would invest in

as a large institution. Well so as managers, as you said, I think they've recognized that, you know, they've been extremely successful building UM primarily going after institutional investors and drag networks individuals, and that they are you know, there is a new breath of investors that are individual investors. They

are much younger, they're digital, et cetera. That they don't have access to those products at all because of the structure of the products is the sign for institutions, etcetera. So they all recognize that they have to figure out

how to reach out to them. And I think they see, you know, blockin and organization as the most if you want modern and advanced way of providing this, you know, fractional ownership in a very efficient way, being able to track the beneficial ownership of the of the securities provide you know, our compliance as a servicing, etcetera. So they all that conversation usually is very easy, and I think what balls down later is about how do we do it, etcetera.

The fund itself is based similarities, slightly different in the sense that this is a feeder that hasn't slightly different structure, which we're trying to make it actually more individual investor friendly. So but overall you should expect that the performance of the organized version you know, very closely tracks the performance of the original privadiquity that was only available for institutions. Now, how much of this was even possible even five or

six or seven years ago. How much was this made possible because SEC rules have made it more possible for credited investors to invest in a wider array of funds. Well, the assisty rules to allow for more accessibility to create the investors haven't really changed significantly. They did some improvements, uh two years ago in terms of who qualifies and

a created investor. I think what also has happened is that more and more people are create investors, right because you you know, the wealth is growing in the in the United States and today is around thirteen point six million people that qualify as the created investors. That's more than ten percent of the households that collectively managed seventy

five tillion dollars. I think the issue was that the products that those susset management companies had, they were not accessible to these investors because they're not being served by the current however wealth management or reach the investor advice.

So that's what it begs the question, when you're looking at the opportunity to invest in a broader array of alternatives, do you think that crypto blockchain technology in particular can be used for more of these types of purposes, more than they will be used in the in the longer

term future for actual tokens. Actually, you know, if you if you look at the size of the of the space that we're looking at, this is we're talking about two lunch and twillions of dollars of real world assets and funds and you know, credit and real estate exec that can be organized and put into the into the blockchains. So that works anything else that you've seen in more like native digital assets if you want, like bacon or a theory. So I think that the potential of this

becoming the biggest thing in crypto is definitely there. Carlos Amingo, that's the CEO of Securities. Looking forward to your next day. I'll hope you come back to talk to us about it. I'm only definitely thanks for having me. All right, Actionality, thank you. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. SpaceX launching a manned crew of four on an assa mission to the International Space Station, including a Russian cosmo and the first Native American woman to travel to space. Are at Ludlow

back with all the details and what exactly happened today. Yeah, so we're deep into a twenty nine hour journey to the International Space Station. As you said, Nicoleman one of the crew members. In fact, the crew commander becomes the first Native American woman to go to space. So it's a landmark in that respect. She is a member of one of the Round Valley Indian tribes here in California.

But there was also a Russian cosmonaut on board. It's the first time SpaceX is carrying a Russian citizen, a Russian cosmonaut from US soil to the I S S. And as you know, and we talked about this week, some of the controversial tweets Elon Mosk, who is the CEO of SpaceX, made about the war in Ukraine and about his belief about it a negotiated settlement with Russia. But it's going to take them twenty nine hours to get there. Talk to me in the next show and

we'll see if they made it safely. But this is a kind of routine operation for SpaceX rights their fifth crew mission, the eighth or ninth human flight mission, and you know it takes the crew two miles above the Earth. So how does this fit into them the broader mission and the other things that SpaceX is working on. Yeah, I think you know what SpaceX is really doing in conjuncture in NASA is ramping up to go beyond the

International Space Station, right. You know, they're involved in the project more broadly to go to the Moon, which that relies on a different company's rocket Artemis, and as we know, that is behind schedule. We don't expect SLS an Artemis to launch until about mid November. You know, the next kind of big mission for SpaceX in kind of advancing

humansplace fright is Polaris Dawn. And you know, through the Polaris program that they basically are going to push the boundaries of what they're capable of doing in terms of how long and how often humans can go into space. But part of that is contingent on the development of Starship. And what we're really waiting on from SpaceX is news of when we'll get that orbital test flight of Starship,

because we don't know when that will be. And we've talked so much about Tesla and the impact on Tesla with e Musk taking over Twitter, unless so about SpaceX since as a private company, But what do we know about how folks SpaceX feel about Elon Musk taking on another big company? Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, Elon Musk has also been divisive within the ranks at SpaceX, right. There are many employees that do not believe in some of the things he said and disagree with some of

his actions. There is also an element of key man risk. You know, Elon Musk is a hands on manager and executive at SpaceX in much the same way that he is Tesla. You know, he often attends some of the key launches. He's often present in Hawthorne where space Sex is kind of headquarters and R and D Center is. So there is a question, you know, if he takes on Twitter what does that mean with respect to how

he splits his time between those three companies. But as we know, he is a man that spends a lot of time on a private jet, a lot of time on his phone, and doesn't sleep as much as the average human. All Right, Indeed, at love Low, thank you. As always, we'll be watching for the results of this latest mission. Um, and that does that for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Uh. Coming up Thursday, we've got Google Senior vice president of Devices and Services, Rick Ostrolo at

the company's Made by Google hardware launch event. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg