From Mahard.
We're Innovation of Money and Power Collie in Silicon Valley, NBN.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hide and Ed Love Love.
No from Bloomberg's world headquarters in New York. Home Caroline Hyde and.
In the Big Apple back together, I'm Ed Lovelow. This is Bloomberg Technology coming up.
Full earnings coverage ahead. We're going to be breaking down the results from Uber and sit down with the CEO Daracosta Shahi.
Plus we'll speak to the CEO of Figma about where Adobe's twenty billion dollar purchase of the company stands, and take a look at new AI tools that they've unveiled.
And we'll bring you the big takeaways from open AI's first ever developers conference as the AI startup on Veil's custom GPTs. Stick into these Uber earnings for peace to be welcoming to the show the CEO of the company, Donticles Ashahi, as well as of course our own Emi Chang of Blue magnes Ey.
Take it away first, Caroline, thank you so much, Dara, thank you as well as always for joining us. So look, Uber shares have almost doubled this year, but they were a little volatile this morning on the upswing. Now, what's the message to investors who are seeing mixed signals here?
Well, the message to investors is that we had another record quarter and that the business is accelerating and actually surprised us on on the top line, our growth bookings came in over thirty five billion dollars, up twenty percent on a constant currency basis, accelerated versus an already high growth rate in Q two. If you look at the number of trips taken on the platform, two point four billion trips this last quarter, that's twenty seven million trips
taken every single day. That was up twenty five percent on and you're on your basis again an acceleration over last quarter where trips care twenty two percent. We did have a revenue accounting adjustment, and basically it was taking marketing costs and incentives. We do provide incentives to customers discounts to spur demand, and while they used to be classified as marketing cost in previous years, in previous quarters they were classified as contra revenue and our revenue then
stated revenue grow ten percent. But this it's really the geography of marketing classified as contra revenue took down a reported revenue by eight percent doesn't affect the bottom line at all. So our adjustedy BADAC came in at a billion ninety two, up over one hundred percent on a year on your basis. And then of course we were again gap net income profitable with over two hundred million dollars in net income and something that we expect to be profitable going forward as an enterprise.
Right your second quarter of profitability. Revenue is growing more slowly though over the last several quarters, so you know, what are your longer term what's your longer term view on where the growth is.
Going to come from?
And you know those who were concerned about market saturation, well, the.
Revenue growth slowdown is again purely as a result of these accounting reclassifications. If you look at the business and the bookings growth, which is really consumer demand, both on the ride side and on the delivery side, both of them accelerated. So our mobility business grew growth bookings thirty percent on a year on year basis. It was an
acceleration over Q two. We saw strength all over the world, but we saw particular strength in the Asia Pacific regions and Latin American regions as a result of some of the newer products that we've introduced, taxi two wheelers, motorcycles that you know are Uber motorbikes that can whish through traffic,
et cetera. And then on the delivery, our gross bookings grow sixteen percent, again an acceleration over Q two when we grow fourteen percent, And that's just food delivery continuing to be super popular with consumers all around the world. It's our growing faster than the general category. We gain category position in nine out of ten top ten markets all around the world. And it's our number of grocery offerings expanding beyond just food into grocery, alcohol, pet food,
whatever you want delivered to your home. We want Uber East to be there. So the strength continues the consumer, US consumer, global consumer continues to be strong, and that's definitely been a tail one for our business.
You've been building out your advertising business, and I'm curious where you see the biggest opportunity there. Who's a target demo, where's the most upside, where's the best place to show folks in the app new advertising and how does that play out?
Well?
The biggest part of our advertising business us our restaurants who are looking to improve their placement inside of the marketplace by targeting consumers or eaters who are likely to want to eat from that restaurant. And these are mostly small and medium businesses and enterprises like McDonald's or Wendy's, etc. Who advertise on our platform. And because we know so much about our consumers, all our data, et cetera, we can identify consumer segments who are likely to react, so
to speak, to that advertising. And as a result, advertising revenue continues to grow at significant numbers. We targeted a billion dollars in advertising for next year. We're pacing on that target. We're going to exceed that target as well. The number of advertisers who are advertising on Uber is up seventy percent on a year on year basis. It's over four hundred thousand dollars four hundred thousand businesses as well. Now, one of the newer adverageising products that we're very excited
about is actually branded advertisements. And you might see those branded advertisement advertisements when you're using your Uber app and you're waiting for your car. We might show you and add from an Apple or a credit card company or an upcoming movie. Our demographic consumer tends to be urban, tends to be very high income, and we have very big hopes for our branded advertising business as well.
Dar We've gone deep here on the numbers, which Emily and Caroline know I love doing.
But I just have a big picture question for you.
What does Uber look like in five years from now and what are the steps that you take to meet your vision for Uber in five years time?
Well, I think in five years time, we really want to be that operating system for everyday life for you. Personally. We want you to wake up and think about Uber. Am I going to have breakfast? Am I going to top up my grocery if I'm cooking tonight, going to the office, coming back to the office. We really want Uber to be there every day to help you in your life, to get you where you're going, and to
save time from some of these tasks. You know, there are some people who like grocery shopping, but there are a ton of people who don't like grocery shopping. There are a ton of people who just want to eat at home, etc. And we want Uber to be that relevant life partner or life operating system for you really all over the world, it's.
The freight unit. Dara still part of that vision in five years time. There's been talked from our own bluemerg analysis, so maybe that's fun off well.
Freight is a very promising segment for us that is suffering now from kind of the great freight recession that you see create. Rates are coming down post pandemic as a result of an oversupply situation. There are a ton of digital brokers and actually analog traditional brokers going out of business now. One of our or big competitors, Convoy, for example, announced that they were going out of business a couple of weeks ago, and that's those rates of
hit or freight business as well. It was down twenty seven percent year on year. It lost some money, but the technology of matching supply and demand in a digital way we still think has incredible promise.
As the freight.
Business cleans up to some extent and some of the smaller players move out, we think that Uber Freight is going to emerge as one of the players with the best technology out there. We've actually invested into the transportation management part of the business, so not only do we connect you with a trucker to go from point A to B we're helping you with your whole freight network and using machine learning, using the power of the data that we have to create a more effective shipping network
for you. We think that's a very promising business and at this point we are absolutely investing in freight and innovating around freight.
Dara, Uber's been in the AI business for a long time, but I know you're integrating it more and more into the platform.
Where have you.
Seen the biggest value add so far and where do you expect to see the biggest value add from AI in the future.
Well, AI is intermingled into every part of our platform, and you know, every single time you see a price on Uber, every single time we make an offer to a driver on Uber, every time we match you up with a vehicle route you, all of that is powered by AI. Some of the newer AI kind of innovations that you see with large language models are helping us automate some tasks that were difficult to automate previously or difficult to train machine learning algos previously. One is, for example,
document transcription. If you put in your license, your insurance, background checks, et cetera, documents we can transcribe to those with the power of machine learning versus having humans look at it. Humans, as it turns out, often make more mistakes than algorithms. We actually combined both into a call it a superhuman. Another area that we are we think is quite promising is actually on the customer service side.
Anytime someone reaches out to us in customer service, we have to be aware of you know, your history with Uber. We've got to be aware of the context, what's going on in that particular time, and also what are our policies,
and our policies differ all over the world. Again, machine learning algorithms can go through all of that at the click of the button essentially and then get back to the customer, and we think actually provide an elevated customer service at a lower cost, something that's super excited for us.
All right, Well, thanks there to Uber CEO Dara Kushashai and of course Bloomberg exactly changing out in SF. Really big morning actually on the Uber earnings front. A lot of volatility in the stock, but a wide ranging conversation are coming up here on Bloomberg technology. Open ai wraps up its first ever developers conference in San Francisco. We had the key takeaways from someone who is there on the ground, a good friend of ours out in SF. This is Bloomberg Technology.
GPTs are tailored versions of Chat GPT for a specific purpose. You can build a GPT, a customized version of Chat GPT for almost anything with instructions, expanded knowledge and actions, and then you can publish it for others to use.
Open Ai CEO Sam Altman there at the company's first ever developers conference where they unveiled custom versions of Chat GPT. Let's go to Bloomberg's Rachel Metz. You are in the building assessing all the euphoria around it, but ultimately is this going to fend off the competition?
Rachel, That is a great question. I think that you're starting to see them think about a little bit what are other companies doing? But also what can we do really well? How can we get people interested in using
our products even more for different things? And the fact is that you can use something like chatchpt for all sorts of things, but it would work even better if you customized it and made it more something like a homework helping bot or a recipe bot, you know, those sorts of things, and give it a little extra data, train it in a certain way, and perhaps it'll be a little bit something like the app store that Apple really came up with years ago, where people weren't quite
sure what to do it first with it right, and then after a while it was like, ah, this is what we do and people some things won't work, but some things really well with.
That was something that a lot of folks are talking about that caught their attentions. Open Ai to do a digital store and introduce revenue sharing, kind of like X is done in some ways the platformforming known as Twitter. What do we learn about that future Open Ai store, Rachel.
We know that there is going to be some looking over of the GPTs us they're calling them these customized chatbots before people are allowed to offer them to other people, similar to what Apple and Google et cetera do.
With their respective app stores.
It's not one hundred percent clear to me yet how the revenue share is going to work in terms of people, if people are downloading these things a lot, if the creator is going to get paid a certain amount of money, I think some of that stuff is still TBD.
We want to thank you Rachel Metz bringing all the inside track what the event was like, ed Avity, Yeah.
We have a quick talking tech And first off, Elon Musk's SpaceX is on track for fifteen billion dollars of sales in twenty twenty four. That according to Bloomberg sources, the company's Starlink internet business is showing growth such that it's expected to outpace and exceed the company's rocket launch business. Starlink could account for more than ten billion dollars in
total sales for next year, one source told me. Plus, we Work shut as its doors, the company filing for Chapter eleven bankruptcy in New Jersey, This capping a tumultuous few years which the company has navigated a failed merger, COVID nineteen lockdowns, a blank check merger, and of course a slow return to office trend. We Work once commanded a forty seven billion dollar valuation back in twenty nineteen,
but it has listed nineteen billion dollars of liabilities. And then you look at who might be impacted as creditors. Caro a big name on their.
Creditors credibility of one Massa Yoshi Son. Interestingly, here in New York, they've already dumped forty New York City office leases since that announcement, so notable moves already had, but we've got some notable moves that are happening in the worldern publicly traded companies and Apple's won to be keep an eye on on Yeah.
And reported by who else Bloombo's Mark German a rare move, but Apples basically hit pause on developing most of net next year's software updates for iPhone, iPad, Mac and some other devices because it's trying to fix some bugs. German says that this delay has been announced internally to employees. He's now reporting those details and we'll bring you more on it. This is Blombog Technology. Figma is launching new
AI features for its collaborative tool fig Jam. The new AI version aims to boost productivity with new features to generate, summarize, and sort files, among other things. Delighted to be joined by Figma's CEO Dylan Field and Caroline and I were talking about this this morning about the technology base for what you've announced. Where does the technology come from? Is it your own large language model, foundation model powering this or have you gone to a third party?
All right, well, it's great to be here and thank you for having me. Just to back up a little bit, Figma's platform. We try to make it step people can go oh the way from idea to design to production and software code. And what we're launching today is our new fig Jmi features which will help it make it so that you can do meetings better and have more productive working sessions and brainstorms in big jam. And with fig Jmi, we're really excited to see how people use it.
And we're using the our finacial model we're using is from open Ai. We're using GPT four, but yeah, definitely something that we could reconsider in the future. We have done a lot of work on the prompt engineering particular set we can make it set. We're able to better lower the four and make it set more people are able to have better working meetings, but also raise a ceiling and make it so you can do more in our product in fig jam.
So you've outlined basically how this is going to help customers. Dnnan What does ultimately product design look like once AI has really taken charge? I mean, where will the human interact with AI? Where will ultimately be able to just put in a prompt and how well the latest fintech at built within a blink of an eye.
Yeah, I think that ultimately.
First of all, for fig JMAI, we're much more focused on how do you take the busy work out of creating great means and brainstorms. But if you think forward to Figma design and how we're going to take AI and put it into more of our products experience, whether it's design or even development with dev Mode, the new product we launched earlier this year, I can fig I think that AI will really help you get to a
great first draft. It'll still take a great team to get to that final product and it though, I think though that it'll make it set you can do more and be even more productive and efficient, and we're really excited to see where that takes our users. But yeah, right now, I think it's more about how do you get away from the busy work, not how the robots take over?
You cooled it.
By the way, when we were chatting Caroline, we were like, which LM interesting choice on open AI. Look, it's been a year, Dylan since you announced that you would be acquired by Adobe. Is that actually going to happen? I mean, what chances that the deal falls through?
We're very optimistic and really excited about what we can do with Adobe. I think that there's such comminary strengths that Adobe and Figma can bring together.
So we've seen with.
Adobe all their work with fire Orfly and what they've done with AI, and Figma can wearn a lot from Adobe there. But also Figma has gone into new audiences such as developers with dev mode, and we think that we can bring a lot to Adobe there as well. And we can wait you get this done and do or together.
You've already been brainstorming about you as a consolidated unit, what actually you can bring to consumers, how your products change. It's interesting actually the EU regulators, we're worrying about how your use of AI might end up fending off competition even further, how do you think AI brought together with Adobe and yourself might change the game a little bit.
Look, I think that all companies will benefit from AI, and I'm really excited to see how different companies are able to bring AI into their solutions just to make better products for everyone. So Adobe and Figma are no exceptions. I think that both companies will do great things here. And you know this is the very start. There's so much more to come, and it's really hard to predict the future, but obviously more building towards it.
It's hard to predict the future. I'm still going to ask you to try.
There's a lot of interesting like Figma's own momentum, right, That's why there was so much excitement about the deal with Adobe. What is your customermentum? Like, what is it you're carrying into this potential deal close?
Yeah, obviously I can't share exact numbers, but it's been a very exciting your Figma. We've added I think about five hundred employees now since the deal is announced. We've introduced new products like dev Moode as well as advanced pro typing variables and how the user conference called fig with eighty five hundred people coming. Honestly, it's it's felt like we've been accelerating our pace and I hope to continue that acceleration and momentum into the deal.
Clothes.
Well, really nice to have you here talking us through at Figma. CEO Dylan Field, thanks so much for your time today.
Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology.
I'm Ed Loveloke and I'm Caroline Hyde.
One of those days, let's get a quick check on the markets at the moment, because we're on a bit of a tear, we've got desire to get into tech names in particular. In fact, we have been up for eight straight days on the NASDAC and indeed on the NASDAQ one hundred longest winning streets. It's November twenty twenty one, whilso adding the fuel to the far while we up
more than eight percent. Because some of the big tech names are rising on the day, let's look over and look at some of the micro names, and in fact, Microsoft heading over towards you, had a new record high. At the moment, we're currently up by just four and three quarters of point, but that's still one point three percent to the upside. Data Dog absolutely flying New York based company up thirty percent.
Let's call it.
As we see this software company outperform, really raising its guidance on its back of its numbers uber as well managing to be on the higher site after its earnings as well, we see that it's really pushing towards well, the forecast being one that the investor bases liking were up two point four percent, and Apple still higher more
than percent point higher. That's as we get a scoop coming from our own Mark German, who's saying, look, they might have to put pause to some software initiatives and indeed's improvements next year because as they want to iron out some glitches in particular that will be across their phone, that imag across the macro course and increase across most of their software. But what'll be looking at in terms of individual moves today.
Yeah, Look, some of the biggest names in megacat tech are kind of in the spotlight this week for political reasons. Officials from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe, we're all heading to Capitol Hill tomorrow for another Senate forum on AI's growing influence on American elections and democracy. The forum's part of a series of closed door discussions that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is been leading September to help members get up to speed on the technology and in the end,
regulate it. We're going to dive deep into this conversation on this election day with Anjana Sosala, Professor of Responsible AI at Michigan State University. The way that we frame it in our Daily Politics newsletter is that today's election is kind of a testing ground for the events of twenty twenty four and in the context of technology companies and social media companies, do you see it that way, Professor.
Yes, absolutely. I think this is a test of multiple things. One is the provenance of some of the methods used to identify deep fakes. And also misinformation has gotten very sophisticated in today's world, So how can platforms enforce all these policies where given the volume of misinformation that's out there, what are some sort of content moderation policies that platforms can responsibly implement?
And to that end, how much can artificial intelligence bea something that fights it as well as ads fuel to the fire ultimately onsider which side is going to be winning out here? How can wese artificial intelligence to help whites off this rise and misinformation.
Well, there's definitely a lot of methods that platforms have used meta for example, users these methods called self supervised learning to identify deep fakes and fake news. And sometimes what happens is there'll be issues where we have a known source of misinformation and it's debunked and removed from the platform. But they can be very easy sort of you can duplicate essentially the same information and spread it in a different way. And so platforms have gotten good
at those kinds of enforcement issues. So AI has helped tremendously in those kinds of cracking down on some known sources of misinformation. What is I think challenging from an AI perspective is things where there are half truths or rumors that can lead to maybe people not showing up in voting, like active you know, water turnout, disinformation effects. I think as are challenges for AI.
Professor Caroline and I have covered election cycles and we've talked about social media companies be it meta x formerly known as Twitter, and in that period they have talked to us about the actions they're taking on content moderation, but also said that it's not their responsibility to oversee everything. Essentially, what's interesting about AI is it gives them a new technological tool. Is it a sufficient tool for them to get it right this time around?
I think it's only one part of the arsenal of tools that they have, and in the sense that you know, it's not completely maybe platforms responsibility alone, because we also need a sort of a coalition of citizens and platforms working together to solve the larger challenge of disinformation and misinformation, especially given it's so easy to create and manipulate the truth and so easy to spread you know, aisstate, deep figs and so forth.
I want to also bring to our audiences awareness that, of course today is not just a bad election and the focus, but it still continues to be one where particularly the government is looking at the impact of social media or mental health, particularly those of teens and younger adults on genre and at the moment we understand a form of Facebook employee and whistleblower, our turo Bajar is actually testifying before the Senate Subcommittee about social media, it's
impact on team mental health, the crisis there and MET just put out statements today saying every day countless people inside and outside of matter are working on how to help keep young people safe online? How do you wait them at this moment fighting that particular areas of concern that society has a lot.
So this is actually a somewhat of a troubling area because I think there were a lot of studies where people have tried to create, you know, an account posing as a teenager and the first within the seven or eight you know, sponsored ads, you see your clicks that you will end up seeing content that is kind of very troubling from a treteam mental health perspective. And so I think those are things where once again we need
more transparency reports. Europe is doing that, asking platforms to provide more detail into how they're enforcing all these policies. So I think that's this is one area where maybe
platforms also have a you know, a huge challenge. So I'm not you know, I'm sure they are doing a lot from their end, but as citizens and ASLAM when the lawmakers have a lot of questions, I think we need to ask platforms to be more truthful and transparent and share with us all their efforts and in content moderation how they're fighting all these issues.
And Jana, it's great to have your expertise on the show. Thank you, come back. And Joanna Sosala, their professor of Responsible AI at Michigan State University, we thank her.
Meanwhile, coming up.
Now, how to accelerate workflows for financial services businesses with your guest AI. We will be joined by Il Shiner, CEO of the AI platform Black Hall, coming out of Stealthbed.
Yeah, I'm still with the earning story as well. Global Foundaries, a stock that's up seven percent, on track for its biggest jump since February. Be Expectations in the court have gone strong EPs forecasts for the current period, slightly disappointing revenue forecasts.
And what is it talking about?
Uncertain economic and geopolitical situation around the world. One of the smaller contract manufacturers for chips that we like to track this has been by Technology.
It's an AI startup world and we're just living in it. One more player comes to like black Or coming out of Stealth, new AI platform for financial services in particular, it's just launched today announcing sixty million dollars in financing led by another than a sixteen z an Oak eight c FT plus a whole list of the who's who's a VC. Let's bring in Black Hole CEO al Shana, who is going to discuss, well, ultimately, what you're using
sixty million dollars for? What problem are you solving with a much hyped area of artificial intelligence?
Thank you for having me. We we're very excited to announce our launch out of Stealth. We're using we're building a platform by leveraging AI. Is that streamline an end to end of all of the co workflow of the Black Office of CPS at the moment, and then are
on financial services in general. Most of the problems that we focus on now is the wrong capacity issues for CPA firms where there are higher complexity of the tax code two hundred and thirty eight million tax returns done annually in the US, but at the same time, three hundred thousand accountants left the job in the last two years and there are sixteen percent less accountant than twenty eighteen, so they're facing very severe capacity issues and the giving
up on revenue and other things that they went to school in order to the study accounting to solve for instead of that doing very manyal work. So what we're doing is we're automating all of the pieces that are could be automated by a machine, and right now are struggling to find the right talent for the capacity constraint.
I'll found this fun coast la Andrey general catalyst that's like the Who's who? A VC is backing you and you did it coming out of STEPH. I don't understand how does it work if you're in self? How do they even know about you? Or is it you kicking down doors and saying we have something really big coming.
We do have something really big coming, but we do have an existing relationship with most of those investors. In my previous company, some of them were already investors. So when I started to work on this problem, I reached out and we started discussions and we didn't have to kick too many doors.
Talk to us about the technology.
Are you a maker of foundation or large language models, or do you use the underlying technology of a third party to then make an AI tool that's relevant in the financial services space.
We do build a proprietary technology that consists not just from L and M, but from a combination of machine learning, automation vision. We do use third party technology for the LLM. We made a strategic decision not to build them model yet because it's extremely expensive. But with the pace of progress, we believe that in two years it will be a fraction of the cost to build it ourself. But ninety percent of the technology is not leveraging LM, which which
proprietary technology. We're using the usual suspects, but it's relatively less than ten percent of what we actually offering. It's end product today.
So tell us about your moat Ultimately, how do you ensure that anyone who wants to be really making their accounting work, making the job of a CPA efficient, only comes to black or not others that are building similar models.
That's the main reason why we were in Stell for so long. We spend two years building the architecture, building the pipes, building the actual plumbing, or how we put the data, how we train a model to recognize the document, what I of a document classified automatically fetching the data
from within the different document. They could be handwritten, they could be a PDF, they could be JPEG, and we put it in the right place in the tax software without requiring the CPA to change any workflow any tax doctors using today, and eventually the end product is a fully completed tax return ready for the CPA to review, as well as the work products that associate without like
tie out, binder and so on. It does take more than AI to build that, a lot of inter understanding of the workflow and the processes, and we started relatively early on working with many different CPA firms and tax preparation firm to make sure that we understand the workflow end to end, even before it was cool to use the word AI. We automated very big piece of that.
You're a serial entrepreneur and founder. You've been on this program with a different name, fund Box. I've written about FunBox and it's fundraising. Yeah, so you've got a pretty good lay of the land right now. How expensive is engineering talent? Like, I know you have a big chunk of cash now, but how far is it going to go?
In the talent.
Space, engineers are still expensive. I think, just like CPAs when you want to focus on the very high caliber of talent. Humans are still in high demand and very expensive, and especially when you start adding words like data science and AI, it makes them even more expensive. But the bottom line is that if you build the right team, you don't need to throw too much money on the problem. You don't want to higher before you have a product out there, and once you have the product, you need
to be weekly. At Black OAR, we're being very efficient, not just because of the burn of the cash burn, but also an organization is becoming less efficient when you have too many people. That's something we would like to keep as long as possible.
Black or CEO Shanna, thank you so much for your time here on Bloomberg Technology, thank you very much for having me.
In a rare move by Apple, the company is hitting pause on development of this next year's software updates for the Iphoney, I've Pad, the Mac and other devices so that they can actually root out glitches in the code, none of them. Bloombog Technology is Mark goam and of course broke the story and mark how out of line with the usual policy? Is this for Apple?
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
So.
In twenty nineteen, when iOS was as buggy as ever, Craig Federigi, the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, implemented.
What the company calls the Pact.
The idea from twenty nineteen until now is you cannot add any new features into iOS during its development if it's going to break other features or make the operating system more buggy. So far in development of next year's operating systems, Apple has found that a lot of that is happening. A lot of new bugs are being introduced the software. So last week they implemented a freeze, a pause or a delay to the next stage of development
and the next software dates. So for one week, all Apple's engineers can focus entirely on fixing bugs before moving forward.
Brilliant scoop.
We keep a track of all of it as always, Mark Gumman, and we thank you so much for bringing it today. Meanwhile, we want to talk about today's Bloomberg Big Take. It's focusing on Elon Musk's neuralink as it seeks a volunteer for its first clinical trial. Meaning look, it's looking for someone willing to have a chunk of their skull removed by a surgeon so a large robot can insert a series of electrodes super thin wires into
their brain. Now, when the robot finishes, the missing piece of skull will be replaced with a computer the size of personally about a quarter and that's meant to stay there for years. It's job will we be to read and analyze the person's brain activity, then relay that information wirelessly to a nearby laptop or tablet.
We volunteering.
Actually, what's notable is the ideal candidate is under forty, like yourself. But actually our lives.
Really I'm not volunteering, but yeah, okay. Sticking with Musk, his sprawling business empire has granted the billionaire a degree of power and global influence. That transcends the industry to reshaped. In a new weekly chat show and podcasts, Bloomberg editors and reporters break down the most important stories en Musk and his empire. We're joined now by two of them, Bloomberg's Sarah Fryar and Max Chafkin.
Elon Inc.
You We've actually all been talking about this for quite a while, but I guess I'm with you, Sarah. What is the broad concept of Elon Inc?
This is, this is a man you can no longer think of just in terms of his disparate company there are six of them now, But he's also a geopolitical force. He affects our culture. He owns a major communication platform. He's in the car business, he's in satellites, you know, involved in wars.
He has this power that is.
So so vast and so interconnected that we felt that, you know, even as he becomes a more overexposed person, perhaps directing media with his own messages, he's under explained. His work is something that you know, takes some journalists who actually spoken to a lot of the people in the in the Musk Empire and who can tell you what's really going on.
Ashley Vans of course, writes today's big take, which is about neuralink, and I mean, the opportunities of helping particularly people who are paralyzed, are extraordinary. But of course many would then say for that, you need trust, you need safety, not to mention with spaceships which blow up every now and then cars as well. Where are you starting with the enormous empire with which he oversees.
Well, the show that will drop just in a few hours today, it's about groc, which is the new chat bot created by x dot ai Elon Musk's AI company, and I think it's a it's a really good example of what Sarah was just talking about. You know, x
dot ai standalone tech company. They've recruited some really big names from DeepMind and Google, but in certain ways it's very closely connected to X you know, formerly known as Twitter, because Musk is sort of using it as an enticement to sign up for this new higher tier of service, which I believe is called Premium Plus. It's it costs between sixteen and twenty two dollars a month, and Musk is kind of saying, if you do this, you'll get all the great benefits of X Premium Plus but you'll
also get my AI company. So again it's hard to understand those companies stepple On Inc.
Though, Right, these companies all have a direct relationship, and also we're good value here, right, So you get a bonus episode dropping, which I think is about musk relationship with unions. I find that fascinating because I remember covering Tesla March twenty twenty onwards when the pandemic hit and the union sensed an opportunity because of must position on the Fremont factory at the time. But tell us about episode two.
Yeah, so we actually have two segments on the first episode. Episode two is a bonus episode with an Ashley Vance on Neuralink getting into the exclusive some exclusive detail about what we learned or what Ashley learned getting inside of that company on the union issue. It is super interesting because of course it gets down to Tesla's finances, but
it also has a serious political component. You know, Sean Fain, the leader of the UAW, is really a new kind of union boss and in certain ways, you know, there's a thought that maybe Elon Musk and Sean Fayne are matched to each other. They're both sort of larger than life. They both have big ambitions. We will see what happens.
Sarah, Ultimately, what do you want and listener to come away with? Because many would say we've had too much elon news across every outlet of late what's different here? How do you think you really educate in that manner?
I mean, I think we want to explain, right, and I think these two pieces of news that you may have heard of, the groc Ai and the union fight that may be coming up, they both are are connected to Musk as a geopolitical figure and how he might affect the twenty twenty four elections, how he's talking with the governments around the world, what might be motivating him, right, and so we go into like his conflicts and his competition and what really drives must And so we get
sort of behind the news and explain why.
You should care, what you should care about.
And what to look forward to as the world shifts around this extremely powerful man.
Context Bloomberg, Max Chafkin, Seraphra really excited further, not one, but two that you're going to be getting dropping whichever cause area that you currently are digesting your podcast, because we've got many ed But meanwhile, I doesn't have this edition of Any Bad Techology.
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