Tesla's Cyber Rodeo and China's Lockdowns (Podcast)

get this party started. We'll also get you the latest from Tesla's cyber rodeo in Texas, where Elon Musk inaugurated his newest factory. That's next, and the toll of China's lockdowns on its population and its economy. We'll talk about what it means for China's competitive advantage in tech and more later this hour. I want to turn now to the war on Ukraine. A horrific attack on civilians that

left at least fifty people dead, including children. Russian troops reportedly bombed a train station that had become a hub a critical hub for evacuations. Joining US now, our Washington correspondent Emory hoardered and Anemory seems like widespread condemnation here from the international community. Yes, certainly, as we've seen these

horrific scenes. We should note that Russia says this was they were not responsible for this, but all fingers are pointing to Moscow when it comes to this missile attack on a train station. Emily, as you say, this is where civilians are using to evacuate from eastern Ukraine, in the dawn Bass region specifically because you do have Russia changing course and really focusing their troops on eastern and

southern Ukraine. So a number of capitals around the world are drawing condemnation at Russia for for this attack, including in Washington. The President United States took to Twitter and had this to say. He said, the attack on the Ukrainian train station is yet another horrific atrocity committed by Russia, striking civilians who are trying to evacuate and reach safety. He went on to say, as many leaders have that

they will continue their security assistance and weapons deliveries. And we should also note Ursula vander Lyin of Europe was in Kiev herself today and she said Russia should expect rolling sanctions. So let's talk about those sanctions. What further sanctions. Could we see out of this, I mean, what is their left to sanction at this point? It's a great question.

So we have the European package they finally pretty much signed on the dotted line, and the biggest component of their fifth package coming from the EU is a ban on Russian coal imports. So on one hand, it's not a lot of money Ursula vunder Lyon put it about four billion dollars, but it does start to target something that for many European countries was going to be off limits,

and that's Russian fossil fuels. Then you have the Polish ambassador saying today in Brussels, we already preparing work to target Russian oil, Russian natural gas as well as nuclear fuel. This Emily is still the lifeblood and the lifeline Putin has left in terms of the money he's able to get from those sales. Boombrom Economic says about three billion dollars this year alone they will make on sales of commodities.

Now we're also following the aftermath of this cyber attack, again reportedly from Russia on Finland as they weigh NATO membership,

talk to us about the significance of this. So This comes at a time when really we're seeing the polling shift in days in Finland about whether or not and they've always kind of played this keep the door open of what if they were to join NATO, And as they are discussing this out in the open, especially in UH finished media as well as Zelenski, the President of Ukraine is addressing UH Finnish lawmakers, do you have this cyber attack on a number of their government websites. I

was literally just talking to it. I was just looking at my phone seeing what his final response was a Finnish official who said they actually are used to these types of cyber attacks and also they are preparing for more, and potentially this is something they need to be preparing for as they discuss whether or not they should join NATO. Russia has made it clear Putin does not want Finland, does not want Sweden in the NATO alliance. All right, bloombergs Emory Harden, thank you so much for all of

those updates. I do want to switch heres now and get to a story we've been covering all week, and that is elon Musk. Thursday night, the Tesla CEO held a rodeo event at the opening of his newest factory in Austin, Texas. Let us deliver al first Tesla cars made in Texas at this opening, which felt more Hollywood

than Silicon Valley. Must announced the production plans around three products that have fallen well behind his original schedule, joining us now Bloomberg, Shan O'Kane, who was at the event in person and Sean looked like a lot of enthusiasm there from the attendees, including I think I saw a

video of people crying, Yeah, you're right. There is a lot of There are a lot of fans and owners there, but also a lot of employees who I think, we're really happy to see the hard work that they've put in over the last couple of years come to fruition with these first model wied that were built at this factory, and honestly just the factory itself. The fact that they were able to get this up so quickly in such a short amount of time is really something that we

don't really see too often here. It's something Tesla did in China with its factory there. But so I think that was all of those things played into overwhelming some people. So does Tesla need this factory to keep up this tour and pace. Yes, frankly, I mean they still have some room to grow in China, and that's been a huge boon to them. The China factory is really the main reason why they've been able to grow their valuation and grow their uh, their deliveries honestly as much as

they have over the last two years. But they are nearly a capacity at the factory in Fremont, California, which Elon Musk has said that they plan to try to find a way to expand, although it will be tough for them to do that. They don't have a lot of land there. Um. One thing they do have here in Texas is a lot of land. They bought far more land than even this massive factory is taking up right now, and so they have a lot of room

to grow. And even the graphic that he showed last night of the factory and their plans for it includes i would say probably about a quarter of it for future products. So even though they are planning to make up to model wise a year at this factory, there's going to be a lot more room to produce even more here if they can get these new models like the Cybertruck and anything else that Elon Musk has a

sleeve out of the design studio and into production. Elon Musk has may have it of throwing these launch parties. I've been to some of them at the Fremont Plan. But what does he get out of an event like this is is this just you know, his version of marketing? Yes, simply yes. But there are a couple of different angles that I think they play with events like this. One of them is simply really just sort of appeasing the people here who have been following along and really helped

facilitate this happening in the first place. There was a lot of kudos thrown out to local government officials. Austin's Mayor, Steve Adler had been invited, although I don't think he attended because he came down with the COVID nineteen over the weekend. They were Travis County officials. There um a lot of local schools and workforce development groups who are helping fill the sort of recruiting pipeline into the factory.

So it really sort of helps acknowledge all of the work that those people have put into it, while also setting them up for a good relationship moving forward. Uh, and then on top of that, it's really just, you know, this is part of what feeds the beast of Tesla. You get these sort of quarter the events or maybe once or twice a year, and they sort of feedback into the excitement. Even though he didn't really say too much, that was all that news worthy compared to some of

the other speeches given in the past. Meantime, a different reaction to Elon Musk at a different company, and that is Twitter. We're hearing that some Twitter employees not happy about Elon Musk joining the board, certainly not crying in jubil Asian Um CEO Pagara says he's going to address the issue next week, potentially with an a M A with Elon Musk himself. What are you hearing about this?

I mean, it's from what we've understand about the reaction that the Twitter employees has had, it's, you know, in some ways, it's kind of nice to see because we don't see people say no to Elon a lot, at least within his orbits. I mean, people obviously have strong opinions about him and negative opinions about him, but within the companies that he runs and among the sort of

executive ranks that he operates. We don't see a lot of pushback, at least publicly, and so to hear that the employees of Twitter, we're sort of standing up a little bit and saying, hey, you know, Elon's behavior is very sort of public behavior on this platform, and it's not really been in line with sort of the values that par has been expressing he wants Twitter to carry forward.

And so they have some concerns about what that means and what it means for the platform's future to have someone on the board and controlling so much of the company who seems to be able to operate outside the bounds of what they really want to allow on the platform. Okay, well, certainly a lot of unanswered questions. They're Bloomberg, Shaan, Okaine, thank you. I'm here in my apartment in Shanghai in the last day, suppose the last day of my lockdown,

but it looks like it's going to be extended. And my biggest concern right now is food. Um running short of everything, And I want to give you a little peekin sign my refrigerator. Mean, it looks so bad, but I got I got tell you a lot of stuff is pretty old. Um, we've got milk care. The exploration data is April one, The Brent's expliration date is March thirty IF and today is April six. Thank god, I still have a little bit of wine because I think

I'm going to need it. So the biggest concern right now for a lot of people is how to get food. Um. For us, um, we have to order online through this one grocery app called Dingdo my Chid. Basically in the evening, usually after nine pm, you go into the app and see what's available. As you can see a lot of food,

meat and vegetables already gone. The big problem seems to be we can't get groceries delivered to our apartment because there's a lack of drivers delivering food in general because of the lockdown, The number of cases continues to rise in Shanghai and Jialing Province. Both areas are struggling with the economic and personal ramvoications of the lockdowns, with food shortages, a lack of medical care, and shut up main factoring

plants bringing misery to residents. Chan remains a hotspot for the current flair, despite in definitely extending a swooping lockdown of its toy. Five million people originally intended to be carried out on two parts. The rising number of infections led to a continuation of the restrictions in the eastern proportion of the city that were initially expected to be lifted last week. So one question that I'm getting asked is why didn't I, uh why and I stocked up

on more food? Well, well, first, as you know, we were told that my face A lockdown would last from Friday through Tuesday, and it's already Wednesday. Didn't know that it was gonna be extended. Obviously I could have gotten more meat and vegetables, but even before the lockdown it

was kind of hard to find. You know. I still have a lot of instant noodles, spam and the odd carrot, the odd carrot, bloombergs allen one there under lockdown, Like many across Shanghai and Greater China, they submist hearts government measure to contain the country's latest COVID outbreak. It's left people struggling to eat, get food, essential supplies, and it's putting even more pressure on an already stressed supply chain.

Let's talk about all of this and more with on your man Well, executive director of the Aspen Security Forum. On you, that's just one example of the human toll this is taking. What's your take on this at scale? What this means for China, what this means for its economy? Yeah, nice to see you, Emily. It means that China's zero COVID policy is coming apart at the seams. You know, you saw Q four of one. The growth rate for Chinese economy was about four percent. That's not as high

as they wanted This year. They think they're going to grow at five point five percent. But if they keep having these extreme lockdowns, and I thought Alan's story was harrowing, I don't think you achieved those kinds of growth rates. Now, we know lots of American firms who are delivering food to their employees for exactly that reason. And of course it just hits all of the supply chains again, the lockdowns, the road closures, they're affecting factories as well. Tesla and

Volkswagen for instance, they've suspended work at factories there. Do you see this having a long term impact on China's ability to attract global businesses global manufacturing. Yeah, maybe not in the in the long term, but certainly in the medium term. You know, it's very hard to run a business in China if every couple of months it's going to get shut down again. You talked about the factories. You know, Shanghai Disneyland is closed again, Fox, con Union,

Microns on. All of these suppliers to big American tech firms are once again shut down, which makes it really hard. And I think it just accelerates the tech decoupling you see already with Western firms increasingly saying, well, maybe we should look to the rest of Asia, or we should diversify, not entirely away from China, but we need to hedge our bets a little bit. And I think this is

going to accelerate that trend. There's already been a lot of pressure on Chinese tech companies because of the crackdown by the Chinese government on tech companies in particular. We've seen the Chinese government perhaps trying to dial some of that back, saying they're going to give US regulators more information about these companies. But do you see this having a more sustained impact on China's tech world and its competitiveness. It does. It has a huge impact, but not just

the lockdowns. It's sort of everything is swinging in the direction of decoupling. I mean, you saw these huge crackdowns on Chinese tech last year. You and I talked about them, you know, um delisting people telling people they can't do business in the United States under certain circumstances. And then of course it's coming from the U S to You mentioned the new SEC rule, which basically says, you know, if you're a Chinese company, you've got to follow US

accounting principles. Uh, they've got three years now to comply. But other than that, if you don't comply, we're going to delist you. So you just see this trend happening in every direct and I think Emily will continue. Now we still haven't seen a distinct steer from China and its position on Russia, and of course China's under a

lot of pressure from the international community. What do you expect to happen there and how do you expect that to influence the US relationship with China and China's relationship with the rest of the world. Yeah, it's it's such a good question. It's been really interesting to see because I think Shijin Ping and his team were surprised by how brutal and gruesome Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been,

and there was vacillating for a week or two. Now the politics of China has come out solidly in favor of Russia. If you look at what's censored on the Chinese Internet, anything pro Ukraine is censored and taken down immediately. All of the Russian propaganda gets through. So on the political side there with the Russians. On the business side,

not so much. I mean, so far, we've heard anecdotally that all of the big Chinese tech firms are complying with Western sanctions on China, as are the big Chinese banks, even though their government is saying, hey, you should be doing what you can to support the Russians. I mean a perfect example is d D, the big taxi service, the sort of uber of China, announced right away they were closing in Russia, and then after pressure from the

Chinese government, they started back up their Russian operation. So what do you think this means quickly for the longer term? Then, you know, is it is it status quo for China's relationship with the rest of the world, or could we see a shift? Yeah? I think China will stay just below the level where they're going to be subject to secondary sanctions from the US and Europe, and so they'll keep playing this game. They'll probably buy a little bit

more oil from Russia. They'll try to help their Russian friends as much as possible without really running a foul with what the rest of the world wants. Because if you remember, Emily, this is the year that hijin Pain wants to be voted forever leader of China, so he needs things to be fairly calm, at least until the fall. All right, Anya want Manuel always appreciate your analysis and insights. Here,

executive director of the Aspen Security Forum, Thank you. Amazon employees in Bessemer, Alabama, voting night against forming a union. That result is now being challenged. A labor group claims Amazon interfered with the election by prohibiting employees from talking about the union during work hours or posting about it. Joining us now Bloomberg's Spencer soaper Spencer, what exactly is

this labor union expressing here? Yes, so they they're saying that Amazon was inconsistent with its rules, that it it allowed anti union employees to discuss you know, their uh reasons for not wanting the union in work spaces, and that they could display anti union literature, but that similar things done by employees or on the pro union side were discouraged and prohibited. Um, and that some people were even fired, you know, for for being pro union. So

that's the beef on the union side. Even though Amazon appears to have won this, there's still several votes, you know, several hundred votes that were disputed that that could be counted and could uh potentially tip the tide of the election the other way. And so in to preempt that, Amazon actually filed its own own objections as well, basically saying a lot of similar things as the union, so or just in a lot of illegal manoeuvering. Right now, this vote was already a do over. I mean, how

likely is it there could be another do over? Yeah, that's a that's a great question. How many How long is this gonna go on? Um? So time will tell, especially uh if those challenge ballots um make a difference, because that first vote was quite decisive, I mean, the the union lost handily. Um. But the National Labor Relations Board said, look, Amazon, you played dirty pool. We gotta do it over and now the gap is narrowed significantly. So okay, I think the first thing, wat hang on

contested ballots, change things, Spencer. We're just getting a headline that Amazon has challenged the union win in the New York election. Remember the result was reversed and that's election that happened the very same day in New York. Now Amazon, Amazon is challenging that quickly. What does that mean? Yeah, I mean it was expected. Um, there's gonna be a lot of legal maneuverings and things are moving very fast

right now. But Amazon is basically trying to argue that the turnout was very small in in that election, and that a majority of workers did not vote for the union. That really you had a small, a small voter turnout, And they're alleging that the National Labor Relations Board actually tarnished this proces tess by getting a little bit too deeply involved and workers may have felt like the like

the government was actually advocating for the union. Wow. So now we're looking at both folks being challenged, but for different reasons. Bloomberg Spencer, soaper who covers Amazon for a Spencer, I'm sure you will keep us up to date. Thank you, scared dragon God said, actually, Juan, there, it is the SpaceX Falcon nine rocket taking off at eleven seventeen a m. Eastern Time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in

its first private mission to the International Space Station. Let's bring in our own ed Ludlow now who attended the launch, to talk about just how big a milestone this is in the private space race, and bring us the details from the ground. How's the crew right, you know, it was just another flawless execution by SpaceX, the cruel. Well, after about two hours aboard the capsule in that orbit or the orbits were path they took off their space

suits them and they had their first space meal. But as you know, it's a twenty hour trip from here in the KPE up to the International Space Station. They're due to dock at around nine thirty a m. Eastern time on Saturday. And everything went as planned, you know, as you know, I sat here in the thunder and lightning on Thursday night, but the weather really clear cleared up, some high pressure brought coal dry air into the equation and space X were able to lift off on schedule

the Friday morning. So let's talk about what's going to happen on the I S S. So they're gonna meet Russian astronauts. Yeah, yeah, I mean this has been the question, right. The backdrop is the tensions between the United States and Russia because of the war in Ukraine, and there are three Russian cosmonauts aboard. I spoke to a number of NASRA fish who who officially have told me that if the Russians invited the private astronauts for dinner, they could go across the that side of the I S S

and have dinner. But there's bigger issues here. Here's what Bill Nelson, administrator of NASA, had to say. Even with the terrible things that Vladimir Putin is putting on the Ukrainian people, I expect the professional relationship between astronauts and cosmonauts to continue. The point that Bill Nelson made there is the same that CAFFE leaders made on Thursday, that whatever is happening down here on Earth, in space, there's peace and there is a professional relationship between NASA and

Russia's space agency ros Cosmos. And frankly, none of the officials I spoke to thought that that was going to change in the nearter So give us the bigger picture here, and ed axiom isn't just about sending rich people to space, though they did confirm with US yesterday and they sink at past million dollars. What are a bigger ambition to Yeah, your spawn m you know, part of this Axiom plan is to send their own private International Space Station module up.

That module attaches to the existing International Space Station and they develop it and upgrades over time. Because as you know, the I S S has a shelf life. It's due to be deep decommissioned in one and then de orbited to crash into the ocean somewhere here on planet Earth. So this is about NASA passing the bat on to

the private sector. Cost NASA four billion U S dollars a year to maintain an upgrade I S S. And what they want to do is have the private sector take on that burden, that cost burden, but also the development upkeep burden. So in the future we have private or commercial space stations in lower orbit. That frees up money for NASA to do other things in And as you know, the big priority for NASA is the Moon

and then Mars, and what about space sex itself. We just saw elon Musk and Naguri, a Tesla factory in Austin. He's very busy, it seems, with his new Twitter board membership. You know, what does this mean for for the SpaceX part of Elon Musk's empire, you know, the the Action mission and being here at the Kennedy Space Center over the last few days has been interesting because SpaceX is not preoccupied with these kind of smaller objectives in their eyes of getting folks to and from Earth to and

sactional space station. You know, they have these contracts with NASA. They were just awarded more nations by MASSA. But as you know, Elon Musk has his sites set on Mars. They're developing the next generation of launch system in Starship. They hope to test an orbit or test of Starship at some point in the next six months, and their ambitions are greater than that. But in the meantime, this is another example of SpaceX dominating the market for launch

to orbit. You know, they account for eight of the payload that is sent from Earth into space. Right now, we talk a lot about Russia and China as space superpowers alongside the United States. Really it's SpaceX that dominates this market. And alongside satellite launch with Starlink and taking satellites with third parties, they're making money off this. We

think this is a good money maker for them. And as we know from your interview on Thursday, right, Axiom is sold out for a X two x three and they're probably going to be sold out pretty soon for a X four. So it's an interesting dynamic for SpaceX

that has much bigger picture designs. All right, Ad Ludlow on the ground in kick Canaveral, Florida, and thank you so much for your coverage from there and for the launch throughout the day time for our crypto report now and Bitcoin ending the week on a down note, trading lower for the fifth consecutive day, even as Bitcoin one of the crypto industry's biggest conferences, is drawing to a close in Miami. I want to bring in our crypto contributor,

Sali Bostic now for more Snali, what's your read on this? Well, there's a few things here, Emily, and we've been talking about it all year. What is the catalyst? What is going to drive bitcoin higher than not only this year, but where it was last year. We have five straight days, as you said, of declines. We are back down to forty two thousand, six hundred or seven hundred dollars or so. Remember throughout March we got a little higher than that.

We did get to forty seven thousand, touch forty eight thousand, but you know, we are above forty so we have hit kind of a floor here. There's not that same fear of things really going much lower. There's a lot of conversations about legitimizing the asset, more companies using the Lightning network. That was a huge story this week. But at the end of the day, it's not just about the same people who are picking up bitcoin the Lightning

network at a marginal rate. This is going to be about countries and companies adopting Bitcoin at a much bigger rate as the asset class stars to mature. All right, Shanali, stay with us. I want to bring in our next guest who is actually joining us from Bitcoin two in Miami block Stream CEO Adam Back. Adam, thanks so much for joining us. You've been a player in this industry for such a long time, and I'm so curious what's the mood there after the many many years you've been

in the crypto industry. And how much do you think is changing in this moment. Well, it's a much bigger conference for bitcoins than I've seen before. I think something like people present very big venue, high production values. Say, it's introducing bitcoin to many more attenders and a wider audience. You're working on something new and interesting with block and

powered by Testla Solar, a new mine. Talk to us about you know, what are the details where it will be located, what you'll be doing there, and what it means from an energy perspective. Right, So it's a joint projects between block Stream and block formerly known as Square and Tesla is building the solar infrastructure and also providing the Tesla Bigger Pack which is a battery, so it's actually solar and battery so that it runs, you know,

not just during the day. And what that means for the energy infrastructure is that it's a first step for us to prove about the thesis that a number of people have put forward and we thought we would go from theory to practice and actually build it alongside the block and that is that um bitcoin mining can actually help make new power projects, nubrem power projects more cost effective, make them more profitable and effort easier to finance and

physically build the energy infrastructure for the future. Adam, how do you feel about the ability of bitcoin to become more energy efficient, especially as the merge comes for theorium

and the ethereum is really so focused on energy efficiency. Yeah, I think that's actually mistake in the sense that if we look back to gold historically, um society looks for hard money, and what what made gold a good money was the relative scarcity and this sort of inherent cost of extracting more mining more that comes with scarcity, and so something which doesn't have any inherent scarcity effectively becomes similar to a share in a company managed by some

officers of the company, or like a fear currency like US dollar or the Euro, which is managed by a monetary policy committee. So I think it's very difficult to imagine that kind of currency, you know, the old coins and so forth, reaching global acceptance as a as a new digital gold. You know. I'm also curious you mentioned your work with a block I'm wondering what you think.

We interviewed also Elizabeth Stark of Lightning Lads. Jack Dorsey is a backer there for her her for her company and I'm wondering what impact do you think Jack Dorsey overall is going to have on the adoption of bitcoin across the world. Well, it's pretty interesting. I think sometime last year he made the observation that he thought the most important and useful place for him to use his time on Earth is with bitcoin, and so you know, promptly he stepped down let's see of Twitter and actually

devoted his energies to two bitcoin. So I think that's very positive. I want to double down, Adam on your thoughts on a Theoryum, your work was in that original white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto all those many years ago. If you're not bullish on etherorium, then how do you see the crypto market actually playing out? Like where are

we in the next ten years? Um? Well, I think bitcoin is the investival asset class, and the other sort of smart contract cryptocurrencies of which there are many competing um, are more like startups or services and not not really an esset class. I think personally that the utility token concept is is mispriced and that the value, the fundamental

value of those tokens should be much lower. So there's a an investor called John Feffer, who wrote an analyst report on this topic and just just looked at the business economics from an x KKR investor perspective of such chains and the fundamental business value of the utility tokens and concluded that they should be sort of just in time boughts. What doesn't make sense economically to keep inventory.

So I think the valuations are sort of out of kilter with the fundamental value and sort of driven sort of kept afloat by speculation basically. Interestingly, also want to talk more about the energy efficiency aspect of this, because the Tesla Magapac is powering a bitcoin mining facility at a box stream mining site. What impact do you think

Elon Musk will have on the future of bitcoin moving forward? Well, well, I think he's famously a quiet bitclin I believe he said himself and through a number of his companies, So he's certainly a big holder and long time holder. And you know, we're excited to um bring Tesla into into the mining space via the acquisition of the Mega Pac

and the the installation by Tesla of the solar arrays. Adam, I'm creous what you make of the evolving relationship of Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey given you know Ellen, you know, both of them playing a big role in the crypto community, crypto Twitter huge community, and Elon Musk now joining the

board of Twitter with Jack Dorsey support as the largest shareholder. Yeah, I mean, actually I'm quite positive on Elon joining Twitter's board because there was some unfortunate incidents during the last few years with Twitter's kind of content mediation deep platform NG and that kind of thing got pretty controversial, and I think Ellen's views on on that direction that's similar to my own. So I'm hoping for him to be

a positive improvement, uh to Twitter. Adam, you mentioned earlier about the valuations that we're seeing in bitcoin today artificially held to where it is right now. So where do you think it goes to the end of the year and what we'll take it there? Um, Well, it's it's kind of surprising to me in a sense that it's already not a lot higher because the many of the on chain metrics and the news flow you know, throughout

the year are sort of bullish indicators. You know, the number of coins net coins moving off exchanges, which indicates large buyers buying and storing the number of coins left on exchange to be the pool of potentially bought coins, the news flow of new ETFs in various countries, new financial institution providing bitcoin rely it's financial instruments. Um, so

there's a lot of kind of positive news flow. And I think that, uh, you know, the current bitcoin price ranges to do with similar factors that affect the wider market I Ukraine and the COVID's economic effects. And say, for Blocks Room CEO Adam Backed, pleasure to have you as always along with our very own Shinnelle BOSSI thank you both well. Also to come out of the Bitcoin conference, billionaire entrepreneur Peter Tele called Warren Buffett, Jamie Diamond, and

Larry Fink members of a finance gerontocracy. He said they're opposed to a revolutionary youth movement quote unquote that embraces bitcoin. To'll blame the finance titans for the digital currencies failure to hit a hundred thousand dollars or get even close. For the third year in a row, Apple will hold

its Annual Developer Conference w w DC virtually. That means developers and Apple watchers will need to tune in online to watch the introduction of iOS sixteen, Watch OS nine, t v O S sixteen, Mac OS thirteen, and other new software and services. The one new wrinkled this year is that Apple will allow a small number of students, developers, and members of the press to watch the keynote videos from Apple headquarters. Still, all developer sessions and other aspects

of the conference will be online only. Despite its virtual nature, I'm still expecting a fairly jampacked conference. I'm expecting a fairly significant update with iOS six teen, code named Sydney, including changes to notifications. There also should be major fitness tracking and health upgrades for the Apple Watch. But for those expecting some major iOS design overhaul, the last being about a decade ago with IO seven, I wouldn't hold

my breath at least for this year. Apples also likely to launch some new Max in the w WDC timeframe, and this may include a major revamp to the Maple Gair. In fact, that new Air will be the biggest upgrade to the product in its history. Apple has a history of announcing new Max at the conference, including when it introduced the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon two years ago.

I'm also still expecting Apple to hold off on showcasing it's mixed reality headset hardware until later this year or next year at the earliest. Still, maybe we'll see a preview of some new A R and VR software to get the show rolling him Mark Erman, This is power On. Don't forget. You can subscribe to Mark's weekly power On newsletter Bloomberg dot com. Well sell robin Hood. That is the message from Goldman sacks. It comes less than a year since robin Hood's much hyped I p O, which

was led by Goldman. The news caused the stock to sink even lower, down more than from its post ip O record high. For more on what it all me as, I'm joined by Bloomberg's Anti Massa. So why is Goldman, of all companies saying cell now? So it's a bit of an awkward situation because Goldman did lead the robin Hood i p O. But Goldman's analysts have downgraded now

the stock um to a cell from neutral. And what they said is that the path to profitability is looking pretty fraught for robin Hood and it would take a lot for this company to achieve profitability by So what's changed since the I p O? Has something gone wrong. The retail trading environment has changed a lot. Even in the past year. We saw an enormous boom in retail trading that happened over the course of the pandemic and really escalated during the game stop run up that happened

in early one. That was all happening in the lead up to Robin Hood's I p O, which happened in July of last year. What's happened in the intervening months is retail trading activity has continued to taper off, and now retail trading is making up more like sevent of equities overall market volume, where you saw it higher more like two percent in those feverish days of the MEME

stock run ups. So robin Hood's contending with this question of how it will earn money beyond just sheer transaction volume, or if Robin Hood saying the growth is going to come from I know they've been talking up crypto. In fact, they've actually been doing that since the I p O

building out crypto products. Could that be it? Yeah? What one thing that Robin Hood has pitched, as many fin techs have, is the idea that it can become more like a financial supermarket for its customers, offering much more than just mirror trading and moving into new areas including retirement accounts, crypto expand its crypto offering, as you mentioned, and it has been making strides towards some of those goals. So just this week, robin Hood did open up its

crypto wallets product. It had a waitlist going and it's beginning to offer that product now, and it is working towards those other some of those other pitched products such as UM retirement accounts. But the big question remains whether robin Hood customers want all those products from robin Hood specifically, or whether they might be getting those services from other apps UM and it's a it's a big part of robin its growth strategy to sell their customers on more

than trading all day. Now, the robin Hood bulls that are still out there talk about gen z and the future of a rising generation that's going to be investing more. Could that be robin hood savior quickly? It It could be, but it really depends right now. They're very dependent on trading volumes and they want to diversify away from that. But the question remains whether they can and whether the customers will come when they deliver those new products, all right,

Bloomberg's Annie Massa on Robin Hood's struggles. Thank you so much, Annie for that analysis.