Against gawker. But first, new alliances forged between traditional automakers and the ride hailing challengers. The news comes as a car industry braces for change, especially when it comes to the future of car ownership. By investing in the main players, the biggest car brands are hoping to secure a place in the future. This week toyota tied up with uber and vw took a stake in gett. Here we take a look across the space to see who is leading the pack. Carmakers are choosing sides in the ride hailing wars, this week alone volkswagen invested 300 million in gett and toyota committed an undisclosed amount to uber with plans to get into the car leasing game. In january, General Motors took a 500 million stake in lyft and lets not forget apples billion dollar bet on didi. With traditional Card CompaniesCar Companies looking for a piece of the pie, which are leading the pack . Fueled by mega funding, uber may get all of the headlines, but lyft is taking on a much bigger rival and through International Partnerships with didi and grab. In china, didi claims to have more than 99 of the right ride hailing market. They boost more than 300 million users to my completing 1. 43 billion rides in 2015. Grab dominates in Southeast Asia with the presence in 30 cities across six countries and a fastgrowing motorbike service. Meanwhile, gett, which grew at 300 last year dominates in europe. As these startups scramble for supremacy, it is still too early to tell how the ride hailing wars will play out. Emily now to get a sense of how the ride hailing wars are shaping up in Southeast Asia, i caught up with anthony tan. Grab has raved 700 million from investors and has over 50 of the market share in private cars across the core region. Take a listen. Grab is the largest mobile tech platform in Southeast Asia, we have very localized services. So imagine, we have taxis, cars, and motorbikes. That is right. As you know, motorbikes is, you jump on right behind and it navigates you through the traffic that you would imagine any big city would have. So we get to give back to. 5 hours of 2. 5 hours of commute time too many citizens in jakarta, for example. Emily your greatgrandfather drove a taxi, your grandfather brought the japanese auto market to Southeast Asia and you occasionally drive a grab yourself. Tell me about that. Sure. Cars have been in my family blood for a long time. And because of that, we felt comfortable dealing with, for example, governments, because i followed my father working with governments before we build a factory, getting the appropriate licenses, getting the land. So for us, learning from that, learning from how my family ran business, on how important reputation is, working with governments on a collaborative approach to basically build grab. And that is how it was founded. Our first launch of grab, four years ago, we launched with someone very senior from the government. Emily grab, didi, lyft you announced a Big Partnership in december, which would cover half the worlds population. So how do we see that progressing and when will we see more integration . You will see global roaming product, whereby, for example, you here in San Francisco, you can book a car in beijing, in singapore, and you have access to the Worlds Largest fleet of cars and bikes. Emily so the idea is, if i go to singapore i can open my lyft app and get a car. Right. Note, you dont need to reinstall the app. It is exactly the same experience you have here in San Francisco. Emily when will we see it in full swing . Soon. Emily [laughs] how worried are you about ubers Global Expansion plan . Competition makes us all better. For us at grab, we focus on serving our customers. Going back to the global roaming product. Again, very focused on the customer experience. As we continue with localized relevant services, like grab bike, motorbike taxis, very unique to jakarta, very unique all across Southeast Asia. We are going to add a new payment piece, whereby we think of 95 of civilians use cash and no credit cards. They do not have credit history. We said, hey, how do we reinforce that message . How do we make didi relevant to customers and we are reinvesting in this payment piece to make sure our customers on grab taxi, grab car, grabbed bike, enjoy that. Emily does that mean over does uber does not worry you . For us, it is all about growing the market share and for us it is about serving our customers and winning their hearts. Google is valued at 6. 5 million. What about grab . There is a range of valuations, by the way that we think about it is, are we a good value . Yes, we believe we are. And do we believe investors believe in Southeast Asia . Southeast asia has 630 Million People and one of the fastestgrowing internet populations in the world. Google just released a report on that and people at cic believe that grab is positioned to ride the wave. Emily can you share how much you raised in your last around . In total, close to 700 million. Emily the you continue to raise money to fund the expansion . We are always open to Great Investors and great partners all throughout the world. Today we have seen people like softbang being bullish about Southeast Asia and grab. Emily so, didi for example is said to be targeting an ipo next year, what about you guys . Right now, we target growing rvalue. We have bold ambitions. We always think of how to find great partners, ipos, just one of the many options on the table for us. Emily my interview with grab ceo, anthony tan. Coming up, hpe saw shares surge this week after news that it would be merging with another company, what it means for business and the ceo. And microsoft hits a deck on the eject on the smartphone business with job cuts planned for the department. Is this the right move for the company . We will discuss, next. Emily shares in Hp Enterprise have been riding high this week after the company said they are spinning off the troubled Services Business and merging it with Computer Science corp. In an 8. 5 billion deal. It focuses on service and storage for corporate customers. We spoke to our Bloomberg Intelligence analyst who covers hpe for more details. What is your first takeaway on this deal, is this something expected . It was not expected, but it makes sense. To be quite honest. The focus, one part of the entity focus on hardware, predominately networking, storage, and servers, and then finding a way to exit the Services Business to a company that focuses on exactly that portion of the business, it is a good strategy. It refocuses the company to a smaller piece of the pie, but the risk here is that now you have an extremely smaller pie that you are focusing on. One that is on hardware, predominately selling to corporate i. T. Systems. So, will that be the longterm Revenue Growth area for hpe and do we need services to bolster that . So that remains to be seen. In the near term, this deal makes sense. Emily what does this mean for meg whitman . Look, it gives her a sense of focus. The results bear themselves out. After the split, hp has done well. And now after the announcement of the spinoff of the services, the stock is up. And at the end of the day, cash flow is improving. The debt profile should also get better and these are the Measurable Results that she has improved or things that have improved under her watch. She gets credit for that. Emily this unwinds an arguably bad deal done under former hp ceo mark hurd, years after the acquisition, anything else that you would tease out that we should be watching in the new hp . Look, at the end of the day this is not a Company Either piecemeal or together that is going to post incredible growth rates from a revenue standpoint. This is modest Revenue Growth at best, coupled with heavy cost cuts from time to time, coupled with some acquisition, some digestive chairs hopefully the growth rate this is the way we have to think about hpe and hp inc. In piece or as a whole. Emily that was our senior analyst. Microsoft officially cut loose their handset business, cutting more than 1800 jobs and writing down close to a billion dollars in assets. Two years ago, microsoft spent 9. 5 billion on the acquisition of nokia but the company could not compete against apple and samsung. Even those companies are struggling in a maturing market. We spoke done with the director of mobile Device Research to ask how they see the smartphone orders playing wars playing out. Microsoft has all but given up, does this mean they have given up . They give up in the device war. In terms of software, they have not. They mentioned a third of their customers in the fortune 500 are running their mobile Device Management suite and they have downloaded 300 million uses of software to these alternative devices, they are nonpcs. I think that the way that they will target the mobile market is a lot different than maybe the way we thought they were going to go in and that is through ongoing subscriptions that they are selling to their customers. So, i think they are taking the right approach and taking a completely different pathway than most of us thought, which will probably be a more profitable pathway overtime. Emily microsoft and not happen microsoft did not have a lot of market share to begin with, who gets what is left for grabs and who Gains Momentum and who loses . I would not say there is much left to grab, they were at a point where they were left a percentage of the market. We are seeing big shifts and the vendors outside of apple and samsung, they are still the giant. Even in the most recent quarter, we saw two new Chinese Companies enter the top five for the first time ever. Emily with companies . Oppo and vivo. Now they are starting to get into the 15 20 business internationally. We are seeing big shifts and if you look back three years or four years, we see this occur and people come and go over time. So i would say, those other companies we are seeing today. If you ask me that question in a year and two years later, you will see more localized players because it will not always be the chinese. Emily ok. For microsoft, does this mean no phones, either . I think it is the refocused back on software, which we have been talking about. They are in businesses that grow and create margins, they do not want to be in businesses that have really no margin. This was a business that was a tough one. I think that was a business that Steve Ballmer pushed. It was his last assignment. I think if amy and the della nadella, if they had the oldest decision they probably would not have made the decision. My belief is that they are cleaning up what was part of the old team and this is the right approach and they are repositioning the company around mobility and the cloud. It comes in a different form, which is, these software subscriptions, when i subscribed to office 365, i get them across any device i have. They do not care which device you have, they just want the software on it. I think that has been resonating with cios and that is why you have seen the Enterprise Business do so well. Emily ryan, are there any other small market share players hanging on that you could see also getting out of the business . I think the localized players will come and go. No question about that. Which ones right now, i think time will tell. As we start to see the middle east try to come onboard real strong, we are seeing localized players in india. There are couple big names that have been around that are facing challenges. We have seen a lot from htc, from a hardware perspective, i would say they are at a turning point where it could go out of business. Sony is in the same place. These companies are struggling to make money on hardware and i tend to agree that microsoft is not out of mobile, just in it in a different way. And a much more profitable way. Emily isnt nokia still licensing the name to some companies . You will see that brand, that, no question. They have made public announcements about that. The challenge is they are trying to come back from how low microsoft took the brand. Selling off the feature phone space, that is still a big piece of the market in some areas. I think it holds a lot of weight and it comes with supplychain agreements that will drive that section of the market under nokias brand. Whether they can revive things in smart phones and android, i think it will be a lot tougher. Emily what is the future of microsoft in a world where there is not as much mobile device growth . The high rate cloud, they are on servers and what is happening in the public cloud. You are seeing this as a real focus point that they are pushing towards, they will not give up the software business, but they are starting with cloud first, they want to lead with this solution. If you look at their business in the intelligent cloud, that is outpacing most of their peers. Oracle and ibm are not doing that quite as well, they are outgrowing that space. They have a number of brandnew releases serverside, a brandnew launch of their database which i think will help them in the application portfolio, they have a whole suite of new apps they focus on. Analytics, communications, there are different ways that they are going down that we think are more back to the core of what microsoft was, which was a True Enterprise software company. Yes, do they care about the consumer, they do. But they understand what they are good at and they are going back to their core, in my opinion, from wall streets view, is a good thing. They do not want to accept the decline that they have seen. We are starting to see the operating margin stabilize and improve slowly on the operating margin line. We think, this will be a multiyear shift, this hybrid cloud, last quarter was one of the last worst quarters they have had. He will see the weight of the perpetual cloud and they are pulling along a big business. We think they are architecting the right future, it will just take time. Emily that was ryan reese and brent of ibs. And peter thiel strikes back, we will bring you the full story on how he has been eagerly funding hulk hogan in multiple cases against gawker. Emily this week we learned billionaire investor and facebook board member peter thiel secretly helped bankroll the Defamation Case that resulted in a 140 million verdict against gawker media. The lawsuit was filed by hulk hogan in 2012. And the ruling in the case threatened gawkers very existence. It is legal for third parties to back losses, but peter thiels involvement highlights how it can influence the state of the media organization. Owen thomas outed peter thiel. He is not Business Editor for the San Francisco chronicle. I caught up with thomas on the latest development. Emily so, knowing what you know now, do you have any regrets about writing the story . I have no regrets. Emily why not . First of all, i do not believe i outed peter thiel. I think he did that himself to a wide variety of Silicon Valley. Who then took it upon themselves to say, this is ok for but the masses should not know a detail about one of our own. Emily just because he told people who know him, does that mean it should be public . If it is an open secret, why cant you discuss it . Gawker was founded to discuss open secrets. And as a gay man emily as a gay man yourself . As a gay man myself, not i feel like we need to live in a world where it is ok to say this person is gay, that person is gay and it is not viewed as a schoolyard taunt, but a human fact about someone that is interesting. Interesting because not everyone is gay, we are a minority within the population, but it should be ok to discuss. Emily what are your thoughts . It is also ok not to be. It is ok not to be gay, i support your right. And i support yours, i think it should not matter and we are moving toward a world where it does not matter. And thats a good thing. But if it does not matter, why not say it . Might issue is shouldnt a person be entitled to be able to determine to whom they say it and when they say it, when it is their personal business . Whether it is about this subject or any subject, to be honest with you. Yes. It is not whether it is gay or not gay but shouldnt a human being be able to determine how they want to express themselves, whether you agree or i agree. That is my issue with it. Emily when you published the story, did you and nick denton, publisher of gawker, discuss this, debate it or was it an automatic yes . Denton had the conversations with nick denton were typically one way. He would give me a tip and i would run with my investigation, my reporting, my journalism to see if there was a story there. That is typical between any editor and their boss of the editorial chain. You get a possible story, you look into it, you determine what the story is that you want to write. This was a story i wanted to write. Emily nick denton just released a letter to peter thiel saying this vindictive decadelong campaign is out of proportion to the hurt you claim. Your plaintiff lawyer has sued not just the company, but individual journalists. Thiel told the New York Times i refuse to mean a journalism means massive privacy violations. Think much more highly of journalists than that and i do not believe they are in danger fighting back against gawker gawker. Against i think the larger issue here is, should billionaires be able to dictate what is said about them. Do we want to live in a world where the subjects of coverage get approval over every single thing a journalist writes . If they dont like anything you write, are they going to fund a secret lawsuit,