From the heart of where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow.
Live from New York and San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology coming up. President Trump says global trade deals and tariff rates are coming in weeks as he ends his technology tour of the Middle East.
Plus M and A and focus in the world of US cable providers, with Charter agreeing to combined with Cox in a deal valued at about thirty four point five billion dollars.
And we're joined by Airbnb CEO Brian Cheski after the company unveils an app overhaul, a new services offering, and a relaunched experiences product. But first we check in on these markets, which are having a stellar We are up more than six percent on the NASAQ one hundred over the last five trading days. We call in terms of that investor enthusiasm on the day, but look, consumer sentiment ugly ed the second.
Worst on record. We've had some really painful readings across the.
Economy, but maybe inflation not as bad as we expected, and it is risk one when it comes to tech.
We had technology earnings overnight, I go to Applied Materials. This is America's biggest chip making or chip equipment maker, and you can see the stocks down negatively current period week outlook, concern about trade, particularly with China. There's a bigger conversation to be had here about the reality of what's happening in investment going forward despite all the hype
with chips. Speaking of hype, We're going to go out to the Middle East soon, right, And the big beneficiaries of President Trump's visit are on this screen, principally in video. Video is up for a fourth straight week, a four straight weekly gain, up fifteen percent on the week, and I'm sure Amhmrie is going to talk about how Jensen was by the President's side every step.
Of the way.
Comparing contrast with Apple, it's still up six percent despite the negative headlines, but it's rebounding from last week where it's sort of declined.
Character extraordinary amount of market capitalization added what more than four hundred billion dollars to in video alone over the last five trading days. And that's as President Trump said though that he actually will be looking back at tariff rates for US trading partners d quote over the next two to three weeks, saying his administration actually lacks the capacity to negotiate the deals with all of its trading partners. Let's just run through the week that was with Trump's
visit in the Middle East. Bloomberg's amorihood and joins US now from Abu Dhabi, and he's taken off.
He's jetting home.
But he leaves a lot of tech optimism in his weight, but a lot of anxiety when it comes to tariffs still to deal with.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And the President talked about those tariffs today, talked about the fact that there's so many countries that are lining up and want to negotiate with the administration, but right now they're focused on the main trading partner of the European Union in Japan India when it comes to
these other countries. And the President has said this in the past, most recently last week I was with him in the Oval office and he talked about this, said, they're just going to set the rate for these countries and let them know where the new rate is. Remember Liberation Day, April second. That's how the administration want to
frame it. Very high teriff rates for a number of countries, they put all that on pause, so potentially in July, some of these countries they haven't been able to have these bespoke agreements with, they're just going to set a new rate. So the President is just supposing a lot
of issues at once. He's still facing some pushback when it comes to countries and investors, when it comes to the tariff policy and the fact that trade deals can take years, with the fact that he's inking deals across the entire Middle East between riod Doha and Abu Dhabi and Caroline ed, you're one hundred percent right. Tech was really the star of this entire trip, specifically Nvidia and
Jensen Wang. And when I spoke to him briefly in Riatto's during this honorary dinner for the President with the Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salman, I asked him about the diffusion role. I said, you must be happy they rescinded, and he said, rescinded, canceled, and because of that he is going to be able to get more of those advanced chips into the Middle East. The President name checked him and Riyad saying, my friend Jensen Wang is here, and then.
A remarkable photo.
Really yesterday in Abu Dhabi, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik was signing this AI partnership between the United States and Abu Dhabi.
That would mean building.
The biggest AI data center outside of the United States right here in Abu Dhabi.
Look at that photo.
He is standing in between President Trump and Sheik Muhammad Benzayad.
It's Jensen Wang.
He's been everywhere on this trip and you can kind of see why.
Bloom E exam Marie Horden with everything from the ground and a long week on of Middle East tour.
Thank you very much.
Let's get more on what markets think about President Trump's aideals and what that means for technology Epek. This Shia is Swiss quote senior analyst, and I showed that chart at the top of the show, right, Nvidia, Amazon, and Apple over the course of five days as an investor in those names in that sector. What's been the net result for you of everything that's happened this week.
Well, the big technology companies have had a very difficult quarter with the Chinese AI competition coming up, and the trade at tensions and the deals, the Middle East visit and these deals are coming right at the best imaginable time so far this year. First of all, we have been seeing companies delaying their AI investment plans due to tariff uncertainties, and there are a lot of questioning regarding how much of these investments could still materialize given the
gloomy economic outlook. And the deals just come at the very best time and from the well the richest countries.
In the world.
So there is a reason in media john to fifteen percent since Donald Trump's Middle East visit. We think that the NVIDIA deals with the Saudi and Qatar and abudeb is just going to fill in the gap at a very very critical time for the chip industry. There is one thing, though, we start hearing that at the White House some politicians, some members are not fully comfortable with the idea of selling chips to the Middle East due to the national security reasons. But that's a story to
be followed for now. Though the optimism has strong legs.
I want to go there.
Am Marie talked about the sort of significance of the images we showed, which was Jensen Wong standing between the President of the United States and his UAE counterparts. But actually there are deep concerns that the rescinding of the diffusion rule, those are those pictures now? Good job to the team in New York does not at all answer the question about China. We don't know anything about rules for China. Has the market yet to price that in?
Well?
I think that most of the Chinese trade war has already been posced in and investors have somehow came to the conclusion that okay, China will well gently get out of this picture and has a slower exposure to well to the Western world and vice versa. So there is now the thinking emerging that because China is willing to gain its independence and it looks like it could get there with their own means, that's going to be the
future for the Chinese companies. There is this thinking that China is willing to gain its independence and if they do so, actually that's going to be a positive for Nvidia because the trade tensions will not necessarily will hit them as hard as they have been hit over the past.
Couple of months.
This being said, while China's still remains a big chunk of the Nvidia's revenue, So before we get there, we still have some bomb Heerio to go.
If it broadened it out because in video, yes crushes it on the week up fifteen more than four hundred billion dollars in market cap added, it's again a three trillion dollar company. Are the legs left to run with? In videos? Up to the right and indeed tech more broadly, Well.
I think that Nvidia still has earnings to be announced, and we expect that the earnings are going to be strong enough to keep the optimism going. We shouldn't forget that Nvidia had a very difficult quarter and we saw a very significant fall in a strape price and also in its validation.
And right now with the.
Arrival of the good news and big lions that actually counter with the idea and the worries that the big technology clients could be finding their ways out of Nvidia is obviously a very positive view, and we think that Nvidia does have potential to extend and to well extend is rarely on the Middle East deals. If obviously the Middle Ist deals materialized and there is not a problem barrier in the future.
Yeah, it's so definitely.
Yes, it has been a right positive for Nvidia thing.
I mean, it's been an outright positive for many a tech stock this week looking Alphabet more than nine percent over the last five trading days.
That's despite the ongoing worries that this is a company that might be forced to break apart.
Meta also investigation with its monopolistic as has been deemed by the FTC monipolistic position. What do you think are some of the risks that investors perhaps aren't tuning into right now.
Well, one of the other risks that we see because we are in Europe, is that if.
The trade negotiations don't go well with the.
European Union, the European regulators will be going after companies like Google and Facebook, big technology companies. They have been very clear warning the United States about that. So I think that one of the trade risks is on these companies that have been spared so far because they are offering digital services, and it was mostly the companies with complex international supply chains like Nvidia, like Google, Apple that
have been very very hardly hit. We think that there are still risks there that have maybe not been fully priced in.
Obviously, the risks.
Are two sided, because there is always a chance that the European Union and the US striker deal. But if that's not a decase I think that Microsoft, Girl and Facebook are also going to come under pressure.
Eupe Cosko Deshkaya of Swiss Coat. Great to have you back on the show. Thank you.
Another news story I've been writing about this.
Morning, Tesla is adding a long time Chipotle executive to its board. Jack Harton, will join as a director a member of the board's audit committee as of June one, Tesla said in a filing. This comes as the Carmakers grappling with forny questions over Elon Musk's compensation and its strategic direction.
Charter Communications, well, let's agree to combine with privately held Cox Communications in a deal that would unite the two of the biggest US cable providers.
The transaction will.
Value Cox at about thirty four and a half billion, including debts, according to a statement Friday that actually confirmed earlier Bloomberg News reports.
Who that reporting, Michelle Davis was and she joins us.
Now, Michelle's interesting that this is a fiercely competitive space.
Does it just have to end in consolidation?
That's basically what the Cox family is saying. I mean, they have been owners of cable assets for seventy years, and the fact that they're now saying okay, it's time to combine means that that's how fierce it is. And you know what's going on is cable companies have been making their revenue from Internet, but everyone has Broadway ad
Internet these days. And at the same time, the phone companies are getting into it and people are cutting the cord, and so the idea is this is what they have to do to survive.
John Malone is the billionaire that's sort of behind some of these deals. In fact, maybe he signaled this earlier than the deal came about.
Right.
He had an invested Day saying, look, I want.
To combine Charter with someone else. I need to be able to make a deal here.
Yeah, this is one of those perennial deals that John Malone has wanted to do for more than ten years, and it took time for it to get there. But in December November, during the Liberty Media Investor Day, he said, it's so competitive. The tech companies are allowed to just roam the earth without limits, and why should cable companies just be restricted to one part of the country. They
should be allowed. Charter, he said, should be allowed to merge with Cox, Comcast or T Mobile, and I guess they chose Cox.
And what's interesting is that meanwhile, the T Mobiles, the AT and t's of horizons are busy trying to do wireless offerings and they're almost offering their.
Services to tom cable providers.
Is this therefore going to get through regulatory scrutiny because it's just so fiercely competitive.
So it's going to be.
The big litmus test of the Trump administration to see how it's received. The companies clearly believe that they have a shot at getting it through the way the cable industry is structured in the US means there's not any overlap in terms of geographies that these companies play. And I think part of why they're focusing on this competitive element is because their argument is we need to do this to survive.
It's been great talking to Michelle Davis. We appreciate it. Meanwhile, Ed, you're looking another key story.
Yeah.
Turning to Coinbase, the crypto platform disclosed it had suffered from a hack that leaked sensitive customer data going as far back as January, the revelation coming just three days after Coinbase was added to the S and P five hundred bluing Bosse Margie Murphy's here, let's go to the basics and details of the hack. What were hackers able to obtain, how did they do it, and what was the kind of net effect for coinbase and coinbased customers.
Right, so, back in January, the threat actor realized that they could get access to some of Coinbase's contractors in their customer support assistance teams, and essentially the threat actor was bribing individual employees or contractors and saying I'll give you cash if you give me the information on coinbased customers, and that has been They have been giving a drip feed through since January up until around this week when Coinbase say it received an anonymous email saying, I'm the
person who's been bribing your customer support assistance. I have this pool of information on some of the most valuable customers you own. Give me twenty dollars at twenty dollars, give me twenty million dollars.
And I will delete that information.
And this week Coinbase will yesterday disclosed that that had been going on and that they refuse to pay the ransom and they wanted to come public with it instead.
That's right, if you're just tuning in, I mean Coinbase shares are pretty buoyant, and Friday session they had fallen by seven percent or so in Thursday session. The simple question is what happens next?
Right, So Coinbase is estimated that this is probably going to cost them around four hundred million, And what they're saying to customers is, look, they hacker didn't access your account through us, but they got a lot of information that they could very easily socially engineer you. So they've been sending out emails to people they believe have been affected, and they are saying, if you do suffer a loss as a result of this data being leaked, we will compensate you.
Marg I'm sorry to interrupt you in your career covering cybersecurity and.
Hacks like this.
Where does this rank in sort of corporate worlds?
It's pretty bad.
It's the way that the hackers can use this information to target wealthy people. They are able to see the balances in their coin based accounts, and they now have very very detailed information on these individuals that they can go and socially engineer them, not just to get into their coin based accounts, but into other financial accounts that
they might own, and by social engineering. I mean calling up and saying I'm a bank support assystem and when the person questions, well, you know, how can you prove that? Give me some information about my account, and they can say, well, I have names, emails, balance, you know your last transactions.
It's all very convincing information. So I think in terms of they may not have got an inter coin basis systems per se and broken into their networks, but the mushrooming effect this will have on people's personal data and the potential impacts that could have on people in individuals losing their money.
Is a pretty big.
Moodlo's Margie Murphy on a breaking and fast moving story, Thank you very much. TikTok is willing to talk about it's Brazil operations with the South American country's government, according to an official. This follows a visit to China earlier this week, when President Lula and the First Lady expressed concerns over the potentially harmful the app may have on children and women.
Character let's just turn a rotation to other social media players because meta ed share still lower. That's after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company will delay the release of its AI model, the latest one it's called Behemoth for more Bloomberg, Riley Griffin can talk not only about the AI models but also what's been happening with the FTC.
But I go first to Behemoth.
How important is it that then perhaps not able to make significant incremental improvements on the overall model.
So this is Meta's biggest model. It's one that they have pointed to as a landmark and said that is better than chat gbt's comparable model, Claude's.
They've topped a.
Big game about Behemoth. The delays here are interesting. They were supposed to release the model on April, according to our colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, but it's now looking like it'll be delayed to the far And the point here that I think we need to take Carolina, is that each incremental development is going to become increasingly
harder to achieve. Some of the big advancements that we saw earlier on twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three through now it's becoming harder and harder to advance these models in ways that are worth the releasable milestone.
Well, it's a difficult undertaking, right, But did the report say specifically why it's delayed or who made the call.
The report said that internally, senior executives at the company are disappointed with the team and the milestones that they're reaching so far. It didn't explain exactly why it was being delayed, so we're going to have to keep watching this story unfold.
And Meta at this time is not commenting.
I mean, it is interesting, isn't it that all of this comes at a time with Meta that not only are they trying to push the envelope and general to AI, but they're also under a lot of stress. It would see you in the courts trying to say, look, Instagram and overall WhatsApp are not monopolistic. There are so many others out there competing, But the FDC thinks.
That they're on to snap no doubt.
And AI, as you mentioned, here is not just a story about the chatbots and the models, but it's about how they're integrated into the applications themselves. So the future of Instagram, the future of WhatsApp has a lot to do with the capabilities here.
Bloombo's Riley Griffin, thank you very much. A big take. Microsoft co pilot AI is gaining traction among its customers, but the company's investment and relationship with open Ai could complicate things for CEO Setia Nadella. It's the subject of today's Big Take bloombosostin Car wrote it and joins us now in part this is informed with time you spent with missing Nodella. Right, but the Copilot launch wasn't smooth,
wasn't great. They want to put time into it. They have to manage their investment and relationship with open Ai, which has a competing set of products and offerings.
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean I would just you know, turn to your viewers out there and ask have you used Copilot or has it more likely that you're using chat Ept if not even pay for chatchipt subscription. And that's the big challenge for Microsoft right now. You know, open Ai really was successful thanks to Microsoft It's thirteen point seventy five billion dollar investment over the years in the company, as well as all the money it poured into GPUs and
data centers to help with that back end processing. The issue is that that sort of gave open Ai headstart, but Microsoft has had to play catch up on its own app offerings like Copilot, which is both available in the enterprise for customers using Word and Excel, as well as a standalone consumer version which you can get on
Windows Max and your iPhone. And it's just really been a challenge for Microsoft to show why it's different because a lot of people at the beginning just saw it as a knockoff of Chatchipt with a different brand name, because it was still tapping into open AIS models underneath. And that's what Sachnadela is trying to differentiate now, building up Microsoft's own models, trying to differentiate their product through integrations with Microsoft software.
You've got Mustafis Suleiman, who we all know well on the consumer side. Can you introduce us to a new executive that Feathers might not have heard or so much.
Asha Shama really leading the.
Charge here from the company's AI platform perspective.
What does she bring?
Yeah, I mean, I think what's so fascinating here. She's building up a product called Azure AI Foundry, which is their sort of AI marketplace that's available on Microsoft's leading cloud platform. And I think, you know, a lot of people have this grand misunderstanding about Microsoft that it's really wetted to Open AI, when in fact that a model marketplace offers about nineteen hundred very varied models, including internal Microsoft models as well as external third party ones like Meta,
which you were just talking about a moment ago. So Microsoft is and Sachandela are really hedging their bets on.
Open Ai.
So you can rent open Ai models through Azure Ai Foundry with something Asha is leading, but you can also get access to cohere, Mistral, Meta, as well as more recently Deep Seeks models that are adding to the platform.
Austin Khr It's a brilliant read Go get it on BusinessWeek along and very deep and thorough one on Microsoft as it stands. Welcome back to Blueberg Technology. I'm Caroline Head in New York and.
I met Lodlow in San Francisco.
So, like in the moment this Friday, when we think about at the index level in markets, tech's kind of taking a time out with flat on the Nazak one hundred, but it has been a strong gain on a weekly basis. We're up about six percent on the Nazak one hundred.
A lot of.
What's driven that gain over the course of the week has been the technology companies that have been beneficiaries of President Trump's visit to the Middle East, the AI infrastructure deals. You're in videos, your Dell's, your Amazons, for example.
But the story this Friday is a little.
Bit economic, Caro, and we'll get to it later in the program. A gauge of US consumer sentiment was worrying, I think to the markets. But again from a headline perspective, there's been a fire hose Monday through Thursday, and I kind of feel like in the world of tech, at least we're taking a time out.
We are indeed maybe a whores, but there's no pause in terms of deal making right now. And let's just go to food delivery company s ED. They have been hungry for consolidation, using deals to enter new markets and new.
Areas of lifestyle.
Basically this all includes Process which just announced, of course relatively recently, to buy just Deep Takeaway for four point three billion dollars. There's new strategic partnership between Uber and Processes Brazil portfolio company I Food, and not to mention the fact that they're getting into travel as well, with a completed deal just announced overnight Fabricio Bluisy is with US CEO of Process Group.
You are such a global company, I know You've just.
Been deemed Brazil's Man of the Year, so your voice is a little bit horse.
Congrats, no caroline for you again.
Well, congrats also on all this deal making.
But I'm really interested is to let's just go to say the strategic partnership with Uber in Brazil. Why decide that's a partnership and that's not m and A to add on delivery services and mobility.
We are super.
Excited about for the leivers. You know, we just announced two months ago the four and a half Beati an acquisition of just It's takeaway or waiting for the confirmation of this exhibition. But Latin America is very important for our strategy. Latin America ecnsistem there, so we have not only eyefood but our payment business, but our event business. We just close it today. Our travel transaction there it was approved today. So we just bought Despegar for close
to Tribulio Europe. But we don't have our hailing offer and what we did was a strategic partnership with Uber, so Uber do not have the food delivery. Now Uber will have Eyefood inside Uber and we will have right Hailey inside Eyefoods. We think we can serve much better our customers, not only our customers, but Uber customers. Working together. I think that's the future. Offer more to our users. It's a partnership and we are very excited about that to work closely with Uber.
Let's talk about the mechanics of the deal. You're a deal maker.
What is the sort of regulatory path been like in that country, what's it like doing business in that region, and so the basics of our audience. You're going to get that deal closed and done right.
We are very excited that should they A few hours ago, we just got our online travel agency deal closes. This is Despegar, So we acquired Despegar. It was approved today by the regulators. You're very excited about that. The Uber deal is not a merge, it's a commercial partnership. We are going to offer to our customers access to Uber, their customers access to ie Food. So we are not waiting for reglatory approval for this deal. We can move fast.
We can offer better service to our customers. That's the idea.
And I'll just jump in now because I think what's interesting is how you align data sharing with Uber. How do you decide what revenue each one takes. What is the deal, the intricacies of the deal here that benefits both of you because I know you're focused on data, because that's the AI win, right.
Yes, perfect.
This deal specifically is about offering more services to our customer. So we're not sharing revenue. We are going to keep the food deliver revenue. We keep the right haling revenue. What we do is to offer to all customers in Brazil food delivery and rite healing together. That's the focus of the deal. But last time I came here to talk to you in London, actually talk a lot about AI and that's the biggest focus of process. I just released a letter this week talking about we are doing
super well. We are growing a lot. We are more than ten percent better than the forecasts I gave. But besides that, I'm more excited about how fast we are moving in AI. We announced our large Commerce model that is a very big AI model that constantly dates all transactional information in all processes to train a model to
serve better our customers. So we are innovating O lots, using open aio four and deep secret, all kinds of new models to really make a step forward in how AI advanced on e commerce, so data is a big priority for us. We are investing a lot on that and we are just starting to release the good results of that.
And what you call yourself is sort of lifestyle e commerce, So sorry, what else do you bolt on? Look, we've got the food delivery, you've got the mobility side, you've got the travel with this new travel operated that you've been.
Buying payment, and I think it's good enough for now, So let's me deliver lots of results on that. And now we'll put some adjacents before. But as you can see, food delivery is very important because food delivery is a very high frequency business. People buy sometimes five, ten, twenty times per week. So on top of food delivery, we are putting many other adjacentcies as payments, as travel, as events. But why I'm very excited now pros now is much
more focused in three ecosystems. The first ecosystem of our focus is Latin America, so you have all these business, all these offers working together in Latin America. Our second focus is India and we have also Swiggy that is a food deliver business in Ninjia. On top of that, payments, pay you and Mashe and Urban Company other companies in India. So you're doing the same ecosistent approach in India. In our third and I'm very excited about that. Focus is Europe.
I think Europe needs big tech in Europe. Now, we just bought just each Takeaway. As I told you, next least time, we have eighteen billion dollars to invest. We want to invest a lot in Europe and on top of Just Takeaway as soon as our deal is approved, so we are waiting for Europe to approve that. We are going to be able to invest ten times more in AI in Europe.
That's my big goal.
So, Fabrizia, you took us around the world there on a jet plane. But with the just Eat deal, there's a shareholder complaint, right They basically think twenty euros and thirty cents is less than half what you should be paying.
What's the latest on that? Do you see it changing?
I we have very confident this is a very good offer for both sides. We are paying around fifty percent a little more fifty five or sixty percent premium in the in their previous price, so we have very confident this is a great offer. We got very good reception for most of the shareholders. Our expectations to close. We have a strong expectation to close at the offer, and we seek it's an amazing offer to the shareholders.
What are the regions next? Which country are going to surprise us with with your next deal? We just have ten seconds.
Late in America, Inja, in Europe, the biggest tech company outside US and China. Let me surprise you get into two hundred billion dollars very fast and come here to talk to about our next steps.
Fabt Blue CCO process great. Great to have you back on the show.
We welcome to our radio and TV audiences worldwide. Now Airbnb out with a redesigned app that puts a great emphasis on services, on one of our kind experiences.
But this is us.
Of course, anxiety remains about consumer sentiment, about our desire to travel abroad. Right now, let's get through all of that with Airbnb's plans. We're John by CEO Brian Chesky, Brian welcome and AIRBMB more than a home. You want to be sort of an Airbnb for the world and for services. Tell us the revenue drivers here. Why is more experiences, more services going to lead to a bigger business and investable opportunity.
Well, I mean as big as the VERBMB is, and we do around ninety billion dollars a year in bookings. There's so much greater opportunity for people to monetize the biggest asset in their life.
And it's not their home, it's their time.
And so what if all the people's skills, all the people's passion, their expertise could be monetized. A huge percent of the jobs in the United States around the world are becoming essentially services jobs. And there is no Amazon for services. You know, people say Amazon's the everything store. It's kind of the everything in a cardboard box store. But there's this whole other world. It requires trusts, it requires two people to have an exchange between one another. I think
that's where Airbingby's core competency is. What we built is an extensible platform that's not limited to homes.
What's interesting is the chefs, the massages, the other key at services that you're offering do have to be vetted?
Yes, that's when you get the scale.
How are you going to scale that If you're doing this on a person to person basis, how much does mL then take over?
Yeah?
I mean, I mean a lot of what we do, and I think a lot of what everyone in technology does is you start things by hand, You learn the rules, and you train the technology, and the technology takes over either does it or it augments the people.
And that's exactly what it was like here.
We start very much by hand, and then we build tools to automate the task that people are doing.
Brian, I started using Airbnb in the UK around twenty ten eleven when I went to college, right, and that was.
Before Uber even launched in the UK.
And when I think about the development of platforms and app technologies like yours, the one point of difference than Airbnb has versus an Uber is that you don't yet have advertising, whereas you look at Uber's ad growth now for them.
On the investor side, it's a really big thing. How do you think about that?
I think it's a huge opportunity.
You know, one of the frameworks I really like around how to invest is you want to invest in the most perishable opportunit unities first, and so we think a really perishial opportunity is you know, launching services and experiences. The timing is right. We think advertising is a huge opportunity for us. It's an inevitable opportunity for us, but we don't think it's the most parishal opportunity, so it hasn't been something we've prioritized in our near term roadmap.
I also think it's really good to first extend our platform from homes to services, experiences in beyond, so when we build things, we can build them as a horizontal platform inevitable.
That's that's really interesting.
You've got a lot of credit this week for the relaunch of the app and its ability to give you some long term growth. I'd just be grateful to hear how you think it will drive long term growth. I think from the streets perspective that's more about revenue growth and profit, but maybe scale of the platform as well.
I think there's three things.
Number One, there's a whole bunch of people who don't book airbnbs because they don't come with services.
They go to hotels.
So what if you get after all the hotel services of a hotel and more in airbnb. So that's one way we actually could grow is to get a lot more customers. The second way we can grow is a lot of people use Airbnb, but the only book one thing on the reservation home, so we can essentially get a greater share of wall on the trip. The third
and the longest term opportunity is local demand. We think a lot of these services and experiences that were initially building out for travel consumers are eventually going to be things that are going to want a book in your own city, and that is an even significantly greater market.
So there's really these three types of horizons.
Coast playing with Megandee Stallion, learning volleyball within Olympian in Rio.
How did you get these one off experiences? I mean, is this making some phone calls?
Yeah?
I mean like, well, a year ago we launched icons. We're shared these extraordinary experiences hosted by the biggest names in culture. We had, you know, we have made the uphouse float in the sky, and we did all these really cool experiences, and then we started thinking to ourselves, how do we bring that magic to experiences?
And we built this.
Network of really interesting celebrities and global icons. And one of the that we found is they a lot of them heard about what we're doing. They reached out to us. I think a lot of these global celebrities want to connect direct with their fans. They don't just want to have a parasocial relationship on social media. And I think the more we talk about AI, the more we start to realize that we are accelerating our life living in
a digital realm. We're spending more and more time on devices, and we want to be the kind of company they're getting people off devices into the real world just as a balance, and I think that could be a very exciting proposition for the future.
As you can imagine, this show's been talking about AI relentlessly for the last three years, but we took a pause started talking about taris and the economy relentlessly. You said, now is the perfect moment to be launching these services and experiences. Why in this environment where you saw consumer sentiment today is woefully low.
I mean, well number one were reported really really good growth within travel, So I think people are still traveling, and I think when the consumer sentiment is and steady, they still want to travel, but they often want to find more affordable options.
Airbeanbe's a great way to do.
But beyond that, like this is a very long term bet that we're making over the next five years, and I think this will endure across any kind of economy.
It's just good to remind people.
Everybody started during the great recession of two thousand and eight, and so I think a lot of the great businesses are starting during you know, kind of a weekend economy.
Brian, you're pivoting to founder mode, right, Yeah, how's that going to help Airbnb navigate the world that it's in right now?
I think founder mode basically just means like running a large company with the hands on approach, where you're in the details, your leaders in the details, and everyone's rowing in the same direction like a startup. I think those principles are more important now than ever with this new
technological revolution that's in front of us. You need people that are able to basically have their hands on the steering wheel and not be you know, in essentially like a self driving car, which is you know how more professional managers typically run things. So I think this is the perfect time to lean into the future, to put the pedal of the metal, put your hand on the steering wheel, and really drive transformation. And I think a lot of the great companies in history have been led that way.
With that in mind, Airbnb, the technology company, what's its call competency.
What are your.
People really good at that other companies are not.
I think a few things all probably a few, but I'll highlight just two on the right now. The first is our application. I think we have one of the most beautifully well designed and build apps in the world. We're able to show it is incredibly intuitive. I know we I believe we were one of the best design teams in the world. So we have really great applications, and so take AI. There's a lot of development on the application, the on the large language model layer, but
the applications haven't seen a lot of development. If you pick up your phone, almost every app looks exactly like it did before Generator of AI came on the scene.
So that's the first thing.
The second is probably even more important the offline world.
We're really good at building apps, but I think we're even.
Better at designing this system of trust between two strangers to live together. I mean, nearly four million people a day live together in Airbnb and nearly every country in the world.
Think about all the ways.
You need to keep people safe, handle their issues, match supply and demand, facilitate money, you know, make sure they're having great experiences. There's so much more the offline world the Airbnb. When people seebnb, they see an app, and the app is just to scratch the service of our community.
I love that you're talking online and offline.
Briefly when you're thinking about Karna, having to decide that actually all the AI focus has to be unwound a little bit. Customer service is not working as they want to bring people back. You're bringing AI to customer service. How's that going? And how much do you have to rely on people's stuff?
We still have to rely a lot on people. I think it's going incredibly well. We launched a customer service agent in the United States to all English speaking users, where now if you need help, you can reach out to an AI customer service agent.
It's a front line.
It's been trained on, you know, hundreds of millions of customer trips to be able to be twenty four to seven and be an escalation point to humans.
Or be able to answer the question themselves.
But I think the key lesson here is you don't want to rush into a trend. I think that people got really really excited AI be invitably thought it's the future. It's going to do all these tasks in the future. All that's true, but you can't skip steps and people want things to work, and so, you know, we didn't
want it to be an AI lab. We wanted to be something people could trust, and so we've been very, very careful about focusing on solving real problems responsibly with a model that doesn't hallucinate.
And I think that's what we're.
Doing at BNBC, you know, and cal co founder Brian Chess, it's great to have you back on Bloomberg Technology.
Thank you, Thank you very much.
A new weekly podcast from Bloomberg launch just today, covering business stories that are relevant to absolutely everybody and as that retitled Everyone's Business. The hosts Bloomberg's Max Chafkin Stacey Venexsmith join us.
Now, Max, what's the USP here?
How are you going to set yourself differently from all the other business conversations.
Well, you know, there's so much going on in the economy right now. You know, you tear offf news changing every day obviously AI.
We heard that in the last conversation.
And all this stuff affects, you know, the markets, it affects businesses and the decisions they make, but also affects like the real decisions that regular people make, and that's the connection we're trying to make. We're trying to bring some sort of smart analysis and basically help people figure out what to do with their money, figure out what decisions to make, and figure out how to make sense of the world.
Stacey, as a journalist covering technology, sometimes the written words not alough, and that is no more true than when I'm confronted with the transatlantic issue of the banana pudding. Please explain the detail to audience how this podcast will crack that well.
Crack might be the key word there. Obviously, inflation has been a huge issue of all over the world, in the US and of course in the UK as well. But eggs, of course are a big concern here in the US, the price of eggs, they were down a little bit. We got some pretty good inflation news this week. But I think a lot goes into a banana pudding. In fact, there's labor, there's overhead. If you're a business making banana pudding, you are dealing with all of the
economic forces that are affecting us all every day. And so I think that's the kind of thing we're going to be looking into through the lens of banana pudding. I think you can see the whole economy. I would argue a lens.
A beautiful, delicious lens into the old economy. I mean, let's talk sports. Look, New York is on tend to Hoox for kating tonight. We're all worried about NJ transport, but I'm interested more broadly, Max and like how the business of sports is going to fold into this, how this becomes entertainment At the same.
Time, Yes, we had a great conversation for the episode that hit today, which you can get anywhere you get your podcasts, with Randall Williams, who's a Bloomberg Sports reporter BusinessWeek contributor.
It it's all about.
The rising valuations of teams and how that's changing how teams operate. You know, we're getting a new breed of
sports owners. The sort of prototypical sports owner who would sort of a rich guy who's into the team is being replaced by these institutional investors, private equity guys, which, of course I think it's exciting if you own a sports team and you want to you know, make more money, but it's also you know, from the fans point of view, it could be kind of troubling because obviously private equity has a somewhat checker of reputation when it comes to coming into businesses.
Bloomberg's Max Chefkin and Stacy Vennick Smith their new podcast, Everybody's Business is out today.
Check it out, Caroline.
That does it for this edition of the television show Bloomberg Technology.
We also have a podcast, so keep your pictures coming for the podcast on the TV show. You can find out on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart and go back over some of our CEO conversations today because they're global, they're important, and they discuss things like the impact of inflation and I still are desire to go traveling and indeed to get our food delivered from New York from San Francisco.
There's that technology