Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Bloomberg West 20160406

More convinced than ever that there should be hearing on president Obamas Supreme Court nominee. Susan collins met with Merrick Garland on capitol hill for more than an hour. She is one of two gop senators to call for hearings, but Senate Majority leader, Mitch Mcconnell said there would be no hearings or votes. Polls show ted cruz leading donald trump in todays wisconsin primary. Cruz got a big boost when he was endorsed by the state Governor Scott walker. Bernie sanders has a lead over democratic frontrunner hillary clinton. Global news 24 hours a day, powered by our 2400 journalists and more than 150 news bureaus around the world. From the Bloomberg News room, i am mark crumpton. Bloomberg west is next. Emily im emily chang and this is bloomberg west. Coming up, twitter seals the deal for streaming rights on thursday night football. The Details Behind twitters latest play for online programming. Plus could home advisor be the tech uniform . We talked to the ceo about plans to scale up. And bonos private equity firm is winding down. First, to our lead. Twitter making a strategic push into online programming. The social Networking Company will stream 10 thursday night Football Games to the public for free, simultaneous to their broadcast on tv networks and the nfl cable channel. The winning small bet is is said to be in the neighborhood of 10 million competing offers from yahoo , amazon and facebook. Joining me to discuss it is the ceo of revolt media. Here in the studio is our reporter who broke the story. Sarah you broke this story , because of another story you broke last week about facebook backing out of its bid. What happened here . Sarah scott on our sports team has been a good reporter on this. Basically, when facebook backed out of the bidding, and made it clear to twitter that something was up for grabs. Everything started to accelerate from there. What we see is something that is good for the nfl and good for twitter. The terms seem a little cheap, right . The nfl has gotten paid 17 million for a single game in the past, but they wanted something that could reach consumers on mobile, that was more of a Second Screen alternative as opposed to something that was just like tv. Maybe verizon or amazon would be a more td alternative. Tv alternative. Emily nbc and cbs are paying 450 million year to air thursday night Football Games. Given the small price tag, who wins and who loses . Guest the fans win, the nfl wins. If we look at the fluid that flows through the business engine of the nfl, it is purely green. The nfl is looking through the windscreen, not the rearview mirror. If you really think about it, this little device looks like a small football field. They are taking chances and being entrepreneurial. If you look at the 50th anniversary of the super bowl, our Attention Span is perfect for this little device. I think it is a great addition to the nfl playbook. Emily what do you make of the economics here . Is this a win for twitter . Guest it is a great win for twitter. Andy is right, allows them to get into the game with one of the most powerful broadcasting entities that exists today. The nfl has the power of tremendous networks and for them to have that opportunity, it really makes it work. I think it is a smart idea. More importantly, the nfl is being smart because they are helping to price the value of what these rights are. This is a new area they are going into and instead of trying to go for the highest price now, they are going to see how it works for twitter and twitter needs to have some wins. They are going to put a lot of attention into this to make sure it works as well. Emily yahoo stream to game streamed an nfl game last year that did not air on the Major Networks and paid twice as much. Yahoo said 15 Million People watched that game online. Others say the experience was a bit buggy. Was that a success . Guest a bit buggy, i love that term. The nfl has a challenge in terms of the world market. Even baseball in asia and central and south america, they have that expansion. But what the nfl is doing is , trying to get to the millennial fan, trying to make sure they dont lose the next fan base in the united states. The money doesnt matter now. The fact that they are agile and that this was a short term deal and they have all her partner their partners signing up on this is a new wave. They look at teamwork and this is an option that shows teamwork, agility and nimbleness and that is important in our society today. Emily what would it take to make this a longterm deal . Do you think the nfl is merely experimenting with twitter to partnerso other bigger to come, or could you see twitter being a partner for the longhaul . Guest twitter is a partner now. Theres a lot of discussion about whats happening in the nfl. To go ahead and give the opportunity to streamline games as well, the package of games, gives twitter the opportunity to go deeper. What they are doing is helping to establish another voice in taking the conversation that goes on during the game and making it part of the experience. It is an excellent move. Guest they look at halftime, they go in and make their changes and come out. This is all about how we can deal in todays world, which is changing by the nanosecond and the nfl is ahead of it. Emily how many new users will this actually add . Our colleague says will not add any. Sarah one thing to remember about how this is structured according to a source at twitter is that this is going to be a player with tweets running alongside it. That can be embedded on other websites, so driving traffic act to twitter or back to other websites. Emily so this is like the nfl twitter account . Sarah people will be able to tweet it out and share it. Other news websites and around the web you will be able to find , the player with the tweet being sent out alongside. Twitter has been doing a lot of tweet duration with moments and this is going to be driving people into twitter. But whether they will make accounts, i dont know. Mi we will have to see. We will watch how it plays out. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Staying with twitter, the Company Announcing a major change to its parental leave policy. Starting next month, the microblogging company will offer a genderneutral leave. Guaranteeing any new parent up to 20 weeks of fully paid time off. Twitter is following the light of other major tech players like etsy and facebook who offers similar benefits to employees. Coming up, tech investors for Elevation Partners are on to their next act. We will tell you about their new project, next. Emily global stocks tumbling, falling the most since february. Id like to bring in ramy inocencio. How did they do . Ramy the s p 500 down by as much as 1 . The nasdaq down by a merely a smug. Nearly as much. This was over a nude pessimism from u. S. Growth as well as mobile growth today. For the past two days, weve seen the biggest all inequities sincel in equities february 9. The biggest one is apple, down by 1. 2 . This is actually gets its biggest fall in the past six weeks and getting a knock on effect on the news coming from the department of treasury about those in versions we have been talking about all day. One analyst said the rule could hurt earnings by 13 . By 15 . Hes keeping his apple as his top pick. Generally it was across the , board in red. Microsoft down by 1. 5 . The most of the fake stocks facebook down by about one third. If you use whatsapp, facebook owns that. It started its endtoend encryption and you probably saw a popup. Twitter was down by about a quarter of a percent. The twitternfl deal is in the spotlight. It could not want onto those gains, though. Earlier it was up 5 , closing down by about a quarter of a percent. Very quickly, Gilead Sciences was the big leader today, up by 1. 5 , hitting its highest price since january. That is after bml initiated a new market performance. Credit squeeze upgrading the stock there. Overall, a down day. Emily thank you so much. I want to talk about Elevation Partners, the private equity firm cofounded by bono. Maybe winding down. Three members are starting a new group, raising more than 100 million to back a tech startup next equity. Joining us to discuss it is alex webb and theres an interesting apple tie in here. Explain what is happening. Guest it is called next equity. When steve jobs left apple, he then went away and set up a Computer Software company with the name next. I have heard the story that is basically one of these guys, the founder suggested this name as a joke and they loved it. They jumped at it, and so that is why that is what they call it. Emily so these guys, two people who actually worked for steve jobs our founding this new fun. Fund. What does it mean for elevation . From the beginning, they are only going to do one fund without investors. With outside investors. Guest it is nowhere near the scale of elevation. This is just over 100 million and i think it is that people named themselves and its not a massive scale thing. Emily what is the record of success that elevation . How well did on oh do . Guest mixed. They had a 12 percent return, which is good. They did well on facebook shares. It is by no means a stellar performance. Not exactly disappointing either. Emily they did do a second fund without outside investors. They still had some strong positions in airbnb. He is also an investor and advisor in this new fund. What does that mean to you . Guest these people have a lot more money than me, and i imagine you. It more of a dabbling thing than a full on massive fund. It is clearly serious money, but as we say, nowhere near a similar scale. He will have something to do with it. I think hes more interested in music perhaps. Emily thank you so much for that up. Next, we take a deep dive into the battery market. There is one company in companies cutping costs and utilities to stabilize the grid. And look at the new type of Eye Technology is researchers hope it might bring site to the blind. Emily u. S. Secretary of state, john kerry, appealing for a lower Carbon Economy at the future of Energy Summit in new york. He noted we are in the midst of the shift away from fossil fuels but warned the pace of change in the Energy Business needs to accelerate. Secretary kerry if edison were to come back today more than 130 years after he flipped that first switch, he would find most energy is still being generated in much the same way he had designed, but he would also find at this moment that the Energy Revolution he dreamt about is actually underway. Emily the secretary of state called for more rigorous rules on how Companies Account for the cost of fossil fuels. He said when Business Leaders and politicians conduct cost analyses, they should factor in rebuilding from floods and death linked to air pollution. It is time for our second installment of our weeklong series for noble energy. We tackled wind power. Next up, the battery market. As costs have come down, Storage Systems are being located to figure out cost while helping Utility Companies stabilize the grid. I sat down with the leading player, John Carrington. Why is there a Business Case for Energy Storage . John it is pretty clear from a customer standpoint, you save on your demand charges. You can do Energy Efficiency plays with the lighting and you lower the amount of energy used, but you will still reach a new peak each month. That peak is what we go after, the highest interval the utility what minute interval is the utility charges the customer. We shave that completely off. When you look at the utility, we have 85 state of charge in our fleet. What that does is that it allows us to participate with the utilities and stabilizing the grid. We know which building to pull from to enable the grid to be more stable. Emily your Business Model works where power prices are high, but california,york and but what about places where prices are low . John that 15 minute peak is what you want to think about. Those are very high throughout the country. Some are fairly low but if there is value to be made, clients could save 20 to 30 . Without any software engagement. If they engage in the software, moore. They could save up to 30 percent to 40 . Software control is a big component that they can control. We are doing it all automatically behind the scenes. The only way you could impact that peak without Energy Storage is to change your operations. Our customers are not doing that. Emily and all of your customers are commercial . John yes. 25 of the companies are in contracting phase are different stuff conversations right now. The chief sustainability officers are trying to figure out a way to figure out how to be a power taker providing an , Energy Revenue stream for their usage. The sea and i multi Location Companies are really our focus. Emily are there more states opening up . John like a lot of are noble, theres different legislation, whether it is itc or tariffs on other products for solar. We have other opportunities in california and new york, but are looking at ways to pencil many states out effectively. Emily the big issue for they have beenat expensive. When will they be affordable . John weve seen price come down about 85 . We are seeing it and theres a tremendous amount of Battery Capacity installed for electric vehicles. I think when the samsung panasonics, teslas around the World Installed a capacity they did, hundred dollars oil had a great capacity and put a lot of it in the market. Now the Economic Situation with electric vehicles and where oil is today has dramatically changed that equation. We are seeing a massive amount of oversupply. It can continue to see deflation. We can operate in subsidy free markets today. We can operate in multiple states and we will only see more inflation is more markets open. Emily how is that impacting the business . John oil impacts the electric vehicle side. You have a lot of capacity on the battery. Gas is probably the better discussion. Gas peaking plants are what we go after. Our product with these virtual power plants, you can eliminate peakerpeaker plants. The reality is, the oldest grids are the most congested San Francisco, los angeles, manhattan. You cannot drop a gas peaker plant in those facilities. There are a lot of buildings where we could put our systems into and you could see a gas peaker plant. Emily do they see this as a viable viable option . John it is effectively to two plants in washington. We are seeing more programs like that and its the biggest of its kind. Very forward thinking by the California Public utilities commission. Is there scope beyond the utilities . John it is a cost avoidance for them. They can provide direction on where the constrained areas are. Are in the grid. We can put our systems around the constrained area and enable more solar to be connected and interconnected and allow more storage to be installed. Emily that was John Carrington speaking to me in San Francisco. Be sure to tune in to our next installment tomorrow. Tomorrow we will speak about the , rooftop revolution and why the future of decentralized power. We are watching shares in marble technology, surging the most in seven years on the the ceo and on news that the ceo and president are stepping down. Both were targeted activists agitating for new leadership. Both executives a husband and , wife duo who founded the company will remain on the board. Marvel let an internal investigation into the companys Accounting Practices which found no evidence of fraud. The executive changes are effective immediately. Coming up, we will check in with the ceo of home advisor and how has come he will reach a billion dollars in revenue. Stay tuned. And if you like Bloomberg News, you can listen on the radio. You can listen on the radio at, and serious xm. Emily tough stories this hour. Ted cruz is clear win over donald trump increases the chance of a contested republican convention. Bernie sanders keeps his White House Run alive. The selfdeclared socialist has contests, but still faces long odds. Merger would be the end of the largest ever acquisition in health care. The u. S. Treasury said on monday that numeral would limit what it calls in transactions if a company has done any within the next three years. He has been involved in several such acquisitions. Can be reached without iran. The governor says that leading producers can agree to cap output at january levels even if tehran does not doyle join in. To agree to a freeze. Those are the headlines from Bloomberg News, powered by over 2400 journalists in 150 bureaus around the world. That is get the latest from the markets. For that, here is juliet. Angie, we saw the answer to weaken a little from those 18 month highs. Is going into its lunch break. It just a fraction of an attempt at a high. Services indexers little better than the february rates. In hong kong, we are seeing good gains. That is typical to what we are seeing across australia. That is thanks to crude oil. Also seeing some good moves coming through from the Oil Producers in sydney. Taiwan has been an underperformer today because it came out of it Public Holiday yesterday. To whataying catchup we saw on the region on tuesday, closing at a fiveweek low. A switch out of the philippines which has been in full market territory. In south asia all looking pretty positive. A quarter of 1 , you can see the oil and gas plans really leading. A fraction lower. We are seeing some losses coming through from all of the big banks, particularly in china on the asian market. This is what the yen look like at the moment. Down by. 2 of 1 . This is how it is looking across asia. Emily could home advisor be the next tech unicorn . The Online Business matches consumers with professional seems to be pushing toward a billion dollar devaluation. Valuation. The ceo sat down with erik schatzker. Guest we would think it is possible in the next three or five years. We will see. Could be faster or slower. It all depends on what kind of investments we make and what sort of things we do over the next 12 to 24 months. Erik what percentage of the market do you figure you have and how big is the market . In terms of the value of jobs . Guest we are doing about 30 billion in value. That was last year. That will take probably get around 15 million. For service requests, probably in the 5 to 7 range. Erik you have a 360 million business growing, but because of all the money you have to spend on marketing and advertising and the hiring in your salesforce to support it, your margins are only 5 . Shouldnt a business that is this big have better margins than that . Guest when you invest in sales and television, we know what the payback is and you will see the Margin Expansion continue. In the past we had 15 or 20 . ,i think this investment is really smart and will help expand the market place and i think you will see the Margin Expansion follow. Erik people look at a 60 million spend and on tv and wonder what its going to be this year or the year after. Is on the slope or is it indefinitely . Guest theres a point where we will invest in this stable time. We will continue to spend the same sort of incremental pace, over the next couple of years, but i think that will flatten out and as you build up your awareness come you get that repeat usage. Erik why television . Tv advertising costs a lot of money. Guest true. Two key things for us, one the post housing crash, you had a be baby boomers who are the ones left standing. They had Discretionary Income and spent a lot of time watching television. Ive done television for a long time and we are highly positive. Its a very powerful medium to drive. Qualified homeowners understand our Value Proposition and do it in a profitable way. Erik one of the nice things about working for every dillers hes willing to buy things to make your business better. Ifc made an offer for angies list. It was an unsuccessful offer at the time. What was the rationale of combining the two businesses . Guest it was an interesting point in time. We have an incredible monetization engine and a lot of they had a lot of qualified traffic. There was an interesting point in time and we looked at that opportunity and decided it was not a fit of them. We go back to business as usual. Erik is the rationale for such a combination as valid today . Guest it is in flux, and we will have to wait and see. Erik what you want are good leads to new businesses. What other kinds of platforms might generate those kinds of leads . Guest we are working with big and small alike. We have such a unique engine. Our ondemand platform is powerful. We are finding that lots of folks are interested in letting us come into their ecosystem and get in front of the homeowners. Youll see some interesting announcements coming up. We have our apple tv at and our and our applep watch. We are doing interesting partnerships where we continue to try to get our engine in front of homeowners that could use it. Erik how long until home advisor is ready to be spun off the way match group was in the Fourth Quarter . Guest thats above my pay grade. I would defer to mr. Diller. I think he has shown an incredible ability to put things together like the match group or expedia group. What were building is a powerful nucleus within the home industry and we have no timetables on anything beyond growing the business in an organic way. If barry feels like he wants to, to spin it out, so be it. Erik will you need more capital . Guest we will continue to invest aggressively. I think they are open and interested in seeing us grow within the category. Guest i think they are interested in putting more capital in this business. And seeing us grow. Emily the home advisor ceo speaking with erik schatzker. Turning now to a major story happening out of iceland the Prime Minister resigning after a massive leak known as the penama papers linked him to secret offshore bank accounts. The assets uncovered by this leak could be a tip of the iceberg. We have been digging into the leak and what it took to uncover it. How big was it . Cory in terms of the leaks we have seen, this is sizable. I combed through a lot of bloomberg stories and when you compare it to things like the sony hack attack or the Ashley Madison attack, the penama papers is right up there with wikileaks. None of these numbers are exact, but the penama papers are pretty serious. People like to dig up dirt like me and i cant see it yet, but im dying to. Particularly the European Focus to have access to this data. Emily where were these files kept . Cory they have a source somehow connected to this law firm and we never actually talked to the journalist working on this thing but they share a nonprofit that shared it with journalists across the world. They actually hosted the stuff out of Amazons Web Services servers are servers. The journalists were working this from all over the world. They could all access the stuff and kept it in two different piles. Some stuff was secret and some stuff at much deeper encryption level. Double extra top secret. Animal house style. Double secret probation. Emily where was the encryption the best . Cory it was at that deepest level where the journalists could see it. It is very interesting. Here you have a law firm with some of the most sensitive Financial Data in the world whose encryption data was not up to snuff. Now selling our customers and client portals that we have the best encryption software, but we are not updating it. The journalists had much better encryption because they did not want the law firm in pamela to in panama to know or there was concern about russia and Vladimir Putins connection. It was an incredible story of how technology was used to hide this information better than it was hidden at the law firm, better than these attacks in illegal accounts. Emily a fascinating story we are still seeing the cascading effects of. Thank you so much. Cory johnson, our editor at large. Coming up, we look at a new type of technology bionic Eye Technology and the researchers who hope it might bring site act sight back to the blind. Emily time for our first installment of the spark. This make, we meet a scientist a macarthur genius Award Recipient who figured out how our retinas take images from the outside world and process them so the brain can understand. It started as a Pure Research project but she is building a device that could bring site to sight to the blind. My Macular Degeneration started about eight years ago. It results in loss of central focus vision, like im looking directly at the camera and i cannot see the length of that camera at all. I cannot recognize faces. I cannot read hard copy any longer. Rosemary is one of about 8 million americans who are partially or completely blind. The damage to her retina is irreversible. Theres no biological cure for her fading vision. In recent years, Bionic Technology has allowed us to make headway against some disabilities, but creating bionic vision has remained a sticky problem. No one has been able to untangle the complex relationship between the eye and the brain, at least not yet. People have been working on prosthetics to help blind people probably for more than 20 years. And the focus has been on implanting something into the retina so the patient will see a spot of light where the retina is. When people first put these into patients, it was exciting to find out the patient saw anything. But it wasnt that effective. And no one worried about it that much of the time because they assumed if we just have more electrodes, we will make it better and better. There was another factor that was missing and that is the signal processing. Basically, the code the right and it uses to gimmick brain. When information comes into your eyes, it goes into your photo receptors and then goes to the output valve and send signals to the brain. The big question is what do they to givecode do they use the sensation of saying something . This is what i was working on as a scientist. You can take a retina out of e and put it on a bed of electrodes. You can present it with all sorts of images and record the output. You can figure out the relationship the brain wants to receive. So, we were doing this and he we unraveled it. This is vision. The code used to communicate with the brain. Your brain is receiving this pattern of electrical signals. We have known for decades that this code exists, but dr. Nuremberg is the first to have cracked it. I realized not only was it useful for figuring out how the brain works, but it had a huge potential for application. The way it would be lamented in the real world for patients has two parts. One part is a device that would take the images in. It sends the code in the form of light pulses. When you shine the light on it, it causes the cell to fire. Fire and electrical pulse. The picture you get in the pattern of the neural code sends the images up to the brain. The next step is to hold human trials to prove it can actually restore vision. Patients like rosemary would then be injected with a light sensitive gene and then be shown images in the neural code. The best Case Scenario is to have someone be able to see faces, to create that contact with people even if it doesnt work, knowing i have the code and pass it on to the next generation, someone else will be able to do it. I dont even dare go down the path of hoping there would be a cure for this disease, but it would be a miracle if i could see again. Clearly, as i used to be able to see. Emily she is currently seeking fda approval to start Clinical Trials of the technology. Hot off the heels of apple plus apples legal tangle with the fbi whatsapp is ramping up , privacy for its billion users. They say they have added option to every form of communication on its services. That means no one but the sender or receiver would be able to access the content come and not even whatsapp employees. Coming up emily talked to one ceo to make his company the amazon of genetic testing. And tomorrow, the cohead of global m a at the group and the at citigroup. The u. S. Department of labor secretary will be on bloomberg no. Emily paypal is taking a stand for gay rights, scrapping plans to build a Global Operation center in charlotte, north carolina, after the state passed legislation barring transgendered people from bathrooms and locker rooms that do not match the gender on their birth certificate. They planned to spend more than 3. 6 million in the state by the end of 2017. Biotech fever is rising stop one San Francisco company saw its stock catch fire, spiking 70 as 17 as they announced they are expanding into 2016. You say you want to be the amazon of genetic testing . There are other companies doing this. What distinguishes you from 23 and me . Guest there are about 4000 inherited genetic diseases that we know about today that are actively being used by the medical community. Theyve been very expensive and fragmented. Most are never done by 23 and me. They are done by medical centers and there are thousands of different laboratories trying to fill that medical niche today. Ist we do that is different actually trying to drive down the cost. Like amazon did, we realized we could dramatically drive down the cost and make it more affordable for patients, their families. Emily we see more companies try to use the information. How much ip protection do you i. T. Protection do you have . Guest the Supreme Court has ruled dna patents are no longer. It has opened up to what i would call a generic market. We are one of the First Companies that has put down a stake in saying that we are committed to driving down costs. Decreasing the cost and margins and providing it to a wider range of people. Emily i read an anecdote that steve jobs spent a hundred thousand dollars trying find a route to the cancer that he ultimately passed away from it today, that would cost 5,000. Guest it cost a billion dollars to sequence the first genome. Then it moved to the millions, to the hundreds of thousands. Now we are at the day when we can our drive is to make every test available for less than a thousand dollars for everyone who needs it for medical purposes. Emily one thing that makes the company stand out is pediatric testing. Explain that to me and how a baby born today and their testing might be different. Guest it is practiced today to do a biochemical analysis that direct to an inherited genetic or metabolic disease that that child may have. Then you have to do a comprehensive test because the current testing is very inexpensive, but it also has a high false positive rate. That is now bringing the cost down and providing support in terms of their needs. Emily what about the idea that a lot of the information is maybe you have a recessive gene for this and its unlikely you would ever manifest it or pass it down. Is this information that valuable or is it possible to get too much . Guest there are over 4000 medically relevant inherited genetic disorders today. Were not dealing with people not get sick someday. We are dealing with people who have symptoms with a a with a child who has neuromuscular disorder and now they are in a diagnostic odyssey trying to figure out what is wrong with my child and now we can give them the option to screen and or screen out any known disorder that might account for those symptoms. At less than 1000, which is a unique time and place in the genetics field. Emily thank you so much for stopping by. Time now to find out who is having the best day ever. Todays winners the six astronauts on the International Space station who are getting a little extra space to move around. The bigelow expandable activity module will be carried by a spacex cargo capsule. Its designed to inflate in orbit. Its the first real test of the technology but, if it works, it could one day be used to create a space hotel. And, that does it for this edition of bloomberg west. Will see you tomorrow. Have a great day. The following is a paid program. The opinions and views expressed do not reflect those of bloomberg l. P. , its affiliates r its employees. This program is a paid resentation for omega xl. Welcome. Im larry king. Im here today to report on a Significant Health related investigation that has been taking place for the past couple of years. The information i will provide you during the course of this show is r