Musk, Twitter Bots, and the Future of Air Mobility

the company for more information. More on the threats to blow up billion dollar buyout this hour, plus the future flying cars are own ed Ludlow on the ground at UP Summit in Bentonville, Arkansas, where mobility tech leaders and

investors have gathered. He will bring us an exclusive interview with Joe b Aviation CEO later this hour, and my exclusive conversation with a firm CEO, Max Lection on the heels of Apple announcing it is offering a competing version of buy now, Pay later and update now on Twitter. And this Elon Musk saga Twitter shareholder has sued the

company in Delaware. John so Locke, who owns five shares of Twitter, wants to judge to force the social media platform to hand over internal files about spam and fake accounts. This has become a hot button issue in the Elon Musks four billion dollar potential buyout. Max Chafskin joins us now with more so this on the back of the Texas Attorney General also opening investigation into this spot issue. Max,

how are these going to potentially impact the deal? You know, when when this deal first started back in March and the Twitter executive team was so excited to have Elon Musk and all of his meme stock, you know, followers on board. Um, you know, we're seeing the flip side of that, which is these lawsuits, which of course are about real issues the bots, but also feel very much like follow on bandwagon, um, basically trying to find ways to back up the claims that Elon Musk has been

trying to put forward. And and it's probably important to say that these are claims that there's not a lot of basis for. In fact, there's there's not a lot of reason beyond you know, kind of Elon Musk's personal experience to think that Twitter's bought numbers are higher than that you know, five percent figure that they've been disclosing all along. Twitter says it's cooperating. Have they handed over

the information that they have or not? I mean, the the perception here is that they're trying to hide something, right, Well, and that's what that's kind of where Elon Musk's lawsuit has has or or his claims that are that he might be using to to to wheedle his way out of this deal. Where where he's landed, which is not that there are too many bots, but it's that Twitter is not, you know, disclosing properly. And this is going to be you know, a long, you know, a long dispute.

There's lots of room for interpretation here because of course, the way that Twitter could you know, prove that it doesn't have as many bots as Ellen thinks that it has would be to turnover it's user data. But of course you don't necessarily want to turn over all your user data, especially not to somebody who's been kind of continuously like tweet about the deal, uh since it was announced. So so you could definitely see reasons why Twitter we

want to hold back to some extent. What are you what do you think the odds are that this deal goes through? I mean, it doesn't feel likely, does it. And you know we're seeing, uh with that chart showing the big gap between the offer and Twitter's current share price. I mean it really feels like Elon Musk is doing whatever he can uh to either get out of this or at least at least get through it at a lower price. On the other hand, of course, we're seeing

Twitter saying, you know, we had a deal. You know, we're we're moving forward. So so I supposed it's possible that this could, this could close, although it doesn't feel likely at the moment. All right, now, you are also in the meantime covering Cheryl Sandberg's resignation from METTA. You still got a lot of people out there wondering why and why Now you're looking at her legacy not just at Facebook and Google, but on the Internet, saying that she has left us with a future of targeted ads.

Talk to us about her influence on the inter net at large. Yeah, and I think this has sort of been lost to some extent with her announcement that she was leaving. I think in part because of the way

that Cheryl Sandberg chose to make that announcement. In her big farewell blog post, she talked about, you know, in two thousand seven, when she first met Mark Zuckerberg, she thought of the Internet as being this, you know, funny little place for searching for you know, images, which of course is totally crazy considering that Cheryl Sandberg for years

had built Google into this advertising monolith. I mean, she was already a well known, very influential executive who had been known for basically building the entire ad words and ad sense business at Google, which are these personalized data driven ads. It's sort of like what we think of when we think of internet advertising. And Cheryl Sandberg was the one who was out there in front talking about how every business owner you know, in the country needed to to adopt this, and we saw a kind of

do the same thing at Facebook. And now as she kind of moves forward to her next act, I think this this kind of creates a complication because as her sort of biggest accomplishments, which was creating this kind of scaffolding of personalized ads that have generated you know, billions of dollars across two companies, you know, that's suddenly much

more controversial than it was before. It's it's both kind of a feature her her greatest achievement, but also maybe a vulnerability as she you know, moves to another job in you know, in business or politics wherever she lands in the future. Now, Apple has been adding more privacy focused features. We saw more at ww d C yesterday. This has negatively impacted hurt Meta and Facebook's business model. Do you think targeted ads are eventually going away or

really never or not anytime soon? Well, I mean, you know that's hard to say. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg thinks that that this is not the future. And I think if you look at you know, why are Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg this you know, wonderful partnership for fourteen years, extremely lucrative for both parties. You know, why are they parting ways now? I think part of the reason is that Zuckerberg, you know, is obviously focused on this metaverse thing,

which is going to be less dependent on advertising. And as you said, we have seen Apple um create, you know, basically throw up barriers for for companies like Meta to you know, to to track people across different websites. That's said, just because Apple creates these privacy rules, it's not going to stomp um websites and companies from collecting what's known as first party data. So that's data inside of Apple, data inside of Facebook and and these companies, these these

big tech giants Apple, Meta, Google and so on. They have tons of data that is never going away, and this and target advertising is always going to be a huge business. The question is, you know, is it the growth business that it once was? And I think that is to be determined alright bloombox, Max Chafkin, thank you. This first six months have been the weakest first half for I P O s in years? How long will the slow down enlistings way on Wall Street and Silicon

Valley and venture capital. I want to talk about all this in more with Initialized Capital General partner Alda lu Dennis Alda. Great to have you here in the studio. Great to be here, thank you. So we've seen Sequoia, hy Combinator, multiple firms come out with their version of

R I P good times. What is Initialized take? Well, you know, I think what we saw was the news sort of trickling down slowly to founders, and I would say about a month and a half ago, I was hearing from one of LPs about the slowdown and they were seeing it in their public markets and their books, their public books, and VC sort of got the memo from their own LPs. And right now I'm having the conversation with our founders about how it really is looking

like this as a downturn. There's still some denial in those ranks and um some defenses about how particular businesses may be able to withstand that. But initial initialized take is that yes, we are looking at a downturn, and we shouldn't panic. We're seed stage investors, so we're in the business of taking chances on founders and hoping that they'll figure out their business models and uh to conserve

a little bit of capital for the longer term. The big question is how the biggest the downturn going to be sure, and I don't think anyone has the crystal ball, but at least at the early stage, at scenes stage investing, what we're really hoping is that they can find a product that people want and that people will want to grab out of their hands. And at that stage we're always going to be in the business of taking those chances and pivoting quickly and trying to find something that

people watch. What are you seeing are fewer rounds closing right now or our founders saying I'm not even gonna try to fundraise at this moment. Absolutely, I've been advising companies to delay uh, you know, not to go out and rush and do a panic fundraise, because I think that vcs are exhausted from the last two years of really really bullish markets, and I know so many that are looking forward myself included to taking some time off

this summer. And so it's not a great time unless you were already planning on fundraising anyway, to sort of go out there and shake the trees for some more capital. So what should founders do if they need to extend their runway? Well, there's plenty of ways to cut costs that don't involve raising capital. Uh and certainly um there are leases that they may have that they could sublet.

We actually just put out a blog post about how it's possible to um uh even cut maybe say a small percentage of your staff or cut everyone back by one day a week and that would reduce t of uh of your labor expenses, which tend to be you know, seven seventy of the overall budget. That's and so you're

advising layoffs. Well, I wouldn't say we're advising layoffs. I think we were are advising to not panic, take time to prepare if you actually need to raise capital and prepare your story and think about some cost cutting measures that may not involve laying off, including UM cutting back on expenses like snacks, or cutting back on UH retreats for those companies that have gone remote, or cutting back on offices. But suggest saying that employee employers cut employee

from five to four days a week. That's interesting. I haven't heard of that before and it's certainly something should tell me more about that idea. Yeah, Avery, talking employees

across the board? Are you talking about contractors? I think it depends on the teams that are involved, But certainly, UM, I think that we could afford to cut a certain amount of days or cut everyone's salary proportionally, and the most employees would be happy to accept that because if it was looking them looking at the face of getting cut entirely, or of their workforce getting cut versus taking across the board pay cut, which my husband's company did

during the start of covid UH, they accepted it and they were happy that the cuts weren't deeper. What what company was that, I don't know if I can disclose on TV and but but they've they've come out of the they've come out of COVID just fine, as as many companies saying, So let's talk about what initializes looking for on the road ahead. I mean, are you still looking at are you are you still putting money out now or not? Have you also paused your investing? No,

I mean we're in the business of being optimists. Were in the business of looking company looking for companies, and I've had the benefit of being an investor and being in this market through a couple of downturns, and so absolutely we're still looking at pitches, We're still talking to founders. But I do think it's true that uh, I personally was very very busy over the last couple of years and looking forward to taking some time off as my

kids school ends on Friday. UM. So, when you look ahead, what are the sectors, the bets, the trends that you think are actually going to flourish in this market? Like, what are you most excited about? There's a lot of different sectors that I'm excited about. UM. I think that for one, I'm interested in the markets that appeal to UM you know, consumers that may not have received m software transformations in their businesses. Another industry that I'm interested

in is sort of beauty. I think that's the one that has stoed up well in historical downturns UM and generally appeals to more female or underrepresented groups of the population as far as consumer investments go. And UM, you know, I can't. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our funds focus on sort of crypto and with free technologies, which is one that we're still actively pursuing. Well, we've

talked to Gary tan had Nauseam, your partner about those. Um, thank you for sharing your view on all that's happening with US initialized Capital General partner Paul to luke Gannist. Well, they were once bitter rivals, but now Weymo and Uber are teaming up. The companies have just announced what they are calling a deep, long term partnership. Weymo will connect its autonomous trucking operation to Uber Freight. This comes just a few months after the companies ended a drawn out

legal battle over self driving technology. Weymo's trucking service, weymo Via, is expected to be running on Uber Freights network within the year and what timing. Both ubers EO Dark Casrashah and Waymo COO CEO to Quedral Mama Kana. We'll be joining us at the Bloomberg Tech Summit tomorrow. Mama Kana will be sitting down right here with me on the

show as well. Coming up, we're gonna get a status update on air taxis and exclusive interview with Joe by Aviation and our own ed Ludlow joining us from a summit on the future of transportation. ED. That's right, and we're on the ground, but we're also up in the air. We're talking all things that fly, all things that electric, all things that our mobility. This is Bloomberg. Let's go live now to the up summit in Bentonville, Arkansas. Our own at Ludlow live on the ground at this invite

only gathering of mobility tech CEOs, investors and startups. That is over one trillion dollars of assets in the room. He's joined out by a special guest. ED. Yeah, and it's one guy that everyone wants to speak to, Joe ben Vett, CEO of Joe Aviation. We're rubbing shoulders with all kinds of people here, right. We have investors, we have other CEOs, we have corporates that want to collaborate with CEOs, what are you trunting people about? What's your

message right now? So what's really exciting right now? This is an amazing event. It's a convergence of amazing CEOs and leaders from around the world were really focused on sustainable aviation and how do we reduce the impact on our environment from aviation. We're talking electrical vertical takeoff and landing flying. I call it flying taxi. Right, let's call it what it is, flying taxi. Where are you in

your cycle at job aviation for making this real? Because that's the other conversation that's happening here in the corridors right. A lot of this seems a long way in the future. Yeah, So we've been working on this for more than a decade. Uh, this is a really fantastic future and it's coming true today. We've we've been flying full scale aircraft since we've been certifying them with the f A since We've had really exciting news just today on additional progress with the FA

on our certification program. So the momentum is really building. So it sounds like you have a pretty high opinion of f a A and the work, the pace that they're doing. Things I've heard from others that are kind of frustrated with the FAA because of how restricted they are. But but you're happy we wear things stand from our regulatory standpoint, the f A has done an incredible job in with the industry over decades to make aviation the safest mode of transportation that we have. It's orders of

magnitude safer than any other mode we have. And that's really really exciting, and that's what d f a's mission is. So asking me about the aircraft themselves, where are we in production? What is the target for production over say the next few months and next year. So we've we've just completed our pilot production facility. This gives us the

ability to bruise tens of aircraft per year. Um, we are we have a close partnership with Toyota and right we are uh working with them on the plans for our Phase one production facility, which will be able to produce hundreds of aircraft per year. So what is the idea that you you work with Toyota to learn from their experience in manufacturing or you use their facilities. How does that clay out in practice? Yeah? So to it

is amazing. They're they're known around the world for being able to build very complex machines UH an incredibly affordable price with spectacular reliability. Right. And so when we looked at who we wanted to partner with to take this to the scale that it needs to go, beyond the scale that aviation has ever been done before, we selected

to it as there's really an ideal partner. I was chatting with Alaska Air CEO Ben Minoicucci earlier, and you know, he's an engineer just like you, and you know he has some skepticism about the use case for battery electric in long distance flying in you know, larger aircraft. What's your take on that, because you believe it's essential from a cobbon standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, absolutely right. And

he's absolutely right. I've been working on electric aircraft since okay, uh We've we've had an order of magnitude improvement in the specific energy of batteries over that period of time. But we have a real urgent problem that we need to solve today. Aviation is one of the highest climate impact things we do on a daily basis, right, and it's imperative that we reduce that environmental footprint and electric propulsion is the solution, but battery electric only moves you.

It's very valuable when you want to move across town or between cities that are close together. When we want to move around the planet, the solution is hygrogeneer electric hydrogen is three times higher specific energy than jet fuel. But that's why we talk about flying taxi. We have put emphasis on that. There's also the use case. I know that you're focused on the flying taxi, but the big name in town is Walmart. You know, they're interesting

towards me about other use cases. Delivery, it's a possible avenue, right yeah, so, uh, we're very excited about moving people across town. But there's also a really valuable use case in moving goods. And we have an amazing partnership with the DoD UH where we are significantly reducing their operating costs okay uh significantly uh, improving reliability and making it possible for them to move goods around on basis around the US people around basis in the US in a

in a much more efficient case. So that's that's a government relationship. That's that's could be lucrative for you. When are you going to be meaningfully revenue generating. You know, give me a real timeline for when this is a substantive business. So we are going to build this slowly. Okay, this doesn't We're not going to be able to turn it on in UH cities around the world on day one. Again. Today,

we're building tens of aircraft. Uh in the next few years, right, you able to have the capacity to build hundreds of aircraft over the arc. We need orders of magnitude more aircraft than that, all right, Uh in order to really bring this vision to life of being able to move people, allow people to live where they want to live, work where they want to work. And UH. This this is if you think of back back through the epochs of history, as we moved from uh walking to riding horses, to

the railroad and the automobiles. They reshaped our civilization. And you think it will do this time. I'm sorry to cut you off, jo Van. We we always need more time. That's Joe Ben beven CEO j V Aviation and and fascinating conversation. He's gonna take me for a ride, he's promised me. All right, You'll have to keep us posted on how that goes. Thank you. Welcome back to Bloomer Technology.

I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. One of the biggest threats to the United States could be its lack of modern technology inside the government, in part due to bureaucracy, from expanding AI capabilities for the military to beefing up cybersecurity. There's a very real concern that the US has fallen behind in the tech race. My next guest and others working in the Biden administration are trying to fix that. Joining me now, Kirsten Todd. She's the chief of Staff

at CEASE of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It's great to see you in person after interviewing you remotely for years. Um, thank you for joining us. Thank you. So look, there's this new Pentagon AI chief who wants to crack the bureaucratic inertia when it comes to some of these issues. How would you rate how modernized US technology to fight some of these threats is at this moment and how much better do you want it to be.

I think when we look at where we are, we're always assessing the legacy infrastructure, what we're working from, and where we're going. I think what's so critical about where the Biden administration is today is that you have leaders across the government, across agencies at d D the director of SISSIGE and easterly Chris Ingliss, the National Cyber Director, who all appreciate the value and the need to bring technology,

modern day technology into government. And there are so many efforts that have been legislated over the last year that really enforce and encourage that's spending to bring that technology. We know that government can't secure the nation or industry by itself. We've got to be working together to identify the right technologies and bring them in. And we've seen a lot of efforts that are actually creating the resources

and an enormous amount of money. Um SISSA has a budget now of over two billion with the newly appropriated funds to bring that technology into modernize government and to keep it evolving to where the threats are. Last I heard there was five hundred thousand open jobs in cyber security. Is that for real? And what are the consequences of that that all of those jobs aren't being filled? So I would even say that the numbers more because when we look how much more well I think when we

look at cybersecurity jobs. Everybody is part of the cyber workforce, and when we think about the accountability and responsibility that we have in cybersecurity, we all have that role. So I'm always hesitant to look at a specific number because I think we've they're all these positions. But it also pigeon fols what a cyber workforce looks like, and I

think we often think it's just math and science. But one of the things that we're very focused on at SISSA is building out a diverse workforce, which isn't just about racial diversity, gender diversity, socioeconomic but it's really looking

at diversity of thinking and aptitudes. And I'm really excited that we're going to actually be launching the second Neurodiversity Pilot in the federal government, where we're going to be bringing neuro diversity neurodiverse individuals into the government to create a more inclusive workplace. With the ongoing war on Ukraine, how would you rate the level of cyber threats from Russia and others at this moment? I think when we get what's happened with Russia and the invasion of Ukraine,

it's a marathon. We don't know where we are in the marathon, but this is a long term battle, and I think as we see this, we have to appreciate what we've learned from this experience so far. One thing that CIS launched last August was the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, which is about operational collaboration with industry, where we're partnering

in real time with industry. We set up slack channels, we developed a plan, we exercise the plan, and now we're working not just with our industry partners in the United States, but actually with the Ukrainian SEARCH, which is the computer Emergency Response team. They've given us information, we share that with our industry partners, and we're able to see a much better profile and threat picture than we've

ever been able to see before. Some critics say that the war in Ukraine has caught the U. S. Government flat footed when it comes to cyber and that we're seeing the shifting of responsibility to the private sector. How would you respond to that? So, I actually would disagree with that pretty strongly, because actually in November we put out something called yields Up in anticipation of a potential invasion, where we asked industry to do several things. We said,

lower the threshold for reporting to government. We said, empower your sissos, look at things like multi factor authentication. And what we've heard from industry systems across the boards that that was actually a very helpful tool because it gave them a heads up on not what the specific threat was going to be, but the need to create resiliency

within these industry partners. There's an effort to scale up and broaden membership in the j C d C. How is that effort going, and you know, what would you like to see the role of that part of the organization be. Ultimately, I think for those of us that have been in this space for so long, you know, the term public private partnership lost its meeting, and so what we're seeing with operational collaboration is this real time

threat and information sharing. So when we look at building this out, we're building it out to where the threat has been. So for example, with Russia Ukraine, we brought in financial institutions, We brought in the energy sector because those are where we had disconcerns about the threats. So I think this is one of these very deliberate, dynamic processes to bring in the right industry partners as we're moving out. So what do you think businesses still need

to do that they're not doing enough of yet. So what we'd love to see I think is important is to institutionalize the shields up approach with these efforts about lowering the threshold for reporting and being able to empower as systems. But importantly, I think we're at a place now where we need to ensure that security is innovation, that secure innovation is the next step where security is

a differentiator. We talk a lot about baking security into products that would go a long way right now, but the ability to see security as a positive effort. You know, if we start to see startups take on security as something that's an advantage and starting to make the business case for why to build this in, I think we'll see a lot of progress. And then I have to make a plug for multi factor authentication. We launched our

multi factor authentication campaign this week. We're calling it more than a password, just getting everybody to take that on. The only other piece that I'll mention is that organizations focus so much on their own security, which is critical, but now we have a responsibility with the increased threat landscape to really secure the digital ecosystem, look at small businesses and other elements so that we can raise the

resilience of both the public and private sector. All right, Kirsten Todd of SSA, thank you so much for joining us. Good to see you, Great to see you. I'm like, thank you, thank you. Kirsten is one of the many featured speakers at our Bloomberg Tech Summit tomorrow again. That starts noon Eastern nine am Pacific. We're gonna be talking about cybersecurity, gaming, travel, crypto e commerce, and a whole

lot more. Coming up, we'll look at crypto e t s. How are they faring against the wider crypto winter we'll discuss This is Bloomberg time now for our Crypto report and a look at crypto l A t f s, which are overrepresented in the industry's worst performing list so far this year. Are crypto contributional I bosst here with more.

Shanelle explain what's happening here. Yeah, what's interesting to me, Emily is that when you look at the decline in bitcoin, which is a little over thirty percent on the year, and you look at what's happening in the t F world, which are often tied to stocks tied to bitcoin, the performance is actually much much worse. Sometimes in case almost twice as bad. Bloomer's critic Gryfil found that the six worst performing non leveraged e t f s we're all

tied to crypto company. So what does that mean? Global X Blockchain down sixty this year, van Act Digital Transportation with the ticker d APP down sixt fix here again nearly double what you're seeing in bitcoin itself, and nearly double what you're seeing in the likes of Bitcoin Future ETFs like Beto, so b a t O so they again they're holding the likes of coin Base, Riot Blockchain,

Marathon Digital, Galaxy Digital. We've talked about this before. The equites that are trading alongside Bitcoin have seen a bigger drop off this year in many regards, and that's what you're seeing in the ts all right nationally. Thanks for that update. I want to talk about all that and more with Matthew Ball, managing partner at a Billion Co

and Matt Hogan, CIO at bit Wise Asset Management. Both of you are out with your own news together launching a new index fund along with multi Coin Capital Matthew, I'll start with you tell us more about this new fund and how it works. Sure, So, the goal with the new fund was really to provide qualified purchasers an opportunity to invest in a diversified, expertly constructed thematic index of crypto tokens forties specifically that are consistent with the

metaverse theme. Our goal was to take a look at the entire ecosystem, focus on bona fite liquidity tested, stress tested securities, and to provide yet another diversified access path to a multi trillion dollar investment opportunity. So, matt the fund is only open to qualified purchasers. How do you identify those? Sure? Great question, Emily. Qualified purchasers are individuals in the US that have five million or more in liquid assets. So this is one quarter of the market.

A big story about crypto is it's often cracked open the market in these areas before it's expanded. The metaverse is obviously a very exciting and very early opportunity, and that's why it's most appropriate for this qualified purchaser market. Eventually, we'd love to open it up more broadly, but that's where we are today. Now, Matthew, your metaverse e t F, which we've talked a lot about, is down almost so far this year. Yes, so much of the market is down.

But you know why should investors think that this et F is the right call? Well, I think the perspective on the met V e t F is it's about down year to date. That compares to about for the triple queues. A reflection of the fact that we are over indexed to growth companies commensurate with the expectation that over the coming decade. Goldman Sachs City Morgan Stanley estimate that between eight and thirteen trillion in annual GDP will come from this sector. That's fort of the digital economies

growth and fifteen percent of the world economy. Over Indexing to growth is often a good play. Year to date, it has proven not to be as relates to this specific product. I see it as yet another asset class that too many, ourselves included, believe is essential. I'm an early stage and late stage private investor. The e t F is designed for public markets exposure, and this product

is designed for the cryptocurrency and blockchain environment. So this is really about you see on the future, Matt, how do you see this fund evolving. Let's say five years from now. Oh, I think it's going to be a very big deal. You know, if you talk about the metaverse and you don't look one year out or two

years out, but five years or ten years out. I think a lot of people feel confident that our immersion in the digital world is going to increase, and that's going to mean that these assets, which are really the core infrastructure on which an open metaverse will be built, should grow, should become common names, and we should get more and more assets in the fund. So we're very early in this opportunity. I suspect five years from now this will be, as Matt said, a much larger asset class.

These assets will be much more familiar. But investors do have the opportunity to access them today. They're able to get in early on this decade long mega trend. So I would love to get your thoughts, Matt on on the crypto winter that just seems to be ongoing and colder on some days than others. We can't seem to Bitcoin can't seem to break out of this thirty thousand dollar route. You know, where is this going? How long does it last? Yeah? I think what we've seen is

a macro induced crypto winner. We've seen a rewriting of all growth investments, and that includes crypto. If you look under the hood, the sort of fundamentals of crypto continue to be strong. Venture capital activity is strong, Developer activity is strong, new project and launches are strong. Companies like coin based are doing interesting things. So underneath the surface, all this great activity is going on. We need the macro markets to normalize and then you'll see the impact

of that fundamental progress. I suspect we still have a few months to go before those macro markets normalized, but once they do, at least historically, what you've seen is crypto rebound aggressively because the underlying trends are just so positive, and that continues to be true in this market. You know, Matthew, it can be hard for investors to believe in in this view of the future, whether it is crypto or the metaverse. The Queen Jubilee was this week. We saw

a hologram of the Queen in a carriage. You tweeted about it. How do you see this as uh, you know, an indication of where the metaverse and some of these

future technologies are headed. The monarchy verse as you say, I think the most important thing is to recognize that the advent of graphics based computing using three D simulation to solve problems that previously we're outside of our reach, while also recognizing that younger generations, in particular I grew up using text My identity was reflected by an email

address and a message board user name. Slowly grew into more and more multimedia, more live experiences, and now we see, through roadblocks, Minecraft and others, an entire new generation gen Z that is reflecting themselves through three D objects, three

D avatars existing in three D space. The confluence of graphics based computing on the industrial side, mixed with societal and behavioral changes among younger demographics, boasted by new technological paradigms such as blockchain and imminent XR hardware, gives me confidence in what's around the corner. Holograms and holography, a field that we previously believed was just for Star Trek

and the Jetsons, is actually imminent. We're going to see it deployed globally in retail stores over the coming years. All Right, We'll be watching Matthew Ball Appillion co Matt Hogan, bit Wise Asset Management. Good to have you both. We'll keep our eyes on your E T F. Apple pay Later lets you split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments spread over six weeks, with zero interest and no fees of any kind. And Apple pay Later is available everywhere Apple Pay is accepted in

apps and online. That was Apple, they're officially unveiling it's new by now pay later service, Apple pay Later, allowing customers to split purchases through Apple Pay with four payments, interest free over six weeks. That announcement initially caused shares of a firm which offers a similar service to fall, but they've rebounded, joining me now exclusively in this week's edition of Teconomics is a firm CEO and co founder

Max leve Kiction. So Max is big question of what this means for a firm and other b n p L services. We want to know how big your mote is. A firm is lined up big merchants that are you know, very much embedded in what you offer, like Walmart, Amazon, Major airlines, Shopify. Will Apple be able to penetrate all these merchants? So, first of all, thank you for listening out our motes. I think they're quite significant, just as importantly, and that's really not why I'm not particularly worried about

Apple pay entering the biopulator space. They're focused on the convenience of a six week product, which I think is great, and there's plenty of competitors, and they should be worried. I think this spells certain level of concern for folks that are really specialized in this really short term product.

We spent ten years building out technology, data partnerships, integrations, really really good underwriting models so that we can offer consumers plans from six weeks to sixty months that is unique and different and special, and it involves not just data and underwriting, also involves capital partnerships figuring out how to manage capital markets in you know, rising interest r environments, etcetera. So we feel very very good about just to sheer

complexity of what we do protects us really well. That said, I'm genuinely excited for two reasons about Apple pleat or One. They chose the right thing by consumers. The no late fees, no gimmicks, no tracks, no fees of any kind. That's a really the right message. And it sends the right statement to the rest of the world. Credit cards, frankly have some real competition, and it's great to to hear companies powerful as Apple say that out loud, there's a

better alternative. And part two, I think just telling the world, telling the consumer that this is a thing, this is the thing that better than your credit card, including perhaps Apple's own credit card, is great. So we feel like this creates a really nice tail wind for US. But Apple does have a huge potential base of one billion iPhone users that has to be too big for even the largest merchants to ignore. How do you think about that?

And mean are you are you preparing for a cut of what you know a firm now gets and you know buy now pay later requests to go to Apple. You know, I think in the world of TRUSI or some maybe that's what I've been a concern. But just for context, in the US, buy Now Pay Later is I believe some five percent of e commerce and of commerce overall, it's really tiny. I don't think there's much concern. When Paypall announced their entry into the space, also was

the six weeks product. I think everyone was sort of pulling their breath a little bit. And we've stated at the time that this just isn't going to register in our world because there's just so much ground to cover. We're all competing with credit cards, and credit cards are competing with cash. There's a lot of room to grow for all involved. So no, not concern all. I have to ask about your broader view on the macro environment. Elon Musk says he has a super bad feeling about

the economy. Tesla laying off ten percent, Klara buy now, pay later competitor again, maybe not apples to apples, but they're laying How do you feel about the economy? Does a firm have any layoffs or hiring freezes planned? We're not just not laying off, sorry for double negative, We're actually hiring. Um I think laying off is you know, no comment on Eline, he's got feelings that I only

wish I could match. But I think in my world, when you feel the need to hire, that means you haven't done the necessary thinking and working in the past. And so we are hiring because we have real needs to grow the product, to build new things, to deliver value to consumers and merchants. Most importantly right now as the economy taters on. You know, Kuno's recession, down tourn whatever it is, it's not. You know, it's going to

get worse before it gets better. We have a mission to deliver spending power in a responsible way to consumers and to improve the top line and growth of our merchant partners, and we take it very, very seriously. We're gearing up for time to shine, for growth, for new products, new ways of delivering value, and that's why we need more people. There's certainly no no, no, no time to rest for us. We have a lot of words to do.

A keyword you just use there is responsible. We are hearing more and more stories of especially young people, getting in trouble with buy now, pay later. Are you doing more to warn some of your potential customers about the risks of taking out a number of small, different loans and the longer term impact it could have. I mean, as we've talked about, this has drawn the scrutiny of regulators. First of all, I mean I've said it before, but I'll repeat it. I think it's really important that the

regulators understand how this particular flavor works. I think as they dig in deeper, they will see that this is a better product than a credit card, simply because credit cards essentially allow you to refinance your own debts in perpetuity, which is not that different from paida lending. And so I think it's really really important that regulators see what by now pay lator can do, which I hollly believe is a healthier can shumor product. Too. It is really

important for consumers to understand when they're overextended. The underlying reason why we chose to never charge lafees was that we are permanently aligned with the borrower. If the borrower is late, banks and credit cards make more money. That is a bad misalignment of interest, especially in a downturn. We don't make a penny if consumers can pay us

back if they're late. We just have to find a way of not making the mistake again, basically, and so this lack of lafees is a really powerful motivator for us to design products and to approve only as far as we believe people will pay us back. And that's one side of it. The other side is you have to help people build their credit history. Firm has always reported with those industries laying us furnished information to the bureaus, specifically so that the consumers can build their history with

the credit bureaus. Majority of my competitors don't do that. I think it's a really really important social mission and we're very committed to that as well. So we feel like we're doing a lot to be on the right side here and we'll certainly do more. Exelection CEO and co founder of a firm, Thanks for joining us so quickly on the back of that Apple announcement. Appreciate hearing your perspective, and that doesn't for this edition of the show.

We've got a huge day tomorrow. The Bloomberg Technology Summit is happening. The theme is looking Forward. Andy Jazzy, the CEO of Amazon, Dar Kasra Shah he at uber too, Kedram Wakana of Weymo, the CEO of MasterCard as well