Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Best Of Bloomberg Technology 20240714

And mind games. Elon musk flames new technology can read a rats mind. Elon musk announces his latest startup neuro link, successfully implanting wires into brains and enabling a monkey to control a computer. The next goal, human trials. We begin with the hearings on capitol hill. Facebook, amazon, apple, google all appearing in washington to answer lawmakers questions on antitrust, social media, and cryptocurrency. The first to be raked over the coals, facebook, as the Banking Committee fired searing questions at the cocreator of the social Networks Cryptocurrency project. We will take the time to get this right. Wouldnt it be easier and safer if people could securely receive money transfers through their smart phones, just like they do for so many other things today . That is what libra is about. Emily the chief was grilled on tuesday. We caught up with the senator after the hearing. Sen. Warner lets start with the fact that i think Blockchain Technology, even the possibly of cryptocurrencies, has some real positive upside, but i think we have to be careful. Particularly when we are talking about the possibility that facebook might dominate this otherwise very disruptive technology. Facebook already has two billion users. It has all of these builtin advantages. We have seen facebook over the last decade plus do what i call catch and kill, where any new entrant into the marketplace, facebook would either copy or they go out and directly acquire, and here you have this Blockchain Technology that might be able to come and disrupt, and again, it appears facebook is using the same strategic effort to say, lets bring some other players in, create this libra network, and then use their market power to create the wallet, where a lot of the transactions will take place. They call it calibra, and my fear would be they would give their wallet solution a great deal of undue advantages and, frankly, mr. Marcus today, i know he wanted to clarify, but it seemed like some of these questions should have been yes and no, and i came away with still a lot of questions that need to be answered. Emily right. So you were not satisfied with david marcuss answers today, it seems. What would your message be now to Mark Zuckerberg, the ceo of facebook . Sen. Warner my message would be blockchain offers an awful lot of possibilities, but you have a burden of proof, facebook, to make sure, one, that they get it right in creating this new network. Two, that it is safe. I thought mr. Marcuss comment that for every crypto dollar, there would be a real dollar or another currency on a onetoone basis backing it up. Thats basically absurd when there is no such requirement in the banking system. It seemed to me, as well, where you have had facebook not be a good steward of so much personal data already, the idea that they would create this new network and not build in implicit and explicit preferences for their own product strains credibility. I was glad to hear him say that if a third party wallet came around, and people do not want to use the socalled Calibra Facebook product but wanted to a third party, they would be willing to transfer the keys, transfer the data, do the other technical transfers to that third party, that was a good sign. And my hope would be as somebody who has Bipartisan Legislation im about to drop that will talk about data portability within their existing networks, my hope would be that facebook would bring that same kind of supporting approach to the legislation that i will bring forward for their existing tools. Emily so, look, there were a lot of issues that came up, adjacent issues that facebook has been dealing with, misinformation, election hacking, fake news. Would you like to see Mark Zuckerberg testify before congress on libra specifically, and again on some of these other issues . Sen. Warner here are the circumstances with facebook. And my office works with facebook on a regular basis, and we are trying to get them and we have made some progress. They have made progress, for example, on some of the Disclosure Requirements around facebookbased political ads, the same way we have disclosure around tv and radio ads, but there are technical issues, and my background was in telecommunications longer than i have been in politics, so i hopefully bring a little expertise here, where we can bring more transparency to this marketplace, whether it is about data valuation, whether it is about data portability and interoperability. They have yet to be willing to kind of lean in and acknowledge what they would be willing to support. Mr. Zuckerberg has been willing to say that he realizes there needs to be some rules of the road for facebook in its current applications. What we have not seen yet is that level of specificity as to which rules of the road they would actually accept, so before we open up this whole new area that could have transformative efforts on the way we transact business in terms of blockchain and cryptocurrency, facebook has got to be proving that they are willing to accept certain rules of the road or regulation around their existing products before we go into this whole new realm. Emily meantime, you had facebook appearing at a House Antitrust Committee hearing today along with google, apple, amazon. Do you think and lets start with facebook, do you think facebook should be broken up . Sen. Warner listen, i am not at that point in time in terms of breaking up some of these companies, but i have not taken that off the table because i think there may be ways to add more competition if we have more of this transparency and data portability and interoperability. I think we can step back from some of the breakup calls if we put in place appropriate privacy protections, the way europe has done already. I think we could have a little more forward leaning if facebook was willing to acknowledge, or twitter for that matter, when youre being communicated with by a bot versus a human being. There are things in a legislative area that if we move forward on, i think would take off the pressure, at least vis a vis facebook or google in terms of some of the break up calls. But if we do not see these Platform Companies actually roll up their sleeves and give us some framework and some abilities so that americans or, for that matter, folks around the world have a little more transparency, a little more protection of their data, know what data is, in a sense, being sucked out of them already, and what that data is worth, then i think we may have to look at more radical solutions. Emily meantime, investor peter thiel has called out google for what he calls seemingly treasonous work with china. We do not have specific evidence for his allegations, but the president is now saying that the administration is going to look into googles work with china. Does this concern you . Sen. Warner well, it concerned me when a group of folks at google did not want to work with our Defense Department but were willing to partner with some of the Chinese Tech Companies who were, quite frankly, creating an almost orwellian social credit system, where they monitor the behavior of the chinese population, 1. 3 billion people, in ways that are, frankly, the antithesis of everything that we in the west would support. I think that is one of the reasons why you have seen two Million People a few weeks ago in hong kong go to the streets rather than have the Chinese Communist party system and that kind of orwellian network take over hong kong as well, so i do think there is some explaining that google needs to make. I have met with the google ceo, he said they are backing out of some of those partnerships, and they are willing to continue to work with the u. S. Government, so i think mr. Thiel and mr. Trumps statements are a little overthetop, but i think it is incumbent upon all these companies to frankly go the extra mile to earn peoples trust. And the truth is these Companies Got so large, so quickly, i am not even sure they fully understood the full ramifications of what they were dealing with, and, quite honestly, the regulators and those of us in government have been slow to catch up, and instead, we saw a foreign nation like russia come in and willynilly use youtube, facebook, twitter to massively intervene in our elections, and they continue to massively intervene in trying to pit one american against another, and they have been, candidly, these companies have been slow to acknowledge that and be a more active participant in bringing about these kind of appropriate regulations and appropriate rules of the road. Emily virginia senator mark warner. Coming up, netflix and no chill. The streaming Company Reports underwhelming secondquarter earnings, losing subscribers for the u. S. For the First Time Since 2011. What this means as the competition turns up the volume. And if you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio, on the bloomberg app, and on sirius xm. This is bloomberg. Emily topping earnings news this week, netflix reported a surprise loss of u. S. Customers for the Second Quarter. The streaming giants earnings renewed concerns about Growth Prospects at a time of looming competition. Netflix says it lost 130,000 customers as a result of higher prices and a weak slate of shows. It signed up 2. 7 million global subscribers in the period, also missing projections. We broke down the results wednesday with analyst Michael Pachter and lucas shaw. Michael i hate to bore lucas because he actually tweeted he is tired of talking about this. I think that price increases probably drove the subscriber loss of domestically. And i think that they are probably bumping up against the ceiling on what they can charge and continue to grow. I personally believe that they will keep 80 of their domestic subscribers as high as a 20 monthly charge, but their last 10 million subscribers are probably middle income households and they notice when prices go up a couple bucks. Which they did in january. And i think you are going to continue to see continued defections as content migrates away and as competition starts to materialize. Disney plus in the fall, warner and comcast next year. More content leaving this year and next year. So i think middle income households will probably have to think about whether they subscribe to one, two, or three plans. Yes they can cut the cord and afford all of them, but the fact is netflix saw a decline and that is what Fuels International expansion. They are about to lower prices in india. So i just do not see how they are worth the 450 price target my competitors have on the stock and i think todays correction makes a lot of sense. Emily to avoid being boring at all, you did tweet you would be talking about netflixs quote, unquote big whiff and that you would be duking it out, so bring it. What is your take . Lucas i think the big question is is this a blip or a longterm problem . The Second Quarter for netflix has been a problem in the past. Second quarter 2016 they missed forecasts by quite a bit, though not as much as they did today. If they had warned everybody that this would be a light one. So is this again a onetime phenomenon or is it something where we cannot trust their forecast . Netflixs response to this is that we have forecast seven million and are still on pace for the biggest year yet, but as weve seen, their forecasts cannot always be trusted. They miss on these a lot. So if they miss again next quarter, which comes around the time that disney is introducing disney plus, that becomes a real problem for investors, especially if growth is not only slowing in the u. S. , but slows overseas, which has been the engine for the past few years. Emily lets talk about the Current Quarter where they say they will add seven million subscribers, a huge jump from 2. 6 million. This quarter, we know that Stranger Things is back. As for last quarter they highlighted dead to me and murder mystery, but does this mean it is so dependent on an original hit like Stranger Things, and does that make it more challenging . Because subscriber additions really depend on a huge hit. Lucas sorry, go ahead. Emily michael, you first. Michael you know, i honestly think what lucas said is right. I think this is a blip. I think that Netflix Subscriber growth will be like movie box office. When there is lots of great stuff, they will see an increase in subs. The numbers on Stranger Things are pretty impressive, it is a really good show. They have a handful of really great content, so i think they will probably hit the sub number. The problem is next year when there is competition and we saw a preview of next year with this quarter. So i think next year, you have a couple quarters where they lose subs. Emily lucas, can the hits keep coming . Lucas the other issue i see is look at the volume of shows they released. I know they did not have Stranger Things or orange is the new black. I was doing some research, they would have something new come on every day. Sometimes on fridays they would have five new projects. A documentary, anime, a new movi e. If none of those are moving the needle and it really is only a handful of shows, that is a little bit concerning because of the volume and how much they are spending. That being said, they do have a pretty good track record of coming up with a new big hit every few quarters. And if they can keep that going, they will be fine. But they do seem to have a volume issue. Emily and that is a good point. We have talked a lot about the hit shows, we have not talked about the shows that are truly not great. I have seen some of those. Michael, how good of a Business Model is it to throw everything at the wall and producing a lot of stuff that is not that great . Or is the hbo model of very few, more highquality content, is that better . Michael by my count, netflix produces about 10 times as many shows as hbo and they get about the same number of emmy nominations. So, throwing stuff at the wall, throwing 10x at the wall, they are going to have their hits. I actually think that subscriber growth is going to be based on one of two things. Either watercooler shows like breaking bad and Stranger Things that we talked about, or good enough content, high quantity of ok content. And that is the real acid test. Do they have enough stuff that is good enough to keep us coming back . I actually think all these metrics they are giving us on the crap shows tells us that people are willing to watch whatever they throw at them because they are running out of really great stuff to watch. So you get 40 Million People watching adam sandler, which shocks me. But it happened. [laughter] emily i thought it was pretty good. Lets talk about international. They are saying in q3, seven million additional new subscribers. 6. 2 million of which will be outside of the United States. They talked a lot about india, introducing a cheaper, mobileonly plan. Reed hastings has said they could get another 100 million subscribers in india. Where is the growth going to come from if not the United States . Lucas i think in the shortterm, you are still looking mostly at europe and latin america. Brazil, united kingdom, france, germany, these are the biggest markets according to most analyst reports. Netflix of course does not break be of this out, which would useful for analysts like michael and reporters like me. But longterm, they are definitely looking to asia and have invested a lot of money in additional programming in the region. Particularly in ngf. And this mobileonly plan is a big deal because they have been testing lowerpriced plans in asia the past few months. This is the first time they are committing to rolling one out. It suggests that either they think it will work or that they need to do something to boost growth in that region. It is the first price reduction we have seen netflix take because they are raising prices almost everywhere else. Emily michael, lets talk about the other parts of the story. You have got disney, apple, warner media, all of these other companies trying to take netflix on. Disney is offering cheaper and has a huge library of classics that people keep coming back to over 50 years. How big of a threat is this competition . Michael i think barry diller said it very well a couple weeks ago. Netflix has won. They are not going to go out of business. They are not going to lose a material number of subscribers. The question is, can they grow into their valuation . And i dont think so. International, sure. If they add 100,000 subscribers in the countries they do business, that is 20 million a year and they could do that for another 10 years. Can they continue to grow domestically . No. Can they turn cashflow positive . No, not with the current model. Emily coming up, microsoft has beaten earnings per share. Didnt deliver this time around . That is did it deliver this time around . And elon musk seeks to merge human brains with ai. More on how his neural link neural implants are already working in rats and monkeys. This is bloomberg. Emily microsofts earnings out thursday, driving the market value up to 1 trillion in recent months largely due to the success of cloud computing. That is at the center of analysis of secondquarter results. We talked to former microsoft executive and current ceo of cloud reach aaron painter and bloomberg intelligences anurag rana. Aaron we did not find anything negative so far. The big deal is going to be guidance and seeing how they can come up with firstquarter numbers and also some kind of color about the next fiscal year for them. Emily aaron, the big question is can microsoft keep it up . Now that expectations are so high, can the company continue to deliver in a new tech economy . Aaron i will tell you, cloud reach was a first provider to amazon and google. We have expanded it to amazon in the last few quarters because there is such enormous demand for the services they are providing. I think this is only the beginning of an incredible boom that will continue. Emily are you saying the cloud is going to continue to grow and is not a zero sum game like amazon and microsoft . Aaron absolutely. Every study tells us we are in the early weeks of a long game. Microsoft is on the verge of becoming the corporate cloud. Fresh off the last few days of their big employee and Partner Summit in vegas and cloud reach is a partner, but their big theme is trust. Not just trust with partners but in the enterprise relationships they have, to expand those. Which frankly is a differentiator from google and amazon. Emily that said, when you are the most valuable company in the world, and microsoft does have a more than a 1 trillion dollar market cap, you have a target on your back. What are the challenges . Anurag i think the macro concerns are the only thing that could provide prevent any kind of provide near term headwinds, but other than that i agree with aaron. The market for Cloud Services are so large and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg at this point. The market potential just in the enterprise space is enormous. And microsoft is better positioned than any company. Emily beyond the cloud, pc sales are still a big part of microsofts business. Windows, office. What is happening between the United States and china is a huge issue given the u. S. china supply chain. Given that you worked in china for many years, what do you think the u. S. China the trade war, how will it impact commercial sales for microsoft in china . Aaron microsoft is very focused on this seven billion. They keep talking about the reach. At the amazon conference, you feel they are leading the world in cloud. At google, they feel like they want to. Microsoft knows that they can, and they focus a lot on the incredible reach of every Single Person in the world and how they can tap them with some sort of cloud service. It is hard to ignore china in that context. Emily so if you cannot ignore china, what could a potential impact of the trade war be . This seems to be not subsiding anytime soon. So if tensions remain, what does that mean for microsoft . Aaron the strength in china has been around its Cloud Services. It was early in the market, amazon caught up fast. Both for amazon and azure, looking to go global or access the offerings they are providing outside china. So that market has the potential to continue to go strong, regardless of any iron curtain. Emily microsoft felt the antitrust pain in the 1990s with big antitrust hearings, but they have been largely out of the spotlight with the recent raft of hearings with amazon, google, facebook, apple, all in the spotlight. How can microsoft use that to its advantage . Anurag definitely. It is one of the biggest things for them because they have embraced opensource more than any company i can think of. More than 50 of the instances in azure are opensource. Which is truly remarkable for a company that did not believe in these kinds of products. So the policy of being friendly with their rivals and being able to embrace any other product from their competitors will play in their hand as regulators look at large tech companies. Emily coming up, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee Representative Maxine Waters says facebook ceo Mark Zuckerberg should testify to congress on the social Networks Crypto play libra. We hear from her next. Bloomberg technology is Live Streaming on twitter. Check us out there and follow tictoc on twitter. This is bloomberg. Hey im bill slowsky jr. , i live on my own now ive got xfinity, because i like to live life in the fast lane. Unlike my parents. You rambling about xfinity again . Youre so cute when you get excited. Anyways. Ive got their app right here, i can troubleshoot. I can schedule a time for them to call me back, its great you have our number programmed in . Ya i dont even know your phone anymore. Excuse me . what . I dont know your phone number. Aw well. He doesnt know our phone number you have our fax number, obviously. Todays xfinity service. Simple. Easy. Awesome. Ill pass. Emily welcome back to the best of bloomberg technology. I am emily chang. Earlier we heard from democratic senator john warner of virginia on his questions to david marcus. The cryptocurrency plan was also the focus of a House Committee meeting wednesday, chaired by Maxine Waters. Kevin cirilli caught up with her after that hearing. Marcus came here today at our request to tell us what libra is and what colibra is, and what they are planning and why they are in switzerland all those , questions we asked him. I think he skirted some of the most significant questions. We knew nothing about what they were doing and how they were doing it, and so he did not answer the question. He tried to skirt that by talking about how they were going to take time. How they were going to give consideration to all the questions, et cetera, and ensure that they would not harm consumers, but it was not good enough. Not only did he skirt the question about the moratorium, we specifically asked about regulation and what regulators do. He think should oversee them, and and i specifically asked about epsoc, and he did not answer that. He skirted that. Kevin earlier in the week i was at the press conference with steven mnuchin, but there seems to be some agreement and the has, thatskepticism the white house has, that you have with Digital Currencies. You mentioned epsoc. The secretary of treasury mentioned another which one. Regulator will be taking the lead on Digital Currencies . At this time, we do not know. As i understand it, the feds have an Advisory Committee. There may he and Advisory Committee over at advantech. May be an Advisory Committee over at advantech. I dont know. One of the things we have to know and understand is what is it . What is it . What is it . Is it a Payment System . What do they do and how do they do it . And so you cannot even decide what regulator would oversee the m without understanding what it is. Kevin so what is the next step . And that is truly the number one question i get when reporting on this, people dont know what these Digital Currencies are or how they will use them. So you as the chairwoman of this committee, what is the next step in this process . As you know we have a lot of , investigation to do. We are going to have more hearings. We are going to talk with the experts out there who know a lot about cryptocurrency and can tell us about the history of bitcoin, block chain, and how it has all worked, so we will be learning an awful lot. We will have more hearings, and it was requested today by one of our members that we get mr. Zuckerberg here. Kevin you agree with that . You think you should come . Absolutely. Kevin so you are calling on Mark Zuckerberg to talk about calibra and libra . That is one of the things we have to do. This is a big idea that is born out of facebook. If he is big enough to create an idea that is global in nature, then he should be big enough to talk to us about it. Yesterday when david marcus questioned in the senate i put , this question to the chairman crapo. I said, would you use libra . He said he does not even use facebook. Same question to you, madam chairwoman, would you use Facebook Libra . All i know is the faith i have in the american dollar, i love the american dollar. I am concerned about libra competing with our dollar, so i am not concerned at all about whether or not im going to use libra as of today. No. I dont know what it is, how it works, so im satisfied with the american dollar, and i am very concerned about any currency that will compete with it in the way that they talk about cryptocurrency doing. Emily that was bloombergs Kevin Cirilli with chair Maxine Waters of california. Meantime in europe, france and the u. K. Are looking at their relationship with big tech. The french push back despite the opinion from the United States. Alex webb brought us this report from london. Alex on july 11, french makers lawmakers passed a new Digital Sales tax, which will see a levy of 3 imposed with revenue over 750 million euros. And carrying out some digital in france. The huge change here, it will be affecting revenue and not profit. The interaction with the customer is something that has been a huge debate, whether the tax should be imposed on companies, where they make their profit, california, or where they have the interaction with users. There is a debate on how the u. K. Has already put in place a similar process to impose this sort of sales tax. It has caused discontent in the u. S. And germany where they sell capital goods in the country, but they might also sell Additional Services on top of it which would then be subject to such a tax if imposed globally. There are difficulties for the companies as well. They are concerned there is a lack of clarity in the french tax on what exactly they need to be paying their taxes on. Either way, there will be a big tax bill going frances way in the near future. I am alex webb for Bloomberg Opinion in london. Emily sticking with European Tech regulation, amazon is facing a fullblown European Union antitrust probe. The e. U. Competition Commission Says it will ff it will escalate its investigation targeting the companys marketplace platform. We will listen to an explanation about the amazon complexity. Amazon has this dual role, they are hosting a number of businesses, but they are also competing against those businesses in the trade they do. We are looking into their use of data to see if it is in a fair way or will there be a case . Emily joining us to discuss, our Senior Executive editor of global tech brad stone. How big of a blow would this be . In the shortterm, probably not a huge blow. These things take a long time. Google is currently facing over 9 billion in e. U. Fines. It has been appealing them, so that continues. This is the beginning of an investigation. At least the expansion of an investigation for amazon in the e. U. But i think vestager is going to demand a kind of level of information that amazon has been unwilling in the past to provide. You know, to the extent to which the Company Takes data from its marketplace how certain products are selling, seasonally, overall, and then moves those products into its first party marketplace. In other words, decides to sell what other sellers are offering, for sale itself on the first , party marketplace. Amazon says it does not look at individual sellers data. If vestager could demand information from the company about that, we might find out if that is true or not. Emily also this week, youve got democrats calling for an investigation into amazon warehouses. This is amazon was one of the four companies on capitol hill today being asked questions on antitrust. Talk to us about this potential warehouse investigation that democrats are calling for. Brad it is not a great political environment for any of the big tech companies. Amazon about to hit the 1 trillion market cap again. Bezos, the wealthiest guy in the world, they are obviously a target. I sort of went in and out of the hearings today so i did not hear the specifics about this purported investigation into the fulfillment centers. You know, i think, look, i think amazon, it has a massive supply chain. Hundreds of thousands of workers around the world in its fulfillment and sortation centers, driving its vans and its trucks and flying its airplanes. I dont know practically how you would conduct oversight. Im sure there could be pockets of workers being poorly performed. I mean, overall, i think they do a fairly good job. It would be hard to conduct that kind of oversight in any practical way. Emily we are in the middle of the second day of prime day. Amazon tweeted it was the biggest 24hour sales day in amazon history, at least day one. We are still waiting on final numbers. You know, there were some shoppers complaining that they were seeing technical glitches. There was a spike in searches for canceling amazon prime. So, presumably some of those people signed up bought some , things and wanted to cancel. What is the verdict so far, 36 or so hours . Brad sitting back and watching prime day, you have to marvel at what is sort of marketing event they have concocted out of thin air. They have created a Holiday Season in the middle of the summer. A Holiday Season comes brings with it a lot of problems. Youve got porch pirates. Youve got disappointed customers. You know, all sorts of things the company the frenzy. Accompany the frenzy. Overall, you have to sit back and admire the company for bringing itself to a peak season in the middle of the slowest time of year, right . They have created a frenzy where otherwise none would exist. They not only have done it themselves, but brought the rest of the Online Retail industry along with them. You see everyone else offering sales as well. The canceling prime thing is funny because there will always be a certain number of customers that will take advantage of the system. While that was the headline today, we will also find out how many people signed up for prime because of prime day, and i am sure that is a large number too. Emily coming up, transmitting data between peoples brains and computers. It is part of elon musks venture neurolink. , he claims that technology is not that far off. We will have all of the details. It has been 50 years since the nasa Apollo Mission put a man on the moon, we will talk to entrepreneur and scientist about moon shots and silicon valley. The captain of moonshots. Alphabet x lab. This is bloomberg. Emily teslas elon musk revealed his once secret project this week and gave them the first look at a venture that will merge the human brain with ai. At a San Francisco event, they showed they can record a rats brain activity with thousands of tiny electrodes surgically implanted in the animals brain. The goal is implanting devices in humans, allowing them to controlled phones, computers, and even trade thoughts digitally. And musk says the company is not far off. We hope to have this aspirationally in a human patient before the end of next year. This is not far. Emily bloombergs ashlee vance. She attended the event and explains how this works. Elon musk, itith is a bit of an adventure. So i got to go to the neuralink offices and several of their laboratories before the event. And so i actually saw a mouse that had gone through the procedure that elon is talking about. And so basically they drill this small hole in the skull of the mouse that i saw, then they have what is essentially a computer chip at the top, then they call these they call them threads these wires packed with electrodes that actually go into the brain. In humans, it would be the same thing with the first human patients they want to drill four holes into your skull, then you would have a device that connects those sensors to a device behind your ear. That device behind your ear would just talk like your iphone app and basically read your thoughts. Emily the wires you write about are about the width of a human hair. How do they know what the rat is thinking or that they are recording what the rat is thinking is indeed what the rat is thinking . That part is actually wellknown neuro science. People have been monitoring animal brains and human brains in all kinds of different ways for many decades. What they are really tracking is these electrical impulses that happen in your brain and irans. It is like a computer chip, it is binary and your neuron reaches this action potential where it gets enough juice and it fires. Thats when Something Interesting happens in your brain. And so that is what they are tracking. The electrodes sitting in your skull are reading the electrical activity, and then we have done this enough that we can translate what we see in that electrical activity via software and that there is Something Interesting on the other end. Emily the real sort of bombshell was that musk said they would be able to get a monkey, via this procedure, controlling a computer. Tell us about it. Ashlee yeah. There have been rumors that this had been doing primate research, which is very controversial for all kinds of reasons. I was at the event last night and i know they have been trying to keep that a secret leading up to it. And elon musk, being elon musk just let the monkey out of the , bag, i guess. The whole team was standing behind him, they were shocked. Im sure they were planning to announce this down the road. There are these huge questions. It is like ok you can do this on , a rodent, but what happens when you get to a primate, when you get to a human . We know now that they are farther along than we thought. And to be doing this after two and a half years is pretty impressive. Emily so, how realistic is it to think that they could get approvals from the fda for human trials early next year . Ashlee i mean, you know, i think elon called that aspirational. Aspirational in elon terms is usually even more dramatic for other people. I mean it is a huge bar. , not only do you have to prove that these things can sit in your head for a long period of time, which has been a huge question. That has really been what has slowed down the science, that your brain rejects these probes. Your brain moves and disrupts them, but then you have to prove that this can actually do something therapeutic. And so you know like you were , saying, yes, we can read these signals, and we know something about whats going on, but can you actually translate that into something that helps someone who is paralyzed, or that has parkinsons, or that has lost their sight . This is a huge open question where you would have to do trials and find out. And so you know if they get the , fda trials next year, that would be quite a miracle, i think. Emily talk to us about the bigger vision here that musk has that is fascinating but frightening, as always with elon musk, that humans have some sort of symbiosis with ai, coming from the same guy who said we should all be afraid of the ai apocalypse. Ashlee yeah, this one was a hard one to square. Asnging the ai apocalypse up of the same time being afraid of it. Onstage at the event last night, his argument was that this procedure would become sort of like something you could equate to like a lasik procedure. You could go in for an hour and get this in, so regular consumers would do this. And so if you had this computer enhancement in your head, maybe you could keep up with artificial intelligence. You could you would be , supplementing your own brain and maybe doing things that ai cannot do. Elon saw this as an equalizer maybe for the people who want to elect to have this kind of surgery. And so it is either the ais and the robots go on without us, or maybe we can join them and keep up. Emily tesla on the defense following more frustrations the company is cutting prices on the model three. The latest can place latest complaints in this story. So you think customers would be happy about a price cut, but you profile the guy who literally bought his model three days before, or maybe a day before the price was cut thousands of dollars. Tell us what happened. He bought a model three fully loaded. The performance addition, 68,000. At the end of last month, the very end of last month, he knew the tax credit was going down in july. Well then comes this month, elon cut the price of that car by more than 6000. If you wouldve bought it this month, even if you factor in the tax credit change, he still would have saved 4500. So he is fuming mad. Emily talk to us about how this is renewing concerns about demand for the model 3. Of course it is important potentially tied to the tax credit, but what about demand in general . Right. You know, elon musk has very High Expectations for sales of this model. So he has had a series of price cuts throughout the year, which has sort of confused and frustrated consumers. The gentleman that i profiled talked about how one of the reasons this is the third tesla he has bought. One of the reasons he buys is because of the price certainty. He said unlike other dealers where they are bargaining on price, he felt confident that the guy buying the car behind him would not get a better deal than he did. That is not what happened this time, so he said this shakes his faith in tesla. Emily coming up, the 50th anniversary of nasas moon landing. We will hear from the head of alphabets x lab whose job it is to find the next moonshot about the future of the space industry. This is bloomberg. Emily finally this hour, saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the nasa apollo moon landing. In the decades that have followed, Space Exploration has shifted to private companies, like spacex and blue origin, both competing for first. Earlier this week, i sat down with astro teller, captain of moonshot area that is his official title. Head of alphabets x lab, where he is looking for googles next moonshot. Here is more on this conversation. Astro the biggest impact that nasa has had on this country is not that a few people stood on the surface of the moon. Its the multiple generations of young people who were meaningfully inspired to change their lives and to spend time on technology with aspiration to make the world better because of nasa. Thats the real legacy of the moon landing, not competing with the soviets or exactly how much thrust came from a saturn v rocket. That is, you know, literally in the history books, and it turns out not to matter much. But the inspiration that they created and a lot of these sort of side effects that were learned along the way, you know everything from velcro , to wearable ekgs, an incredible number of things that came out of the effort to put somebody on the moon. It showed that optimism can get things to happen that you would not think could be done. And it has inspired a lot of people. I would like to think about for us at x and other places, we can do our part to do some of that inspiration for the next couple of generations. Emily so nasas budget is a fraction of what it was in 1966. Do you think the u. S. Can have another moon moment without that money . Without that, perhaps, Government Support . Astro it certainly does not break the law of physics. Government is in principle, having less money causes a kind of scrappiness and creativity which is actually very healthy. We practice a lot of that here at x. The government is not always the best at having necessity being the mother of invention. I would like to think it is possible, but that is probably not governments long suit to do more with less. Emily so, do you think that we should still be trying to get to the moon . You know the president has , argued it is a waste of time, waste of money. We should be focusing on mars. Is this still a worthy endeavor . Astro this one drives me crazy. And maybe it is because we are wired around a very different, a very specific kind of purpose here at x. But if you think you know how to terraform mars, could you please terraform the Sahara Desert first . Emily you are going to have to define terraform for me and my audience. Astro if you think that you know how to make mars livable, which is, to put it very mildly, an inhospitable place, and we would have to live there in a circular economy, Sustainable Way because we pretty much have to take most of our stuff with us and then not use it up. We live on this space station that is holding the 7. 5 billion, almost 8 billion of us now. It was literally designed for us, or we were designed for it more accurately. If we cannot make this space station work for us, there is no way we can get mars to work for us. If you know how to make it so we could live on mars, why not for 1 10 of the cost help one million times as many people by going to some desert like the sahara or the mojave or the gobi, lets make those places hospitable again. There are a lot of people who would appreciate that. And a tiny number of people will enjoy being on mars. I dont see how that is helping humanity. Emily so then is what elon musk is doing a waste of time, trying to get to mars . Astro it is aspirational, and i think it could have some of the positive tech benefits and optimism benefits that nasa created. But the if you actually want to look at how much it is helping people, i think we would be better off focusing on the space station that the rest of us are already on here. Emily part of my interview with the captain of moon shots, head of alphabet x labs, astro teller. You can catch more on an upcoming episode of bloomberg studio 1. 0. That does it for this edition of best of bloomberg technology. We will bring you the latest in tech throughout the week. Tune in every day. 5 00 p. M. In new york, 2 00 p. M. In San Francisco, and we are Live Streaming on twitter. Check us out technology. Be sure to follow are breaking global breaking news network tictoc on twitter. This is bloomberg. Paul welcome to daybreak australia. I am paul allen. Kathleen i am kathleen hays. Sophie im sophie kamaruddin. We are counting down to asias major market open. Paul here are the top stories in the next hour. Hong kong street protests taking a new term. Turn. They fire police guess. Taking stock of of the new tech board