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This is Bloomberg Tech coming up. Warner Brothers reopens negotiations with Paramount Skuidance after it proposed or hinted at raising its bid and sweetening other terms of its offer plus renewed selling in several tech giants are weighing on stocks with lingering anxiety over the outlook for AI, and Thrive Capital raises more than ten billion dollars in its largest fund ever, giving the firm an expanded war chest to invest in AI. Welcome to Bloomberg Tech, and this is
what markets look like right now. We've carried over the holiday weekend in the US to the same anxiety and we're going to talk later in the program about the contradiction right now hard of the AI trade and as that one hundred off five percentage point chips kind of dragging us down mag seven Bitcoin at sixty seven thousand US dollars per token. Of course, it continues to trade twenty four to seven, but over the weekend, a kind of three day period there was a lot of geopolitical
tension driving it. Our top story is Warner Brothers Discovery reopening talks with paramount S Guidars. Netflix has issued them a waiver they can do so. It's a seven day waiver through the February twenty third, by which point they either need to give a.
Sweetened, improved bid or something else needs to happen. Let's get the details.
Bloombose Lucas share leads our screen time team and coverage of media and entertainment. This is actually a little bit more difficult to understand that then simply negotiations reopening. Talk us through the deadlines, the timeline and what's new Lucas well.
The news is obviously that Warner Brothers decided to talk to Paramount. They have not been speaking for a couple of months. Paramount kicked off this wholesale process last year when it kind of sent over an an uninvited to offer basically for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. It then spent a couple of months increasing its offer for every few weeks.
Trying to win.
It lost the Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery has spent the last couple of months sort of trashing Paramount. Both sides kind of waging war in public, if you will.
But Paramount has gradually increased more and more pressure, addressed more of the board's concerns, and is now at a point where I think Warner Brothers Discovery feels both out of pressure from its shareholders and just because they're sort of tired of this, that they want to engage with Paramount for a week, see what happens, and if they can reach a better deal then obviously you know that the board is going to do its fiduciary.
Duty, and we had some reporting about this over the weekend before the formal announcement this morning. Part of this is one of Paramount's bankers signaling to the board that there will be an improved offer, but that they haven't yet made their best offer.
What do we know about that?
Well, Paramount has been saying for a couple of months that its offer is not last and final, and Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders have been waiting for Paramount to increase the offer from the thirty dollars a share. To your point, some a representative of Paramount's guide Ace had indicated to someone on the board of Directors of Warner Brothers Discovery that they would go up to thirty one dollars a share. My suspicion is that thirty one dollars a share still
won't cut it. So the question is Paramount going to go to thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five, and at what point is that beyond what Netflix is willing to match, because keep in mind that Netflix still has a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery and has the right to match any superior Paramount offer.
Netflix has come out with.
I think we're talking about this offline, A strong statement, a lengthy statement, just summarize what Netflix's position is here and where they fit into the idea that negotiations now are open for a window of time between Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount's guidance.
Well, some of those sort of public hostilities or disagreements that I referred to earlier, I think, or what Netflix is really seeking to attack with it state.
You know, they are getting very tired.
Of Paramount saying that Paramount.
Has a clearer path to regulatory approval and offers a superior deal. And so Netflix goes through all the reasons why regulators might be concerned about a Paramount deal including some of their international financing and the concentration owning two
different movie studios. And that is also a jumping off point for Netflix to argue that the Paramount deal would be worse for Hollywood because Paramount would be a heavily indebted company that would have to cut billions of dollars in costs, whereas Netflix is buying a studio that it doesn't have in house, and so it would preserve most of those jobs.
We're just showing the bi Bloomberg Intelligence react, by the way, which is pretty punchy. Netflix should walk away as Warner m and A drama heats up. Maybe we'll get to Githa later in the week. Bloom most Lucas, sure you've led the way on the reporting on this one.
Thank you so much. Let's go back to markets.
Jitters around the software sector are sending investors in search of safety. Some of the industry's biggest names have lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value so far this year to spending anxiety. Bank of America's latest fund manager survey shows a record share of investors think companies are overspending. This as the four largest US tech firms project roughly six hundred and fifty billion in combined spending this year. Let's get the latest with Ted Watson bed
managing partner. This is the heart of the AI trade right now. The contradiction in AI either AI is going to change the old economy in the new economy or we are in an AI bubble and for lots of people both can't be true at the same time kind of reflected in the trading of recent days.
Where do you sit on that dead I.
Think if you if you look at the agentic acceleration, this is something you can't ignore in relationship to traditional sets. I mean, the problem with the reason why the IGV is down over twenty two percent year.
Of to day.
Is people have a real worry on how to model these traditional SaaS companies from a free cash flow perspective, a multiple free cash.
And that's the big problem.
I think over the weekend two days ago when OpenAI bought open claw, that just gave more credence to the segentic explosion. If you look at some of the token growth that you're seeing, and this is why the cloud titans can't keep up with compute demand is some of the token growth that you're seeing our triple digits month over month. This is not sequential. This is not you over year, this is month over month growth.
Can I just jump in there real quick? So I didn't expect you to go to open ai, open claw. That blew up right over the weekend on social media. And what I'm trying to do is understand the story of how public market investors are treating this versus what we see in private markets that clearly is a consolidation of different platforms, right is try and unpick that for me?
I think it's it's really a debate between the old and the new. And I think when you when you can't model the old going back to that SaaS assumption on free cash flow multiples and you're looking at this acceleration on a gentic people just are getting out of the way, to be quite honest with you, and they're going to six other sectors that are more infrastructure related.
And the feeling is that some of the traditional SaaS companies will have problems going from a traditional SaaS model to a consumption model, which is.
All the agent base.
And it's a mess. It's an absolute mess. If you're a software investor trying to model these.
Companies ted with respects, I don't I don't think you really answer my question, which is, you know, the contradiction of the old and new economy software more recently being impacted. And then are we or are we not in an AI bubble? You mentioned cash flows. One of the introsting pieces of math that people are doing is the capital expenditures commitment of the hyperscalers and its impact on cash flow or proportion of cash flow. Basically cash flow is
getting wiped out. How do you feel about that?
I think it's a problem X of Google and Meta which have their supporting businesses on the advertising that can actually make up that free cash flow where I get pushbacks names like Amazon and even Microsoft to some degree, to a more limited degree, but if you look at Amazon, I mean they essentially had to lay off a very large component of their white collar employment based to maintain even getting to neutral free cash flows.
So it is an issue.
One of the things that we are not talking about is memory. And when you have this token, I would say acceleration and you have inference also expanding. We have a huge memory problem and I would almost put it at a crisis level where you're not going to have enough memory to support this compute over the next two years.
That's a real issue out there.
Next week you can video Ports reports its earnings and it's the biggest beneficiary of the capsule expendensis numbers we talked about. To this point, it has shown massive real top line growth. What would it need to show evidence to carry the rest of the market with it next Wednesday evening.
I think number one, they have to they have to assure investors that they don't have a memory problem, which they don't. I mean, Jensen was so far ahead of this memory issue by locking up supply.
That's number one.
Number two is some of the blackwall numbers as well as transitioning.
The timing of Ruben is also very very important.
This is a real change an infrastructure on Reuben, and I think anything that they I can assure investors that's on track, and the adoption of Ruben from a system perspective is now cannibalizing any of their business as it relates to for example, Google's TPUs or infant soldiers.
They've got to play in both realms.
Ted Mortenson of BED, I think you've set us up for a number of weeks to come, thank you very much.
Indeed they're coming up.
Fords charges ahead with a more affordable next gen EV shares a little softer, but came back after headlines hit We're gonna go under the hood next Sploomberg Tech. Ford may have taken a nineteen point five billion dollar hit to overhaul its EV business last year, but the US car maker is out to prove that it hasn't retreated
altogether from electric vehicles. For reveal details of how it's engineering a next gen EV platform to go further on a single charge and still start at thirty thousand US dollies.
To do this, the.
Company's head of EV's Doug Field, told Bloomberg it had to start with a clean sheet for its organization and design process. Let's get more with bloombergs Keith Norton, who has covered this company inside and out since nineteen eighty five. And it's important to be specific here, right. This was an engineering exercise, the Universal EV. What did they actually do to engineer out cost and stay in the game.
Well, as you said, they did it far from Detroit. This was set up in California. It was led by Alan Clark, who's a former Tesla engineer, and they've just they sweat the details. It's like improvement by a thousand cuts. And they've managed to shrink the size of the battery on the CV. The battery is the most expensive component of an electric vehicle, while at the same time extending
the range by about fifty miles. That's just one of many engineering gains they made, which is the reason they can field this vehicle at thirty thousand dollars as a starting price, which is twenty thousand dollars below the average price of a new Current America today.
We spent about forty five minutes on the phone with Doug Field, which was really interesting exercise.
There is a pathway here, right.
It starts twenty twenty seven with a pickup truck and they go basically from skunk works to reintegrating back into the might of Ford with distant maybe distant Keith ambitions on L three systems. What's the sort of timeline from here of this UEV platform please.
Yeah, not exactly that far distant. They're going to come with the Eyes off the Road Level three semi autonomy in twenty twenty eight, so a year after they launched this vehicle, they'll offer buyers the option of getting this semi autonomous size off the road, hands off the wheel feature. So their point is they can put a feature like that on an inexpensive car in the thirty thousands, which
is unusual. Normally those sorts of bands technology features show up first on very high end luxury cars closer to six figures.
Right.
The approach from Ford thus far has been to electrify the big winners, thinking mocky, thinking f one fifty lightning that that's gone now, right, and the focus is that's gone right, and the focus is China. So put that context out there for us. Why this approach ground up, starting from fresh is the right way to counter that? The cost basis of a Chinese EV company.
Right, So the advantage the Chinese have is in price. I mean, there's a Chinese EV in China for ten thousand dollars. Not likely that would come here. But they have a big price advantage even if you make a car ready for the US market. But they also have a technology advantage. They have, you know, cars that are essentially an extension of your of your smartphone smart cars, So you need to compete against them both on price and technology. That's what Ford says it's doing with this
because of the approach they've taken. It's not just an affordable vehicle, they say, but it's a desirable vehicle with lots of good features.
Bloombers Keith Norton, who again has led the charge on covering this industry and this company for a long time, appreciate it.
Let's talk about Apple.
It's touting an in person experience event in New York, Shanghai, and London for a March fourth product launch, suggesting a lower key showcase than often held at its Cupatino campus. Let's get out to Bloomberg's Consumer Tech and Apple Managing editor Mark Gumman. There's the event and how they'll do it right. Different to the kind of keynote style format in Coupatino, but it's harder the products. And I think you were on very recently kind of telling us what we should expect from this.
Yeah, there's a lot in the pipeline for the first half of this year. I don't think that everything is going to show up at this event. There's just too much stuff for you to have in one showcase. But if you think about why would you need an event. Why would you need an in person experience in three different places London, Shanghai, New York. Right these are as big of multi metropolitan areas in the world as you can get. It means they're launching something pretty significant. So
my eyes are on this new low cost MacBook. It'll be in the seven hundred to nine hundred dollars range. It will be their first MacBook powered by an iPhone chip. It'll be slightly smaller than the MacBook Air, but the price point is a really big deal. This has the potential to really overshadow Chromebooks and some of the PCs we're seeing out of the Windows market right now.
So this is a really big deal.
The other new things that are in the pipeline for the first half of this year new MacBook pros, new MacBook Airs, the iPhone seventeen e, as well as new iPad entry level and iPad Air models. I would think that we would at least get the seventeen e by this event at the latest.
I want to say something up for our audience because you put me on the spot the other day. I'm running a MacBook Pro with M four that's my work one at home I've got a twenty twenty macair running in one, and you quite rightly pointed out I should upgrade when they hold these events. How quickly do the new products hit the shelves quickly?
When it's a spec bump, they're rolling out within a few days. The longest delay is usually about a week, two weeks maybe maximum, but it's usually pretty quick.
Flamous Mark German, who's been on top of the reporting on this well in advance, thank you very much. Coming up, we're going to discuss just how big a market the physical AI space can be.
That's where Na over from Berkley's. That's next. This has been bog.
Tech, a report from Berkley's projects that by twenty thirty five, physical AI could be a trillion dollar market thanks to advances in brains, brawn and batteries. So where are the investment opportunities along that value chains? I need to tuttle over Barkley's head of thematic if I see see research, and the author of that report joins us now in many ways, so I need to say it's an update. You know you're keeping the research alive. So we have
the one trillion addressable market twenty thirty five. But digging down into the notes, actually, autonomous driving is a really big part of this for you.
That's right.
Our latest research shows that physical AI could really become a trillion dollar market by twenty thirty five. That's ten times higher than where the market is currently valued at. And that trillion dollar estimate spans four key robotics categories, autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, advanced automation, and drums.
And Look, while I have.
Really strong conviction that the late twenty twenties and the early twenty thirties will be the decade of the robot I also think that growth and adoption.
Will likely come in stages rather than all at once.
I can see how autonomous vikos could lead the trend and said the stage, And in fact, nearly half of that estimate of the market growth comes from autonomous vehicles, or in dollar times, that's about five hundred billion dollars by twenty thirty five. I think, also intuitively this makes a lot of sense because autonomous vehicles clearly have a head start.
The technology has been around for nearly a decade.
Now, the production process is there, it can leverage an existing automotive supply chain, and I think more importantly, the AI models needed for autonomous vehicles can work with a much bigger real world driving data set that's collected from millions of eCos out there, and that's a very different story if you're compared to where humanoid robots are at the moment.
So if you follow the arc of what happened with autonomous driving, what needs to happen for humanoid robots for them to make a meaningful contribution to your one trillion dollar forecast for addressable market by twenty thirty five.
I think the number one challenge that humanoid it's a phase right.
Now is the lack of physical AI data.
And that's because when you think about humanoid robots, they really bridge the gap between the cognitive.
The digital, and the physical world.
And in the physical world, the laws of mechanics and physics apply. A humanoid robot needs precise instructions if it's going to function and perform properly in an unstructured world that is made for humans. Take a simple example such as lifting a box. This is a very simple task for us humans. We have inbuilt dexterity, we have inbuilt intelligence. We know exactly what we have to do. But a
humanoid robot needs precise instructions. It needs to know exactly how much force to apply, where to apply that force, and that simple example can get really tricky if something changes, For example, the box is actually heavier than expected, if the surface is slippery, that means that the robot needs a new set of instructions.
And the challenge is that there is no dictionary out there. There is no single database that can.
Tell us, look for a fifty pounds box, you need this amount of energy, this amount of force. All that needs to be built from scratch in order for the technology to scale and to become more more useful in the real world.
In both cases autonomous driving and humanoid robotics, and actually you could extend that to autonomous drone technology as well. There is a great emphasis on China, how far aheaded is in commercializing the technology, but also supply chain dependency. A lot of that supply chain has historically originated from China.
How does that show up in your research?
So it's clear that China leads.
I think it deploys robots on a completely different scale. For example, in twenty twenty five, we estimate that nearly fifteen thousand humanoid robots were deployed worldwide.
Eighty five percent of those were installed in China. You get a similar story if you look at other types of robotics technologies like industrial automation.
There we're talking about fifty to sixty percent of the units are installed in China. If you compare these figures to what's happening in the US, the numbers.
Look very different.
Low teams for humanoid robots and even single digits for industrial for industrial.
Robots, so the scale is very different.
So China has the advantage in terms of technology, also access to raw materials.
Take for example, critical minerals, rare earths.
You need a lot of those components to build some of these very very specific physical components that go into a robot. So there are different chunks of the supply chain where China can really can really kick in. So all that comes together. But having said that, it's the early stages. I think we are just scratching the surface in terms of what physical AI can do, and I see lots of potential for that adoption to accelerate in other parts of the world.
Starting with the US and even potentially in Europe.
In a couple of years signs so needs to thutter over of barkleys.
It's great to have you back on Bloomberg Tech with your updated research.
Thank you.
So news crossing the Bloomberg terminal, Palenteer says it has moved its headquarters to Miami, Florida from Denver.
They made the announcement.
Via a pretty straightforward and simple post on x the social platform. The shares kind of haven't really moved from where they were trading anyway, but an interesting story will continue to track now. Coming up on the show, bitcoin having a tough time after the long weekend. We're going to scuss what's ahead for cryptocurrencies. A lot of focus on geopolitical risk right now.
And of course, while it was a US holiday.
On Monday, bitcoin trading twenty four to seven around the world.
Do you see since Friday? That's what it looked like.
Market's actually not as anxious as they were when we woke up. It's halftime. This is Bloomberg Tech. Welcome back to Bloomberg Tech if.
You're just joining us.
Volatility has gripped Wall Street, particularly when it comes to conversation around the AI trade. Right now, then, as that one hundred is actually just a little bit softer three tenths of percent. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index or SOCKS was down two percent. We're now off by two tens of one percent. Again, we're seeing volatility in video one of those names participating in it. There are some news stories that want to pick out while we get the opportunity.
Gemini Space Station. The cryptoic Stange, founded by the Vinkel Twins and iPod a few months ago, is down fourteen percent basically in the months that followed the IPO.
A lot of the C suite has left.
They confirmed this morning the CFO, chief legal officer, chief operating officer all left. That's putting volatility in that name. In the crypto adjacent space and generally speaking, cryptocurrencies are struggling to find clear direction. After a weekend rally fizzled, e raising a small bounce that briefly took Bitcoin close to seventy one thousand US dollars per token on Saturday. It has been a tough run for crypto, especially with
Bitcoin posting four straight weeks of losses. There is one person who I rely on to help with this, and that is Bloomberg's cross at reporter Isabelle Lee. So most of America was on a holiday on Monday. In the United States, Crypto is a twenty four to seven thing, and it's a global thing. But it was interesting to kind of track from Friday through to this morning where you net out sixty seven thousand US dollars. Partoken and the stories on the Bloomberg are about geopolitics.
Bitcoin never sleeps, but over the weekend and during holidays. We must recognize that liquidity is thin. But to your point, we've seen four s rate weeks of losses and there are just a lot of things going on. We have renewed geopolitical tensions when it comes to Iran. FED rate cuts are back end focused, especially after last week's inflation report. We also have AI concerns on my inbox, as I'm
sure yours is. It's just full of AI concerns about whether this selloff we're seeing will spill over the tech sector. So all of that is causing Bitcoin, which is now really a risk asset, moving a lot in step with NESDAC. It's really edging lowers, so that's what you're seeing. It's interesting because we still have the original bitcoin proponents saying that this is a haven. This is what you buy and comes when it comes to when there's geopolitical tension,
inflation fears. But for now it's definitely behaving like a risk acid.
Bloomberg's Isabelle Lee with the crypto summary, thank you very much. Latest thirteen F filings from Soros Fund Management has revealed that it's doubled its steak in Microsoft, jumping from about one hundred and two thousand shares to two hundred and sixty three thousand shares. Here with the latest of Bloomberg Hedge Fun reporter Hemma Palmer, what do we need to know here about Soros?
Right, so when we look at his move here doubling his steak in Microsoft, this is a stock that, as we now have seen with the beginning of the year, has become incredibly volatile, down twenty three percent since the end of the third quarter. So you know, these thirteen f's today are actually quite insightful because we're seeing positioning ahead of what's been a chaotic start to the year. So as we can see who made the right best, who is probably in pain, the stock's not doing too well.
Soros also added to Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon, and there's been pain interesting board it has.
It's interesting the thirty and F exercise. Either you start with the hedge fund or the fund, or if you're me, you kind of look at the change of positions of the names.
University of Texas came up. Why yeah.
So on the flip side, they actually trimmed their Microsoft steak and their Amazon position. They ramped up their Apple holding, which has been less painful for them as we look at through the end of September. When we look at these filings through till now, they do have a large portfolio over three hundred positions, so we saw some good rotation in that. But the interesting rove there was ramping up Apple and also trimming.
Microsoft, Bloomberg, Semmapana across all the thirty and f's.
Thank you so much. All right, a lot more to come on the show.
Startup Mesh is out to build the quote largest optical manufacturing footprint outside of Asia, lasers, optics, everything AI. That conversation's next with a funding raise. This is Bloomberg Tech, Elon, Musk, SpaceX and Xai recently merged are competing in a secret Pentagon contest to develop voice controlled autonomous drone swarming technology. According to sources, it's a one hundred million dollar prize that only a handful of companies were selecteds to take
part in. Here with the story, bloombergs Katrina Manson, this was a fascinating read. It's a kind of new domain for SPACEXXAI. It's a contest. What do we need to know here?
This is really the frontier of the future of war. This is everything that folks like Stop Killer Robots and others have been warning about. This is the Pentagon trying to experiment with completely new tech that has so far been failing its experimental and this is a moment really where the AI companies are coming to the fore quite unexpectedly.
Elon Musk is the very same person who's said that he would have nothing to do with new tools for killing back in twenty fifteen when he signed onto an open letter from AI researchers and roboticists saying we do not want autonomous weapons. And now this is the Appentagon trying to create autonomous weapons. These are weapons that can
select and engage targets of their own accord. The contest is not explicitly saying they will be doing that, but they are saying that drones will be moving around and taking commands from voice and turning those into digital instructions.
I don't know that the price money is necessarily that. The main headline for SpaceX right. What you do really well in your reporting is explain where the technology's at and where you know where various institutions want it to get to. So we have drones, but it's this swarming idea in the I guess defense use case what needs to be cracked.
I think there are four stages. First, as you say there are drones. Everyone's become familiar with drones because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Elon Musk himself said in twenty twenty four that if there is a major power war, it's going to be a drone war. So everyone is very focused on what that might look like. In the case of a US traina contest over Taiwan, people have flown multiple drones together. That's not the same
as a swarm. A swarm really is where the drones talk to each other, they interact with each other, and ultimately potentially carry a payload or a weapon and can drop that weapon on a target. Weaving in ai to do that for targeting, automatic targeting recognition, and in this case to take a command from someone giving a voice instruction and turn that into a movement or an action is relatively uncharted territory.
I should say that SpaceX and XAI did not respond to our request for comment, which is pretty normal procedure for them.
What they are doing is hiring.
Some interesting roles bikostally, but you know in the classic talent pools of Silicon Valley, what areas.
This is DC in the West Coast, and of course SpaceX a long term defense contractor, but never an offensive weapons nothing ever so explicit. And XAI, I mean, this is grok, this is x We're all going to post the story on afterwards. They are now hiring for people with clearances and that's a real change. They're looking for people with secret clearance and top secret clearance.
Bloomberg Katrina manson Top Reporting, Thank you very much. There are so many other news headlines in the world of tech. Time now for Talking Tech and first Start and Propics. Talks to extend a contract with the Pentagon are being held up over additional protections. The company wants to put on its clawed tool and Propic wants to put guardrails in place to stop Claude from being used for mass surveillance of Americans, or to develop weapons that can be
deployed without a human involved. According to sources, Depentagon wants to be able to use Claude as long as it's deployment doesn't break the law. Plus five Capital has raised more than ten billion dollars for its largest fund, Yet the venture firm founded by Josh Kushner draw far more demand than it could accept, turning away billions of dollars
from prospective investors. The interest underscores the success of several of its portfolio companies, including open Ai, SpaceX, and Stripe, and sticking with capital, the firm just back to startup building optical transceivers that are crucial for data centers. The startup is called Mesh Optical Technologies and was founded by SpaceX alumni, and it's raised fifty million dollars led by Thrive to scale manufacturing of the technology in the United States.
The company's co founder and CEO, Travis Preshiers, joins US, Now this is such an interesting field.
It's one that Nvidia has.
Looked at the use of optic optics in GPU is also OPU is.
Being looked at.
Let's start with what you're offering, the actual technology itself, which we wrote about this morning.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.
And yeah, we're we just announced that our our company, Mesh Optical, coming out of Stealth. Here we are standing up high volume optical manufacturing of these optical interconnects that are used for all GPU clusters. So anytime you hear someone talking about a GPU cluster, there's four to five
of these optical transceivers for every one GPU. And so yeah, we're excited to offer our first product as what we call a linear pluggable optic and it's at like a one point six terabit per second data rate, which is like what the state of the art will be in the coming years and all these GPU clusters.
Jere, you were at SpaceX for about five years. You're the laser guy right working on the technology stack that helps satellites communicate. Essentially your co founders also SpaceX alumni in slightly different domains. But how is that transferable to what you're doing here in the first instance with the transceivers.
Yeah, great question, and no, I was super excited to have part of a lot of the team that I worked with there flying the Starlink laser medice, and we're very.
Proud of what we did there.
And you know, I think about the job here every day and I feel very similar, about very similar to what I was doing at SpaceX.
And you know, SpaceX, the space Lazer.
Team was quite small and a very awesome team, and we're building the same thing here, a very small, like technical oriented team with really talented individuals, and the day to day feels very similar.
We're you know, building standing.
Up high volume production, trying to deploy as much hardware as possible, and co locating the talent right next to the manufacturing line, and so yeah, it feels very similar.
This is about more than the underlying technology, right. This is a field where the supply chain is dominated by China, and so one of your ambitions is to is to exceed that bring capacity to the United States. And you put a timeline at twenty twenty seven on that. This is a big, sort of big debut funding around. But what's the roadmap from here? You're going to need more capital. What are your priorities?
Yeah, our priority is to build as many optical interconnects as possible and deploy as many of those as we can. So for the immediate term, it's getting to high volume of this first device we're making, while at the same time planning for our long term ambitions of doing space based laser communication and eventually one day propelling spacecraft with photons.
Right, right, So explain that distinction, right in the first instance, who's the customer data center on Earth and then in the future there is a distinction on this happening in space.
Yeah, yeah, So first customer, you know, we've got to help the US deploy this compute on the ground as fast as possible. And you know, there's a big vulnerability in the supply chain with regards to optics and the way those optics are assembled and manufactured all overseas, and standing up a secure supply chain outside of uh, you know, Asia and China specifically, really helps us leverage our product
into all of these data centers on the ground. And when we show how much volume we can do on the ground, it's you know, then we have to start pushing that volume to space, and we'll be the one strategically set up to do that.
Just real quick.
On Frive Capital a big day for them and they're leading you around. Why is it important that they are backing you.
Yeah, they from the beginning have just been ready to go with us.
And deploy quickly.
And you know, our goal is to stand up this volume production as fast as possible. And they were also willing to work as fast as possible with us, and we really appreciate appreciate them, like back in the founder and also wanting to accelerate.
From the time that you're at SpaceX. Clearly like the bigger vision has changed right now, space based data center like that, that's what we're going towards. Do you expect to work with your old company and with Elon Musk to try and pitch the technology back into them.
You know, I'd always love to keep working with them and help I just want to help connect as much compute and send probes to deep space as much as possible, and whoever we can work with on.
That, I'm very excited to do that.
And you know, connecting everything from the ground to space, it's going to need to transition to optical because RF reaches a limit and optical photons are much more efficient and power efficient and the things the constraints on the ground are power, and the constraints in space are also power, and so it leads very well for what we're making here.
We are we're hearing that a lot on the show of Late Photons of the Future. Travis Pasheer is co founder and CEO of Mesh. Thank you very much. Now, coming up, digital talent manager Night raises a new funding round as it looks to expand its business.
We have more on that next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
Talent management firm Night has raised seventy million dollars to expand its business across music, sports, gaming, and live events. Knights founder and CEO Reduction joins us. Now this is this is digital Hollywood, right and the management of top talent. It's interesting to grow through venture. What do you need the funds for?
Yeah, we're going to use it for a few different things. I mean, we're primarily focused on talent management here at Night, but we do have a venture studio. You know, we've gone onto fun things like feastables and tone with Kaisanat, and so for us, I think like the thesis was always that talent of the future are born on the Internet. That is very much still our thought going into the future and so we're going to use that to be like, what we think is the Internet's media company.
Which platforms right now are launching careers. I know that that is a broad question, but if we talk to the giants in broadcasting and streaming, or we talk to YouTube, right they would all kind of accept that it is a battle for eyeballs, even if they're slightly different mediums. So which platform you're seeing launch the people that you hope to serve?
Yeah, I think there's two that stand out to me, especially in my industry. YouTube obviously being the first, Like we just saw that they announced they have almost thirteen percent of connected TV watch time, So they're beating Netflix, they're beating Amazon, they're beating HBO.
You know.
The next one is TikTok. I think just primarily because of the discoverability of content through short form, like it doesn't matter if you have ten followers or a million followers, Like a good video can get a lot of use and go viral.
And so I think that has.
Created a lot of careers just because of that top of funnel that's created regardless if you have followers or not.
You you've been at this a while, right, this is not as if Night just suddenly came about Overnight's ten years of work. I think now at this stage the timing of the rays, what was the strategy behind that read.
Yeah, we've grown very linear over the last ten years, you know, through signing different talent through the Venture Studio. It felt like a perfect time for us. You know, we feel like we've never been more right than we are right now in our thesis of Internet native talent being the future of celebrities. And so for us, like the last ten years, we're all about, like how do we educate, how do we continue to represent the biggest talent on the Internet. You know, we think the next
ten years like attention is the currency. You know, we think that individuals are more or consumers are more loyal to individuals now more than ever. And so as we continue this thesis, you know, this is a company that hopefully I can run for the rest of my life. We'll see, but I think, like, you know, the next ten to twenty years, like we still believe in this like internet first talent born on the Internet, the future
state of celebrity is born on the Internet. And so it felt like the perfect time for us to make a larger move.
You've done some some m and a for one of a better expression. Two thousand and four, Night acquires the Roost podcast network.
Last year Experiential Supply Co.
Is this kind of the plan now, like the seventy million dollars can go towards some interesting properties like that.
Yeah, we've done those organically off the balance sheet. Like we've always been a profit company, you know, We've had a successful career, and so we bought the Roost for Warner Brothers when they were looking to sell that asset. Really like building our media sales apparatus. Acquiring Experiential Supply was you know, another thesis that we're going to continue to run after. Like we do think the world lives on the Internet, and we do think the future state
of celebrities are born on the Internet. But we also think that consumers value in person experiences more than ever in the future. We are still bullish on live events and experiences for individuals, and so that was a lot of bad acquisition. You know, the money will go towards you know, buying things that makes sense for the culture
that we've built here over the last ten years. Businesses that we think intersect with the Internet, and so a lot of what we're going to look at going forward is as things in those categories.
Read from Night's perspective. How do you think about what's happening with Warner Brothers, Discovery, the Netflix part, the Paramount's guidance part. You know, does it have some ripple effect in your world where the talent's heads get turned about the health of industry wide or it's just not a concern.
No, it does.
Like I think the issue is just the consolidation of all these companies provides less buyers in the ecosystem, and so you're seeing a contraction of shows getting sold and we've now seen that over the past three to five years.
I think that's just going to continue.
I think the consolidation, you know, worries a lot of people, Like we are based in Los Angeles, although we aren't necessarily traditional Hollywood, you know, we do have shows and have sold shows to those streaming services. I think the interesting place where we sit as a company is that ninety percent of our client roster sees YouTube or being a large YouTube or TikTok creator as the endgame for them, Like they want to be large Internet personalities. They want
to control their intellectual property. They want to can control their editing and have final cut and final say in the product. And so I think it affects us way less than it maybe affects the traditional talent management companies whose revenue concentration is primarily through entertainment services that's provided from a TV network or a Netflix. Where ours, like the primary revenue source is YouTube, ad sense, brand sponsorships.
It's very different, and it's although it does affect us, it's on a much smaller scale.
Reductcher, founder CEO of Night, It's great to have you on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. So does it for this assition of Bloomberg Tech. What we were just discussing right this morning's news that Netflix is issued a waiver to Warner Brothers Discovery allowing them to negotiate with paramounts guidance. It's seven days through February twenty third, and Paramount either has to improve their bit or something happens
with Netflix, which is a bit softer. They came out with a strong statement saying that they feel very confident in their existing bid and you can definitely go back listen to the conversation looking sure in markets More.
Broadly, we are seeing volatility.
We had some serious declines at the index level, the NASDAK one hundred, the mag seven names, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, they were all markedly lower. Now actually the socks is higher, but there has been volatility coming with that. Will continue to track it. As I said, please recap. We have the podcast. You know exactly where to find it on the Bloomberg terminal as well as online Apple, Spotify and iHeart this is Bloomberg Tech.