Some Life Insurance policies will start seeing vapors as smokers. The ecigarette health scare continues to pose risks. But first, our top story. Mark zuckerberg will get a firsthand look at the growing opposition to facebooks plan to create a cryptocurrency. He will testify october 23. The hearing will examine facebooks impact on the financial and housing industries. My first question is, how significant that it is zuckerberg . It is very significant. Anytime the ceo testifies, it is a big deal. I was there in april of 2018 when he last testified and it was a total zoo. Everyone wants to see him and asking questions. I imagine this will be the same. I know they had been trying to get sheryl sandberg. We wrote about that a couple of weeks ago. It looks like they got someone even better which is her boss. Taylor what do we know about the content of the hearing . Kurt this committee focuses on financial services. They also do housing stuff. Facebook has been accused with issues around its advertising businesses. People are being discriminated for housing related issues. I imagine that will come up. Once you get an executive in front of the committee, pretty uch anything goes. With Mark Zuckerberg being there, i imagine we will hear questions that span the entire gamut. Taylor i think i asked you this before and i continue to be perplexed, does facebook realize the amount of opposition that would be coming their way about cryptocurrency . Kurt its hard to imagine they would have seen this level of pushback. If they had, i would hope that they would have gone out and done some of this work before. It is a tough situation. If they went out and had all of these conversations, it wouldve leaked. People would have said, what is facebook doing . Did they anticipate that Mark Zuckerberg would be testifying before congress four months after this was announced . I have a hard time believing hat. Taylor you mentioned the other times that he and the members of facebook have gone to testify. When you look at the share price eaction during those days, facebook actually rises. Ou see how this testimony goes and antitrust is not a big deal as we thought. It looks like regulators do not have a bigger understanding of how facebook works. Do we assume the same . Kurt i dont know what the stock is going to do but what sually happens is that politicians who spend weeks if not months saying really inflammatory things in the press, all of a sudden they have to ask real questions to these executives. Oftentimes they either have a real answer, which is not all that exciting, or they avoid the question altogether. They have gotten really good at not saying things they shouldnt say. Facebook survived that and Mark Zuckerberg looked good while oing it. Prudential is waiting until the Health Studies came outful federal agencies were highlighting the concerns about vaping and reactive and doing this a few months ago . You dont see Life Insurance companies in particular be very reactive, so i think the fact that prudential is taking it into consideration and what regulateors are saying is interesting. Its my understanding that every Life Insurance company treats it differently. So it is interesting that prudential is saying we looked at our policy and we are go to go change ours. Do you just assume that prudential is the first of many to reenact this policy . Someville treated vapors as smokers. Im not sure it will be a tidal wave but Big Companies are looking at the policies they have and could potentially change it. Thank you. To bloombergs katherine. Public safety is the reason power. P gmp and e to cut the move is to prevent wildfires and protect the public. Never has they cut power to so many people. Oakland and berkeley and San Francisco and Silicon Valley are excluded. We have the latest. So, james, this is seen as a good thing as the prevent tative measures that they are taking . Depends on your perspective and has the potential to limit the wildfires and cause less death. But if you are a customer who lost power for a week, that isnt a good thing at the moment. What are some of the other solutions for them . Do these plaqueouts and technological upgrade. What do they do in this situation . The first thing is no cheap solution to this problem. There is a range of thing they can do and will have to do all of them. They could start undergrounding their Transmission System and that could take a hong time ap start offering subsidies to ustomers toville storage and something they are already doing that. And you need significantly more. They could start developing micro grid in certain communities and shutting off powers. And whether that is something hey want to do is unclear or strategic locations. So there is a range of things. All kinds of op shops will take time to implement. At the gipping of our conversation you said it is good. Who if anyone benefits from this . You couldnt come off the cam paper for buying a generator so and ompany is selling them lar storage and backup power systems. They are happy with the situation because this is a major opportunity to sell more to customers and see a significant boost. We have had news that places like home depot they are running out. Customers are responding to this and prevent themselves. Whether it is people or read about it in the news and wanted a system to be prepared. You mentioned a country. How would they benefit from this . There are other sources of demand and your car is not charged. But one interesting area a couple of companies pushing, more vehicles to grid useing the battery in your car as a power source and power your home or sell energy back to the grid. With events becoming more common there may be more interest and may see that as a phenomenon. What Tech Companies may be if he canned by this . And a lot of backups are occurring in Silicon Valley. A lot of Companies Across the entire california economy is going to be seeing these plaqueouts. And ming up behind tesla its auto pilot feature. Does the company have a long road ahead. And check us out at technology inchollow our network on t ktok. This is bloomberg. Taylor theres increasing scrutiny on unprofitable private companies. I spoke with an investor of sequoia capital. I asked them about quality topline growth at the expense of profits and the competitive software space. It is redefining data anagement. We have great customers. The u. S. Air force. Orthern trust. We did our first 10 plus Million Dollar deal. The problem that we are trying to solve is that data is very sideload siloed in any enterprise. It brings together data on one platform that spans the datacenter and the cloud. Backups happens to be the first one. The movers of tomorrow will be decided by how much value they an extract out of that enterprise data. Taylor what is the biggest change you have seen in the company . What we have seen is what he just articulated. And what they announced so they announced today and their recent performance metrics. It is unusual to see a company that is been in the market for only about three years and having a 10 million software. They are refining data anagement. That is highly unusual for a company at this stage. It is not one customer, it is many customers. We have seen growth in transactions. It is the fortune 100 companies of the world that are employing his. One change we have accomplished in the last year is our shift to software. Our revenues are completely and oftware. We no longer book hardware on our books. That gives a lot of flexibility to our customers. They no longer worry about uying one piece of hardware. They have a choice of many different platforms. We have become a software company. The thing i was going to add that is very impressive is the ecosystem in which cohesity is uilding around them. If you look at the biggest cloud partners, they have deep partnerships with them. As well as the data centers like cisco. They have done a amazing job building a robust ecosystem. Ou dont see that happening at a company of this stage. Taylor as you take a look at cohesity and some of the other companies you are involved in, what is the pressure in the last six months to be more involved on a daily basis . To make sure you are curbing excess spending. To make sure that growth at any cost is not happen under your watch . We pride ourselves on being Business Partners with all of the companies that we invest in. We are making sure that they are growing because growth is a key metric that everybody looks t. But we want to make sure we are doing it. It is not always profitable on day one but we have a path toward profitability. You see hyper scale growth and some of the numbers we were just talking about. We are also trying to do it in a way where we are mining our expenses. At some point, people do look at profitability of startups. While they may not be profitable today, there is a path toward profitability. That is what we see here at cohesity. We have a path toward profitability. That is what we are focused on is partners. We are very fiscally responsible. We have a clear path to profitability. Eventually it is all about Unit Economics. Our Unit Economics are great. We invest more on the growth side because we know that eventually it will move toward profitability. Taylor tesla tends to dominate the global auto market by building its first selfdriving car. Customers adore autopilot. They have logged more than 1. 5 billion miles. Often pushing the limits of the software. The Technology Still has far to go, given that there have been casualties using the future. What was it like to ride in a esla on autopilot . The word i would use is creepy, in the sense that it feels weird to have the car turned the wheel, accelerate, with no input from you at all. It is very humanlike. It really does require supervision. Taylor you hinted on detention, which is this great technology. But casualties are also coming. Is that the internal tension that tesla is facing right now . Zachary their strategy on getting to and antons vehicle is really different from the other players in the space. People like google or General Motors are being very cautious and careful and trying to get to a fully autonomous, functional vehicle before they release t. Tesla is taking their semi autonomous product and trying to put it on the road as fast as they can and sell it to as many people as they can. With that strategy comes risk. People would be out there misusing it. And in some cases dying. But tesla believes they can get to full autonomy quicker that way by having this fleet of cars that have the technology installed. Aylor where is the regulation around this . Zachary to regulators, autopilot right now is simply an advanced driver assistance feature. It is like cruise control. As long as the humans are supposed to be supervising all of the time, regulators are not really, it does not have to pass any special regulatory hurdles. Full autonomy is going to be a big regulatory hurdle in most u. S. States. You have to have a license to drive a car. How do you give a computer that license . Tesla has a way to get something quasiautonomous on the road now without having to meet that regulatory hurdle. Taylor except that tesla has said they want full autonomy by 2020. Then what . Zachary elon musk has said that this year, autopilot will be featured completely. You can turn it on on any kind of road condition. By next year, he expects it to be so good that you wont have to supervise it anymore. That is an incredibly ambitious, bold timeline considering weymo has been working on this on 10 years and they are not anywhere close to having a fully Autonomous Car and theyre not making promises. Taylor we know that elon musk does make bold, grand predictions. Why does he think he can beat out the competition . Zachary the theory is this huge install basis will essentially give them the competitive advantage that they can take data and use all of those cars to train their algorithm to get smarter. The data advantage full actually use them to get to autonomy better. Taylor creepy is the word i will take away from that interview. Thank you for joining us. Coming up, whistleblower is the word du jour in washington. Before ukraine, there was Cambridge Analytical. Why someone spilled the secrets of the data mining company. This is bloomberg. Taylor this is bloomberg technology. Facebook is appealing a ruling that says users can sue the social network over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, saying the Court Decision does not line up with other verdicts by other courts including the u. S. Supreme court. Plaintiffs argue facebook improperly share data with third parties without permission. More than 80 million user ccounts were involved in the scandal. Who better to talk about Cambridge Analytica than the man who blew the whistle on the company . He is also the author of the new book that details the whole series of events. He joins me from new york. Also with me, Bloomberg Businessweek columnist max chafkin. I just wonder as you sit here and reflect, what has your experience been like . It has been intense. Im not going to lie. Writing a book actually helped me really reflect on everything that happened. I talk about my journey from getting recruited at a military contractor to working on modeling and data work that helps identify people who are more prone to paranoid ideation and extremism with the idea of trying to mitigate that problem to having that work completely inverted after an outright billionaire named steve bannon acquired our company to in effect the same thing in america, targeting people who are more prone to radicalization, but in this case, for the altright. Max coming forward the way you did, blowing the whistle on facebook, which as we have set on this program many times, and incredibly powerful Media Company, maybe the most powerful Media Company in history, what was that like . Did you get any pushback, any threats . As you moved to publish the book and tell the story in full, have you heard from them at all . Oh, girl, where do i begin . Before the story emerged, i had een working with Law Enforcement and regulatory agencies months and months before the story broke. When facebook found out that, you know, the story was emerging, something they knew you know, they knew about Ambridge Analytica well before any of this was published. The first thing they do is threaten the journalists of the guardian with in my view, a serious accusation. It turned out it was true. In my case, they banned me from facebook and for some reason, instagram. After that point, working day in and day out with regulatory authorities in the eu, the u. K. , the United States, all over the world, one of the things i really thought is just the power this company has to hide, too obvious get their work, and things that one of the things i came to understand is that, you know, when you go and blow the whistle, you see something that is wrong, and you report that to an authority, you think there will be some guy somewhere in some federal Agency Building that knows what to do. One of the things i realized is that there is not that guy. That guy does not exist. I have talked to governments, regulators, congress, arliament. People do not know how to handle this problem. For me, the real concern is that we have a completely unregulated digital landscape that Companies Like facebook take advantage of. Even though Companies LikeCambridge Analytical now have dissolved and no longer exist, the capabilities are still there. One of the reasons i wrote the book was to serve as a warning. Even if this company no longer exists, what happens if china becomes the next Cambridge Analytica . What happens if north korea becomes the next camp agenda litter ca Cambridge Analytica . Currently, there are no rules. We are entrusting our data to private companies, and i dont think that is a good idea. Taylor i wonder if you think the current regulation and current lawmakers are doing a good enough job handling the problem that you described. One of the things going to congress i realized was the power of lobbyists, particularly to define narratives. One of the questions i would always get at congress is can the law ever keep up with technology . I would say we regulate Nuclear Power plants. We regulate airplanes. We regulate medicine safety standards. Theres all kinds of technologies we regulate in the name of consumer safety. Just because somebody uses software or is on the internet does not mean that we cannot create rules that require companies to consider if the products they are putting out into the public will be safe for people to use. The United States is one of the only oecd countries i think the only oecd country that does not have a National Privacy law. When you look at, you know, the language and the way a lot of Silicon Valley companies talk about themselves they say were a service, this opt in, terms and conditions, all this stuff, get when you look at the types of people who work at the company, right, they are called an engineer or architect, right . They build ecosystems and environments. These are things people are going into. These are architecture. When you look at how we regulate physical architecture or when you look at how we regulate physical architecture or ngineering, where if you build a building without fire access and say its ok because people opted into my building, they walked in and there w