January 29, 2025 • 42 mins
Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde and Mike Shepard discuss ASML's record surge as it sees sustained AI demand. And, Microsoft and OpenAI are investigating whether OpenAI code was obtained in an unauthorized way for a group linked to DeepSeek. Plus, a conversation with T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert after posting a fourth quarter earnings beat and a secret partnership with Apple to implement SpaceX's Starlink service.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news from the heart of
where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Lovelow.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Live from New York. I'm Caroline Hyde.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
And I'm Mike Sheppard in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Coming up asml fights back Deep Seak concerns and surges
the most since twenty twenty as stronger chip equipment orders,
Impress plus, did Deep Seek improperly use open ai data?
Microsoft and open Ai investigate? We have the latest and
we sit down with T Mobile CEO on the heels
of the company's standout fourth quarter.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
But first we check in on these markets.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Remember, folks, it is fed day where we get a
pause that comes later today.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
But we're off by four tens percent.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Now's that on the downside, we're being dragged down by
the like some video Microsoft in the red. Let's move
on and see what earnings we have coming off after
the bell because it is thick and fast. Not only
are we reading from deep Seek, but we've got to.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Digest the real numbers.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Apple a little bit later, but tonight,
we keep an eye on these front three and then
we think about what we've already had out of the
bell in Europe and is ASML the chip equipment maker
managing to fight back some of those anxieties around deep
seek cheap AA models? Ultimately does it matter for chips?
(01:38):
For chip equipment ASML surging currently we see up five
percent in US trading. It was up the most that's
twenty twenty earlier, Mike, and this was on the back
of very strong orders.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
And we're staying on ASML and their big earnings. Be
joining us to discuss this is Bloomberg's Chan coach in Amsterdam.
Speaker 5 (01:56):
Chan.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
There were a surgeon orders in the last quarter for ASML,
far more than expected. But all of that was before
the deep Seek revelations. How did the CEO of ASML
message this to investors today?
Speaker 6 (02:11):
All right?
Speaker 7 (02:12):
CHRISTOSML CEO doubled down on AI. Basically, he thinks Deep
Seek will be good news for ASML, and his thinking
is that anyone that lowers cost lowers barriers to entry,
so lower cost means AI can be used in more applications.
More applications mean more chips, and more chips would mean
(02:35):
ASML can sell more machines to chip makers, and they
think deep sea can lead to democratization of AI, which
will then create more customers for them charm.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
When we talk about chips, we can't get away from geopolitics.
How did some of the US restrictions on sales of
sensitive equipment to China play in the results that we
saw today?
Speaker 7 (03:00):
Will China accounted for twenty seven percent of ASML sales
in the fourth quarter, which was down from nearly half
of its sales in the third quarter. The company expects
China sales to follow up one fifth of its total
revenue this year, and they think that their sales in
China are taking a hit from the prospect of more
(03:22):
US restrictions under Donald Trump's administration, as well as a
broader weakness in the chip sector.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
Bloomberg's John Coach, thank you so much, Caro.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
We booke a plenty more earnings and other socks we're
watching this morning.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Apple t Mobile.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
In particular, two companies that have been working secretly together.
We understand ad support for SpaceX is Starling network in
a surprise release. The tech is now being supported with
an installation of the iPhone's latest software update on Monday,
but more on T Mobile because.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The company, of course is out with this fourth quarter.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Results beating analyst expectations. The telecom providers saw continued growth
in wireless subscribers and home internet customers. Get this, adding
nine hundred and three thousand monthly phone customers and guiding
from continued strong growth. Joining us now might see that
his Tmobile CEO. And what's interesting is descend. But you said,
be cautious about our fourth quarter.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
What changed?
Speaker 8 (04:13):
Well, the only thing I was pointing out back then,
which maybe was misunderstood, is that it's a seasonal quarter,
and you know, the last couple of weeks are important.
But you know, we just are firing on all cylinders.
We just finished our strongest growth year ever, and we
finished it strong with a monster Q four that exceeded
a lot of people's expectations.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And you're guiding for postpaid net customers to be adding
up to six million in twenty twenty five. That's a
big ramp. Where are those customers coming to?
Speaker 8 (04:38):
You know, this is the strongest beginning of year guide
on new subscribers we've ever given, and.
Speaker 9 (04:43):
It's really simple.
Speaker 8 (04:43):
Our consumer business is firing on all cylinders in the
top one hundred markets, also smaller markets in rural areas.
But now our business sector is starting to rise as well.
And so you look across all the segments. People are
flocking to.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
T Mobile, governments to New York one of them that
you've added. But I'm interested that the other competitors out there,
at and T Verizon they added to where are these
customers coming from?
Speaker 9 (05:08):
Look this is I like to think about this.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
You know, we're the best house in a great neighborhood.
I don't need for our competitors to fail in order
for us to succeed. We are taking share. But also
the market is vibrant and growing, and people are, you know,
getting more value out of rate plans. They're buying up
our rate card. You know, our average revenues per customer
per month are rising, not because of rising prices, but
(05:31):
because they're self selecting up our rate card, and that
allows revenues to rise where nobody else is the loser.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
People need more data. They're going to need more data
for Generator of AI. Is that become a choke point for.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You in some way?
Speaker 8 (05:45):
It's going to be a way for us to showcase
our differentiation you know, both Oukla and Open Signal have
once again said we ran the gamut in terms of
network awards and we have the.
Speaker 9 (05:56):
Most capacity by far.
Speaker 8 (05:57):
And so as the demand for our network on AI
based applications starts to grow, it'll only showcase t mobiles differentiation.
I think consumers will really be able to see the difference.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Will consumers care about when they're out without any signal
and now they're able potentially to tap in to Starlin
easing team Mobile.
Speaker 8 (06:16):
When we first announced this partnership in twenty twenty two,
it was the single most covered thing we've ever talked about.
And that's saying something because our uncarrier moves are big deals.
This is the biggest one because it speaks to a
universal pain point in this industry. This is a big
country and there are five hundred thousand square miles that
(06:36):
none of the carriers cover. And so now there's our
vision is so simple. If you can see the sky,
you're connected and you don't.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Have to point your phone at it anymore, which is
what you had to do with an Apple previously. Why
did you sort of roll it out so secretly? Why
did it feel like suddenly we woke up and quietly
you could get onto your T mobile iPhone device when
we wouldn't have thought it already.
Speaker 8 (06:56):
Honestly, we've been a little self conscious than that. We
announced this a long time ago, and so it's been
a couple of years and we didn't want to keep
crowing about something until it was ready.
Speaker 9 (07:04):
So we made a big.
Speaker 8 (07:05):
Deal out of it when we struck the partnership and
we said, look, let's just stay quiet until it's time
to hand people this service. About two weeks ago we
quietly started letting people into our beta program. We now
have thousands of users and we're about to throw the
doors wide open on our beta. It's going to be
a big moment and then commercial service this year.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
So it's performing well in beta.
Speaker 8 (07:25):
Absolutely, and right now the launches are happening really rapidly.
So there's well over four hundred satellites. They're low Earth
orbit satellites, so they're very performant. You mentioned some of
the differences versus higher level satellites, and people are getting
a great experience.
Speaker 6 (07:39):
You know.
Speaker 9 (07:39):
Our goal is to.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
Start with text messaging so that you can get your
texts out regardless of where you are, but it'll very
quickly move to picture messaging, MMS, data and voice.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
I hate to try and find any clouds when you're
pointing to silver linings throughout, But when you signal that
caution in December, Yes, about sort of the cyclicality, but
ultimately you've had stellar growth after sellar growth. How much
can you keep on ramping, keep on bringing on more consumers?
How strong is the consumer sentiment out there?
Speaker 8 (08:08):
It's steady and consistent. I think that's what you want
from us. You know, one of the things that differentiates
us is we set out a set of outlooks and
then we consistently meet or beat them. And what we
put out today was a strong guide, but it wasn't
expecting much from our business that we haven't done in
the past. And so you can rely on the things
that we say because we look at the trends underneath it.
And you know, the bottom line is we offer a
(08:30):
stronger network value proposition, and we offer it at a
lower price, and at the end of the day, that's
going to cause people across segments to continue choosing T Mobile.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
What is it that investors in particular a needing at
this moment to hear from you? I mean you've got
twenty two buys, only nine holds and only two cells.
But where are you hearing the questions of caution coming
from an investor base right?
Speaker 8 (08:52):
Well, they want to know what our next act is,
you know, And so that's a big piece of what
we focused on in our Capital Markets day last fall.
So talk about what comes be on the next couple
of years, and you know, AI is a big piece
of it. We're transforming our business operations to be able
to think about how do we serve customers in the
era of AI in new ways? And this industry has
(09:12):
always treated everybody exactly the same, and it's so analogue.
You go in and spend a Saturday of your life
in one of our retail stores trying to upgrade your
family to new phones.
Speaker 9 (09:21):
We know we can do.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Better, and our Tea Life app that's now in the
hands of fifty million people can give you an experience
of T Mobile that's different than somebody else in terms
of the offers. You may see, the prioritization, the upgrades,
et cetera. And so it's an exciting moment for us
to rethink how we serve customers and give each customer
a fantastic journey with T Mobile.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
What could the phone make has been doing better at
the moment because ultimately we see Apple getting another downgrade.
Many worries about China, but we aren't upgrading our phones
as much as we used to do. You have to
capitalize on giving the add ons in this moment because
Samsung and Apple just they're not presenting as new a
use cases as they used to.
Speaker 9 (10:01):
Well, it works for our business model. I mean, I
can't speak for them.
Speaker 8 (10:04):
One thing that's happening is upgrade rates have slowed down,
but they're pretty steady. Prices have risen, so the OEMs
have made up for it. That way, customers are keeping
their phones longer. But what you saw with T Mobile
this time is our upgrade rates did tick up a
little bit. With the lowest upgrade rates in the industry.
That's good for our financials. But they started to normalize,
so they ticked up. I signaled earlier in the quarter
(10:25):
that our iPhone sales were very strong, and they were,
and you saw it in our numbers.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Mike, so great to have you.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Great to see you again in the back of your earnings.
Come back soon. Mike's even is a T Mobile CEO,
Microsoft and open Ai are investigating where the deep seek
used data output from open AI's technology if it was
obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to
(10:51):
the Chinese AI startups, all according to sources. Now, Deep
Seek and the High Flyer Hedge fund where deep Seak
was started, have not commented on there's so far, so
let's discuss it and the data privacy concerns around deep
seat with Alex Staemosi's chief mentioned security officer at Centinel
One and former chief security officer at Facebook. Look Alex
is open ai and indeed other AI labs at the moment.
(11:14):
Are they right to be concerned about their ip here?
Speaker 9 (11:17):
I think they are.
Speaker 10 (11:19):
There's a lot of people who doubt the claim that
deepsek was able to build such a incredibly capable model
with such a little compute and such as little cost
as they claim. Now there are some great breakthroughs here.
Deep Seek published at paper that demonstrated great breakthroughs in
both training cost and inference costs. So inference is what
(11:42):
you do when you're actually running the model for people
to use later, and they have some legitimate breakthroughs. So those
are breakthroughs that to their credit, they have documentary that
other people are going to be able to use now.
But there's a lot of people who believe that they
utilized both open AI's model probably running up in Microsoft's
Azure service, as well as metas open source models to
(12:03):
build upon to build Deepseek, And that's what's being investigated.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Right now, Alex Is there anything that Microsoft and other
open and open ai and other providers can do to
perhaps prevent this from happening again? If not deep Seek,
then perhaps another competitor from China.
Speaker 10 (12:23):
Well, this is the challenge that they're going to have
that Microsoft's business model is that you can go to
Microsoft Azure and you can throw down a credit card,
you can open up an account, and you can ask
them to create a private copy of open AI's models
for you that you can use for your own purposes.
This is how Microsoft plans on monetizing their multi billion
(12:45):
dollar investment in open Ai. That is a great thing
for them, that's a great thing in theory for both
open Ai and the customers that you can have a
version of open Ai that in theory does not expose
their model weights to the customer and does not expose
the customer's private enterprise data to open AI.
Speaker 9 (13:05):
But what has happened is that people have figured.
Speaker 10 (13:07):
Out ways that you can ask a model many many
millions or billions of questions to suck all of the
data out of it. So imagine you have an ancient
wise professor, and you're able to ask that wise professor many, many,
many questions and then effectively become a.
Speaker 9 (13:24):
Copy of that professor.
Speaker 10 (13:26):
That's exactly what can happen here, except at machine speed.
You can do that over days, weeks, or months, and
that is the business model that Microsoft is operating here.
So detecting that kind of behavior might be theoretically possible,
but that's also exactly what they're selling. And so I think, yes,
they're going to look into what Deepseat did here, but
(13:47):
it will only be a cat and mouse game to
try to determine whether somebody is actually utilizing the models
in the way Microsoft wants them to and wants to
get paid for, and whether or not they're trying to
actually copy those models.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Is we want to ask you a little bit more
about the detail of concerns anxieties privacy. Teresa Peyton joined US.
She's former CEO for the White House. Here's what she
had to say about worries on using deep Seat.
Speaker 11 (14:11):
This is an untested app. I would caution people not
to put too much proprietary company information into it, and
until there's been an opportunity to actually do something called
ethical hacking or red teaming pen testing of the actual
app and learning more about how is your data treated,
(14:32):
where is it stored, how do the algorithms work. It
is open source, but things do still need to be
put through their paces.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Of course, deep Seat was the number one app downloaded
on Apple. We've also now got Ali Baba announcing its
latest powerful AI model. Should similar reticence be used by
US companies?
Speaker 2 (14:50):
By US people? Adds?
Speaker 10 (14:52):
Okay, So this is where it gets complicated and we
got to be really careful here to separate out two
different things. There is the deep Seak app that people
are downloading on their phones. That app, that data goes
straight to China. Right, So if you're downloading deep Seek
on your phone, or if you're going to deep Seak's
website and you're typing in query that app, that data
goes straight to China. That's available to that Chinese company,
(15:13):
that is probably available to the Chinese government without any problem.
So yes, absolutely, companies should not be allowing their employees
to download the deep Seap app onto their phones. If
you're a company and you download the open source model weights,
that data does not go back to China. Now there
are some potential risks right now.
Speaker 9 (15:32):
Those risks are pretty much theoretical. The deep seek model
weights do have an ideological.
Speaker 10 (15:39):
Twist towards the CCP, so if you asked you about
Tineman square, it won't answer. It will not create, for example,
a Winnie the Pooh story about Shishan Pin.
Speaker 9 (15:50):
So it corresponds to the.
Speaker 10 (15:52):
Rules the Chinese government has created about the ideological consistency
of AI, but that is not a security risk. That
being said, there are some interesting theoretical ideas people have
come up with about backdooring AI when it's used for
security sensitive uses, but right now that is not as
big of a deal. I think a more interesting question
(16:14):
for enterprises that are looking to use the deep Seak
model WAKES is the legal issues. If it turns out
that deep seek was trained off of metas and open
AIS models, what does that mean for the legality of
using deep seeks models. Deep Seak has open source theirs,
but they do not have the ability to get rid
of any legal issues that are caused by open AI.
(16:35):
Of course, open ai is being sued for their use
of training data that's open that. This is one of
the issues with AI. The intellectual property issues have not
been solved. We're dealing with eighteen, nineteenth and early twentieth
century copyright ideas and we're trying to apply it to
these twenty first century problems. And it's a real legal
(16:55):
mess that the legal system is years behind what the
cutting edges in technology.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Alex Stamos, Sentinel One Chief Information Security Officer, Thank you.
Coming up, we'll cover deep Seek's impact on the chip
world with Andrew Feldman from Sarah Bras.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Not all hardware providers are worried about deep seek advantas.
The partner of Nvidia that sells chip testing equipment just
lifted its full year forecast almost forty percent in anticipation
of elevated spending around AI, and it downplayed the impact
of deep Seek's big debut. Now let's bring in someone
else in the field. Andrew Feldman, CEO Sarah Brus, a
(17:38):
company building computer systems for complex AI deep learning applications. Andrew,
your company is trying to go toe to toe with
a big competitor and that is Nvidia. What do you
draw in terms of an underdog story from what we
saw the other day with deep Seek?
Speaker 12 (17:57):
Okay, I think this is an enormously exciting moment for
the community. I think it sends multiple powerful messages. Clearly,
they used less compute, they used fewer people and produced
something quite impressive. Now, I think that's a reminder that
those of us who are underdogs and are competing against
(18:17):
the eight hundred pound gorillas in the industry, small teams
of hardworking people with big ideas can produce industry changing results.
And that's what we do at Cerebras.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Yeah, Andrew, they used you, they used Cerebras inference offering.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
What did you see?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
What have you taken on in terms of the amount
of share necessity they need in this moment?
Speaker 12 (18:43):
Sure, So we are now in beta with our deep
Seak offering. And as your last guest said, there are
two ways to use deep Seek. You can use it
through their app, and I think he's absolutely correct that
that that data you can assume goes right to China.
Or you can use it through a company like us
or Perplexity or collection of others that are offering the model,
(19:07):
and we of course have all sorts of protections for
your data such that you can be assured it will
go nowhere. There is tremendous demand for this type of model.
One of the things that separated this model from previous
models was that its ability to reason and to do logic,
and those type of models in particular outperform the other
(19:31):
forms of models, and they do that by using more
compute during inference. And this is something that the whole
industry has been grappling with and we are today the
fastest of this and what that means for you, the
user is a better user experience, quicker answers, less waiting,
and that's what's really moving the customers right now.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Andrew Cerebras had been planning an IPO, do you have
an update on that? And we also understand and that
an interagency panel in Washington known as SIPIUS has been
reviewing all of this.
Speaker 5 (20:05):
Do you have an update there? I don't, But I.
Speaker 12 (20:10):
Think the deep Seek model was put out right around
Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
I don't think that was an accident.
Speaker 12 (20:19):
I think this was an effort to communicate at the
geopolitical level to the US that the previous administration's regulations
hadn't worked, that the Chinese engineer was capable of doing
extraordinary things even in the face of the regulations imposed
(20:41):
by the previous administration's commerce team.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
What's so interesting about this You talk about the geopolitics
and perhaps all that sort of timing use with Huawei
and its innovations, But briefly, many and perhaps worried Siphius
maybe have anxiety around your relationship with G forty two
and it's ultimate relationship with Chines, your overseas locations. How
do you tackle that in this environment?
Speaker 12 (21:04):
Look, I think we have a strategic partnership with G
forty two. They are the national champion AI company for
United Arab Emirates, and they are one of the US's
staunchest allies in the Middle East and have a long
track record of supporting US interests and being good allies.
(21:25):
I think one of the things that Deep Seek has
taught us is that.
Speaker 9 (21:29):
We will need the community and we will need our allies.
Speaker 12 (21:32):
That we thought perhaps that the US could run this alone,
that we had the computer companies like Cerebras, like Nvidia
and a m D and we had the open eyes
of the world. But I think what we're learning here
is that we will need the entire US ecosystem in
(21:53):
this AI battle.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Andrew Feldman, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
CEO Cerebras.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Come back when you do. You have a bit more
news on the IPO potentially coming up.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
Activist investor Kristin Hull joins us to discuss what she'll
be looking for when Tesla releases its results later today.
I remember an activist investor what she makes of Elon
Musk's involvement in government, in the German government. This is
bloue Meg Technology. Welcome back to Blue Meg Technology. I'm
(22:34):
Caroline Hide in New York.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
And I'm Mike Shepard in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Check on these markets, Mike, because we've got some anxiety
ahead of the FED, of course, and indeed ahead of earnings.
We've got Microsoft Meta Tesla after well, nasdak off by
four ten percent. The bitcoin though, is getting a bit
of a risk on trade where at one and a
half percent, maybe because of what Trump Media has just
announced a pairing into financial services. They're launching a fintech
brand name Truthfi. In collaborations with Charles Schwab up eight
(23:00):
and a half percent Sally Bakewell here to discuss what
are we expecting this sort of a move from an
entity related to the president.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I think we could have expected it.
Speaker 13 (23:10):
I mean, Trump has just launched his trump coin, he
has already declared himself a huge supporter of cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
He's the crypto president.
Speaker 13 (23:19):
So I don't think it's a huge surprise that Trump
Media is delving into the financial services world with this investment.
Speaker 9 (23:27):
Now.
Speaker 13 (23:27):
It's notable, though, that Donald Trump he actually transferred his
shares in Trump Media last month to a trust which
is controlled by his eldest son, so he no longer
directly owns any of Trump Media, but he is the
sole beneficiary of that trust. So I think this is
just an example of how the Trump Empire is deepening
its push into crypto and fintech. And it's interestingly timed
(23:50):
because just last week Trump made comments about, you know,
traditional banks and how he said that they were effectively
debanking the Conservatives. He's sort of made a barber Bank
of America CEO Brian moynihan, as well as JP Morgan
chief Jamie Diamond, so he's a big fan of the
crypto the fintech world.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I think it is fair to.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Say Sally in effector is the Trump Media group trying
to create something that Elon Musk has dreamed about for
all these years, that is a one stop social platform
with everything, messaging, finance, you name it.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, so far, what do we know?
Speaker 13 (24:27):
We know that Trump Media is investing two hundred and
fifty million in this effort, and that money actually is
going to be custodied by Charles Schwab, which is also
going to advise it on its investments and its strategy.
It's going to offer separately managed accounts ETFs, and other bitcoin,
crypto and bitcoin related products. Now, getting into the financial
services space is something that a lot of companies have done.
(24:50):
Just yesterday, social media platform x announced that it was
partnering with Visa on its digital wallet in order to
be this everything app that Musk has lo talked about.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And we've seen the.
Speaker 13 (25:01):
Likes of Amazon creeps only into financial services, as has
Apple with the wallet. So it's a difficult world to
enter in many ways. There are a lot of incumbents
such as zell and Venmo, which holds substantial portions of
the market. But equally, a lot of these companies also
want to diversify their revenue, and this is one place
(25:22):
that they can do that.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Bloomberg Sally big, Well, thank you so much. Tesla releases
its fourth quarter earnings later today, and investors are going
to be closely watching for information on new products and
sales volume, and they also want to know how CEO
Elon Musk's new role in the Trump administration is impacting
the electric vehicle maker.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Let's bring in Kristen Hall.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
She's the founder and chief investment officer at NIA Impact
Capital and somebody who follows Tesla very closely, Nia, this
is a real moment for you.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
If somebody watches this company very closely.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Tough sales numbers earlier this month from the company, we
see the new president pulling away the EV subsidies and
the CEO of Tesla himself quite distracted by politics. These
are choppy waters for any company. How is Tesla going
to navigate them?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me today.
Speaker 14 (26:15):
This is a tricky company and all investors are going
to be watching for these earnings today. We want to
see that there's a commitment to growth and that there's
an ability for execution, and of course we have questions
can the CEO execute on these and do we have
a board that's going to support all of the growth
that we need to see from this company.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
What are you looking.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
For in particular when it comes to the business including
self driving and perhaps some of the other businesses that
have emerged for Tesla, including AI and robotics.
Speaker 14 (26:47):
Yeah, so that's a good question, right because as investors,
we want to see growth, and we want to see
a plan, and we want to see guidance. And what
we know from these earnings reports from the past is
consistently there will be surprises. We can expect that we
want to see that there are sales growth in their
main revenue source, which is automobiles, right, and yet Europe
(27:09):
dropping in popularity. Actually worldwide, Tesla has been dropping popularity,
and so we have competition coming up in the market,
both with regular automobile makers as well as some of
the Chinese that are coming in and so it's a
complicated terrain for Tesla right now to navigate, and so
we're going to want to see that there's a CEO
in control with a plan.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
You are so important in terms of a voice because
you're an activist investor, and ultimately you're questioning often the
role of elo Musk, the way of policies he.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Invokes, the way he acts.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
But notably at the moment, Tesla doesn't seem to be
particularly related to fundamentals. We point out that their shares
are nearly doubled since the last time we got earnings,
and the numbers haven't been that great since then if
you think about the deliveries numbers instead, this is a
proxy on Elon's closeness to politics. How do you distinguish
that for yourself as an investor?
Speaker 14 (28:02):
So, Caroline, thanks for the question. This is a complicated company,
particularly when the CEO is as involved with the federal
government as is. Oftentimes you would see if there's a
role granted from the federal government that you would drop
your current day job, and yet we're not seeing that happening.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
So we do.
Speaker 14 (28:19):
Believe that every company deserves a full time CEO, and
so we have lots of questions there. We also have
questions about human capital management and how is Tesla going
to be able to attract, retain, promote top talent, because,
as we know, this is an innovation company, and innovation
does derive itself from really loyal client base, both on
(28:42):
the client side and then also on the employee base,
and so we're looking to see how is the company
going to manage this.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
For years, though, since you first bought into Tesla, you've
been trying to communicate with the company and pushing against
some of the activities that we've seen, whether it be
consents around on to DEI, whether it be certain perceived
anti Semitic compents coming from Elo Musk in the past
that I know you've written about.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
There's also, though, of course, the latest.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
When we come to the concerns around gestures recently made
around the inauguration of Trump made by Elo Musk and
indeed his support of IFD, which is deemed a right
wing group in Germany. Nothing seems the matter when you're
putting this to ultimately a share price that goes up
into the right.
Speaker 14 (29:23):
So you bring up some really interesting points. This company
does seem to stand alone as far as its meanness,
and that it's continued to grow. Other companies would not
get the same reactions with that type of CEO and
those types of behaviors. We as investors are really looking
for the long term possibilities here, and when you have
such a controversial CEO, we are seeing, as you point out,
(29:45):
sales are dropping, popularity is dropping, the brand has been damaged,
and so how is the board and the rest of
Tesla going to step in and see how are we
going to see sales growing when we are having a
lot of controversial issues. As I pointed out earlier, we're
also seeing not only two clients at where I live
in California, many many are switching to Rivian and other
(30:08):
EV brands specifically based on the brand and some of
the issues that they see that they don't want to
be associated with. And we're also seeing that for employees,
who's going to want to work for Tesla in such
a volatile environment. These are questions that investors have.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Kristin, It's been a year since Tesla dropped diversity and
inclusion language from its ten K, and we've seen since
then other companies and even the federal government following suit
in some fashion or another. Do you see this tide
changing at all? And what sort of pressure will you
be able to apply to Tesla at upcoming meetings?
Speaker 14 (30:43):
So for all of our companies, we really want to
see strong human capital management. And so whether you call
it DEI or whether you call it supporting your employee base,
we really want to see Tesla and other companies hold
their employees on the asset side of the balance sheet
as opposed to on the expense side. We want to
see that Tesla is showing that they will invest in
(31:03):
their employee base because we know that again, to execute
on all of the innovation that they promised, they're going
to need to have strong, loyal employees and that's going
to mean strong programs and so again, whether it's called diversity,
equity inclusion, whether it's merit based hiring, we want to
see that investment and we need to see the transparency
around that. So with Tesla, we and NIA have been
(31:24):
asking them to remove forced arbitration from employee contracts because
that does conceal a lot of what's going on, both
for managers and for investors as well as for other employees.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Kristin how, chief investment Officer for NIA Impact Capital, thanks
so much for joining us today and do not forget
to check out the elon Ink Podcasts FINGO card for
this round of Tesla's earnings.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
You can find it on the.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Terminal Online Work out what words are used, how many times,
and if they're in line with that card coming up.
TikTok still needs a US buyer to avoid a bad
in the States.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Seventy five day extension.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
Signed by President Trump run out in April. We'll talk
to Jesse Tinsley about the old cash bid he's put
together with none of them, the mister Beast. This is
bringing back technology.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Could a widely popular influencer become an owner in a
hugely popular social media platform.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Mister Beast is reported.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
To be speaking with multiple groups of investors about buying TikTok.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
One of those groups is led.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
By Jesse Tinsley, the CEO of Employer dot Com. Jesse
Tinsley joins us now. Jesse, thank you for being here.
Let's get right to it. How involved is mister Beast
with your group's bid? Has he fully committed to joining
your team here?
Speaker 15 (32:46):
I think mister Beast, as we said last week, I
think we hope that he joins as many bus as
as possible.
Speaker 6 (32:51):
He's positive influence.
Speaker 15 (32:52):
For young people and people ever read globally, and so
we're excited to have him in his group backing our
bid among others as well.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
So he's not formally signed on to your bid. He's
just seeing whoever wins contacts.
Speaker 15 (33:06):
So I think there's some some articles that came out
last week and mister Beast and his group are definitely
signed on with our group and it's but it's non exclusive,
so we hope he can work with as many groups
as possible.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And what about your bid?
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Who else is involved other than yourself and potentially mister Beaste.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 15 (33:26):
I think we were We were not obviously a very
large bid by by any means.
Speaker 9 (33:31):
Right.
Speaker 15 (33:31):
We're a bunch of technologists and founders and there's folks
like David Bazouki from the CEO and co founder of
rope Blocks, as well as Nathan Coley, co founder and
CEO of Anchorage, among a bunch of other technologists and
folks that I think can stabilize, you know, TikTok can
put in a really good place for users and data
(33:51):
integrity across you know, across the US based population.
Speaker 6 (33:56):
We're We're excited with the group we have.
Speaker 15 (33:58):
We have as almost a great effort as opposed to
some of these larger bids.
Speaker 6 (34:01):
And I think we have folks that can come in
and make a huge impact. We're really excited with the
group that we.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
A Jesse, what have you heard back from BYT Dance
and who at the company are you dealing with specifically.
Speaker 6 (34:14):
Yeah, that's a good question. We have heard back from
BI Dance directly.
Speaker 15 (34:17):
It's been a bit of radio silence on their side,
but we're looking forward to chatting with them the next
couple of weeks. It sounds like there's some movement with
different conversations we've been having across a bunch of different parties,
and I think it's right now. We're scared with the
way things are trending. And yeah, so no direct contact
with by Dance.
Speaker 6 (34:36):
Thom's farm.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Really fascinating about who's alongside you Roadblocks. I totally get
the idea that you want to therefore be aligned with
social media and with discussion and groups and interaction of
young people. But Jesse, you have made your name in
human capital. Why are you interested in this asset?
Speaker 2 (34:55):
What change do you want to make?
Speaker 6 (34:56):
Yeah, the fantastic question. I think. Obviously data's background.
Speaker 15 (35:01):
Roadblocks directly seeks the lines a lot with the same
values that I shared. It's one of the reasons that
we added him directly is I have two young daughters
who will soon be on on social media and hopefully
my goal and whoever whoever wins roadblocks, whether it's myself
or another group, I hope that you know that it's
safe enough for the where I feel comfortable with my
(35:22):
young daughters going on.
Speaker 6 (35:24):
TikTok for the next six ft full months.
Speaker 15 (35:25):
And I think right now, the way the algorithm is set,
where the data is, how the data is being used,
I would not feel that comfortable doing that thus far.
So I think that that's kind of my goal and
the values that I see an ndidate for for US.
Speaker 6 (35:40):
Stone after this stood correctly.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Jesse, President Donald Trump has made selling TikTok to US
buyers or reaching a deal a priority.
Speaker 5 (35:50):
What kind of contact have you had with the White
House and what.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Sort of support are you getting from Trump administration officials
on your bid.
Speaker 15 (35:57):
Yeah, we've done ongoing dialogue with the Trump illustration, and
we feel very comfortable with our bid in terms of
how we've actually set it up. We have a bunch
of we've already preset a lot of the team in
terms of board of directors and board sub committees with
around finance, technology and everything else.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
So we feel really really good.
Speaker 15 (36:16):
We have an all us back vaccine with all of
the data and servers and technology moving here.
Speaker 6 (36:22):
So definitely gonna be a challenge to move TikTok.
Speaker 15 (36:25):
But over from byte Dance and there's so many servers
and move it here.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
But we feel really comfortable with our bid correctly.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Ultimately, it sounds like you're making one just for the
good of humanity, for the good of your kids.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
I mean you.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Said, I think accidentally said you were making whoever wins
out on roadblocks, and you might say whoever wins out
on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
But help us take this really seriously.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
You've already named some really significant people who are in
this with yourself are a significant entrepreneur and founder. But
help us understand how serious the nature it is of
this bid and how much money you've got behind it.
Speaker 15 (37:03):
Jesse, Yeah, so definitely definitely a very large bit, I
think Bell I'll measures we basically have I think the
other public number fit that's been floated as a twenty
big billion by another group essentially ours and significantly higher
that offer ends today got.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
The money behind at Jesse Tinsley, He tells our CEO
of employer dot com thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Microsoft and Meta reporting after market closed today. All this
admits concerns around artificial intelligence spending. Let's bring in Bloomberg's
Ryan Blestelica.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
Ryan. Meta and Microsoft are two very different stories.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
When it comes to capex, Meta seems to be getting
a little bit more of a pass.
Speaker 16 (37:53):
Why is that, Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah,
it's a great question. So last week they came out
gave a new cappex target that was significantly above what
people were expecting.
Speaker 9 (38:03):
And while a lot.
Speaker 16 (38:04):
Of AI spending has come under scrutiny lately, the stock
actually rallied. It seems like the overall takeaway was people
view them as investing from a place's strength. And then
earlier this week, amid all the sell off and volatility
related to Deep Seek out of China, Meta also rose again.
That was sort of seen as a validation of its
own AI model Lama, which is open source, getting a
(38:25):
little bit of a bid from deep Seek, which is
another open source model, So it's sort of a validation
of their strategy there.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Meanwhile, Microsoft expecting eleven percent increase in revenue, but they've
got to vindicate their spending and indeed where the open
AI is is valuable without Since the deep Seek news.
Speaker 9 (38:42):
Yeah, absolutely so that's this company.
Speaker 16 (38:43):
They've disappointed the past couple of quarters, just based on
their share price reaction. Some concerns about the strength of
their cloud business. Is it growing fast enough for people
to justify paying the high multiple that Microsoft has, especially
relative to Meta.
Speaker 9 (38:56):
That's going to be a real focus here.
Speaker 16 (38:58):
And obviously that was the name that a I saw
a lot of weakness earlier this week on the deep
seek news.
Speaker 9 (39:02):
A lot of implications.
Speaker 16 (39:04):
For you know, how much money is being cloud into AI,
at least based on the traditional sort of architecture. Now,
if deep seek is able to do this in a
more efficient and cost effective manner, that really kind of
changes the economics behind some of the spinning that they've
been doing.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
I'm les Delca. Got to be busy, thank you. Moving
on to two other companies also reporting after the Bell Service.
Now in IBM, let's get to it.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Boombergs Brodie Ford and.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
Software is having its moment because of deep Seek. What
do we expect from IBM?
Speaker 17 (39:29):
Absolutely so with IBM, their method of AI monetization thus
far as argument in their consulting business. Everyone's watching their
bookings around AI as it relates to consulting because that's
kind of a good place to be in with the
picks and shovels question because you know, no matter what happens,
even if the customers don't actually end up buying it,
ib able to help you set it up right. So
that's a good setup for Jeni at this moment. See
(39:52):
how folks are watching for that as well as their
own software business largely.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
And Brodie on Service now Generative AI is also a
big part of their story. Tell us what you're looking
for this afternoon when they drop the application.
Speaker 17 (40:06):
Software vendors were struggling a little while as it relates
to AI, but right now with the agent moment, there's
a lot more optimism, especially with deep seek. People say, hey,
are models getting cheaper. Maybe that's scary if you're in Nvidia,
but if you're a company that's going to buy those
models and then deliver them to your customers, that's actually
very good.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
We see that the.
Speaker 17 (40:27):
Service now is at about an all time high right now,
and you know, folks are whole. It's down a little
bit today, but yesterday they close that an all time high,
so investors are excited about the potential for the application
layer to really kind of start having its moment With Jennai.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
Both of these stocks had their moment in twenty twenty
four though. Yes, IBM up thirty percent more than bestince
two thousand and I service now and its best year
up fifty percent. So is it all about just talking
up the AI narrative as much.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
As they can.
Speaker 17 (40:56):
That's a huge part of it. IBM had such a
great year last year because they were one of the
rare reacceleration stories with software. I mean, you could poke
at their growth right and say, oh man, it's only
two percent this and that, but their software business is accelerating.
I mean, the idea that IBM would become a serious
software contender, you know, five six years ago wasn't the
(41:16):
most popular take, but today we've seen that it really
has played out.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
Bertie, Is there any weak spot in either of these
companies as they're heading into this afternoon that investors are
going to be concerned about?
Speaker 5 (41:29):
In particular?
Speaker 17 (41:30):
One X factor is that they are both pretty big
government you know, vendors, and obviously what doge right, I mean,
if the whole promise is that we're going to cut off,
you know, spending on unnecessary things.
Speaker 12 (41:43):
Right.
Speaker 17 (41:43):
Elon famously doesn't love to pay software bills at his
own companies, right, And so some investors have said, man,
is this going to be a concern when it comes
time to you know, a company like service now Is
sells so much into the federal government.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
I correct myself, seve Now up fifty in twenty twenty four,
is actually up eighty one percent in age twenty three.
We'll see what it delivers tonight, Brady Ford. Great to
have him across both of the earnings. And that does
it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Don't forget to
check in on all of the earnings after the bell,
but also check out our podcast. You can find it
on the terminal as well as online on Apples, Spotify,
and iHeart from New York from San Francisco. This is
(42:21):
Bloomberg Technology.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news from the heart of
where innovation, money and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond.
This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Lovelow.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Live from New York. I'm Caroline Hyde.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
And I'm Mike Sheppard in San Francisco. This is Bloomberg Technology.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Coming up asml fights back Deep Seak concerns and surges
the most since twenty twenty as stronger chip equipment orders,
Impress plus, did Deep Seek improperly use open ai data?
Microsoft and open Ai investigate? We have the latest and
we sit down with T Mobile CEO on the heels
of the company's standout fourth quarter.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
But first we check in on these markets.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Remember, folks, it is fed day where we get a
pause that comes later today.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
But we're off by four tens percent.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Now's that on the downside, we're being dragged down by
the like some video Microsoft in the red. Let's move
on and see what earnings we have coming off after
the bell because it is thick and fast. Not only
are we reading from deep Seek, but we've got to.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Digest the real numbers.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Apple a little bit later, but tonight,
we keep an eye on these front three and then
we think about what we've already had out of the
bell in Europe and is ASML the chip equipment maker
managing to fight back some of those anxieties around deep
seek cheap AA models? Ultimately does it matter for chips?
(01:38):
For chip equipment ASML surging currently we see up five
percent in US trading. It was up the most that's
twenty twenty earlier, Mike, and this was on the back
of very strong orders.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
And we're staying on ASML and their big earnings. Be
joining us to discuss this is Bloomberg's Chan coach in Amsterdam.
Speaker 5 (01:56):
Chan.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
There were a surgeon orders in the last quarter for ASML,
far more than expected. But all of that was before
the deep Seek revelations. How did the CEO of ASML
message this to investors today?
Speaker 6 (02:11):
All right?
Speaker 7 (02:12):
CHRISTOSML CEO doubled down on AI. Basically, he thinks Deep
Seek will be good news for ASML, and his thinking
is that anyone that lowers cost lowers barriers to entry,
so lower cost means AI can be used in more applications.
More applications mean more chips, and more chips would mean
(02:35):
ASML can sell more machines to chip makers, and they
think deep sea can lead to democratization of AI, which
will then create more customers for them charm.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
When we talk about chips, we can't get away from geopolitics.
How did some of the US restrictions on sales of
sensitive equipment to China play in the results that we
saw today?
Speaker 7 (03:00):
Will China accounted for twenty seven percent of ASML sales
in the fourth quarter, which was down from nearly half
of its sales in the third quarter. The company expects
China sales to follow up one fifth of its total
revenue this year, and they think that their sales in
China are taking a hit from the prospect of more
(03:22):
US restrictions under Donald Trump's administration, as well as a
broader weakness in the chip sector.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
Bloomberg's John Coach, thank you so much, Caro.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
We booke a plenty more earnings and other socks we're
watching this morning.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Apple t Mobile.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
In particular, two companies that have been working secretly together.
We understand ad support for SpaceX is Starling network in
a surprise release. The tech is now being supported with
an installation of the iPhone's latest software update on Monday,
but more on T Mobile because.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
The company, of course is out with this fourth quarter.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Results beating analyst expectations. The telecom providers saw continued growth
in wireless subscribers and home internet customers. Get this, adding
nine hundred and three thousand monthly phone customers and guiding
from continued strong growth. Joining us now might see that
his Tmobile CEO. And what's interesting is descend. But you said,
be cautious about our fourth quarter.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
What changed?
Speaker 8 (04:13):
Well, the only thing I was pointing out back then,
which maybe was misunderstood, is that it's a seasonal quarter,
and you know, the last couple of weeks are important.
But you know, we just are firing on all cylinders.
We just finished our strongest growth year ever, and we
finished it strong with a monster Q four that exceeded
a lot of people's expectations.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And you're guiding for postpaid net customers to be adding
up to six million in twenty twenty five. That's a
big ramp. Where are those customers coming to?
Speaker 8 (04:38):
You know, this is the strongest beginning of year guide
on new subscribers we've ever given, and.
Speaker 9 (04:43):
It's really simple.
Speaker 8 (04:43):
Our consumer business is firing on all cylinders in the
top one hundred markets, also smaller markets in rural areas.
But now our business sector is starting to rise as well.
And so you look across all the segments. People are
flocking to.
Speaker 4 (04:57):
T Mobile, governments to New York one of them that
you've added. But I'm interested that the other competitors out there,
at and T Verizon they added to where are these
customers coming from?
Speaker 9 (05:08):
Look this is I like to think about this.
Speaker 8 (05:10):
You know, we're the best house in a great neighborhood.
I don't need for our competitors to fail in order
for us to succeed. We are taking share. But also
the market is vibrant and growing, and people are, you know,
getting more value out of rate plans. They're buying up
our rate card. You know, our average revenues per customer
per month are rising, not because of rising prices, but
(05:31):
because they're self selecting up our rate card, and that
allows revenues to rise where nobody else is the loser.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
People need more data. They're going to need more data
for Generator of AI. Is that become a choke point for.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
You in some way?
Speaker 8 (05:45):
It's going to be a way for us to showcase
our differentiation you know, both Oukla and Open Signal have
once again said we ran the gamut in terms of
network awards and we have the.
Speaker 9 (05:56):
Most capacity by far.
Speaker 8 (05:57):
And so as the demand for our network on AI
based applications starts to grow, it'll only showcase t mobiles differentiation.
I think consumers will really be able to see the difference.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Will consumers care about when they're out without any signal
and now they're able potentially to tap in to Starlin
easing team Mobile.
Speaker 8 (06:16):
When we first announced this partnership in twenty twenty two,
it was the single most covered thing we've ever talked about.
And that's saying something because our uncarrier moves are big deals.
This is the biggest one because it speaks to a
universal pain point in this industry. This is a big
country and there are five hundred thousand square miles that
(06:36):
none of the carriers cover. And so now there's our
vision is so simple. If you can see the sky,
you're connected and you don't.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Have to point your phone at it anymore, which is
what you had to do with an Apple previously. Why
did you sort of roll it out so secretly? Why
did it feel like suddenly we woke up and quietly
you could get onto your T mobile iPhone device when
we wouldn't have thought it already.
Speaker 8 (06:56):
Honestly, we've been a little self conscious than that. We
announced this a long time ago, and so it's been
a couple of years and we didn't want to keep
crowing about something until it was ready.
Speaker 9 (07:04):
So we made a big.
Speaker 8 (07:05):
Deal out of it when we struck the partnership and
we said, look, let's just stay quiet until it's time
to hand people this service. About two weeks ago we
quietly started letting people into our beta program. We now
have thousands of users and we're about to throw the
doors wide open on our beta. It's going to be
a big moment and then commercial service this year.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
So it's performing well in beta.
Speaker 8 (07:25):
Absolutely, and right now the launches are happening really rapidly.
So there's well over four hundred satellites. They're low Earth
orbit satellites, so they're very performant. You mentioned some of
the differences versus higher level satellites, and people are getting
a great experience.
Speaker 6 (07:39):
You know.
Speaker 9 (07:39):
Our goal is to.
Speaker 8 (07:40):
Start with text messaging so that you can get your
texts out regardless of where you are, but it'll very
quickly move to picture messaging, MMS, data and voice.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
I hate to try and find any clouds when you're
pointing to silver linings throughout, But when you signal that
caution in December, Yes, about sort of the cyclicality, but
ultimately you've had stellar growth after sellar growth. How much
can you keep on ramping, keep on bringing on more consumers?
How strong is the consumer sentiment out there?
Speaker 8 (08:08):
It's steady and consistent. I think that's what you want
from us. You know, one of the things that differentiates
us is we set out a set of outlooks and
then we consistently meet or beat them. And what we
put out today was a strong guide, but it wasn't
expecting much from our business that we haven't done in
the past. And so you can rely on the things
that we say because we look at the trends underneath it.
And you know, the bottom line is we offer a
(08:30):
stronger network value proposition, and we offer it at a
lower price, and at the end of the day, that's
going to cause people across segments to continue choosing T Mobile.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
What is it that investors in particular a needing at
this moment to hear from you? I mean you've got
twenty two buys, only nine holds and only two cells.
But where are you hearing the questions of caution coming
from an investor base right?
Speaker 8 (08:52):
Well, they want to know what our next act is,
you know, And so that's a big piece of what
we focused on in our Capital Markets day last fall.
So talk about what comes be on the next couple
of years, and you know, AI is a big piece
of it. We're transforming our business operations to be able
to think about how do we serve customers in the
era of AI in new ways? And this industry has
(09:12):
always treated everybody exactly the same, and it's so analogue.
You go in and spend a Saturday of your life
in one of our retail stores trying to upgrade your
family to new phones.
Speaker 9 (09:21):
We know we can do.
Speaker 8 (09:22):
Better, and our Tea Life app that's now in the
hands of fifty million people can give you an experience
of T Mobile that's different than somebody else in terms
of the offers. You may see, the prioritization, the upgrades,
et cetera. And so it's an exciting moment for us
to rethink how we serve customers and give each customer
a fantastic journey with T Mobile.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
What could the phone make has been doing better at
the moment because ultimately we see Apple getting another downgrade.
Many worries about China, but we aren't upgrading our phones
as much as we used to do. You have to
capitalize on giving the add ons in this moment because
Samsung and Apple just they're not presenting as new a
use cases as they used to.
Speaker 9 (10:01):
Well, it works for our business model. I mean, I
can't speak for them.
Speaker 8 (10:04):
One thing that's happening is upgrade rates have slowed down,
but they're pretty steady. Prices have risen, so the OEMs
have made up for it. That way, customers are keeping
their phones longer. But what you saw with T Mobile
this time is our upgrade rates did tick up a
little bit. With the lowest upgrade rates in the industry.
That's good for our financials. But they started to normalize,
so they ticked up. I signaled earlier in the quarter
(10:25):
that our iPhone sales were very strong, and they were,
and you saw it in our numbers.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Mike, so great to have you.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Great to see you again in the back of your earnings.
Come back soon. Mike's even is a T Mobile CEO,
Microsoft and open Ai are investigating where the deep seek
used data output from open AI's technology if it was
obtained in an unauthorized manner by a group linked to
(10:51):
the Chinese AI startups, all according to sources. Now, Deep
Seek and the High Flyer Hedge fund where deep Seak
was started, have not commented on there's so far, so
let's discuss it and the data privacy concerns around deep
seat with Alex Staemosi's chief mentioned security officer at Centinel
One and former chief security officer at Facebook. Look Alex
is open ai and indeed other AI labs at the moment.
(11:14):
Are they right to be concerned about their ip here?
Speaker 9 (11:17):
I think they are.
Speaker 10 (11:19):
There's a lot of people who doubt the claim that
deepsek was able to build such a incredibly capable model
with such a little compute and such as little cost
as they claim. Now there are some great breakthroughs here.
Deep Seek published at paper that demonstrated great breakthroughs in
both training cost and inference costs. So inference is what
(11:42):
you do when you're actually running the model for people
to use later, and they have some legitimate breakthroughs. So those
are breakthroughs that to their credit, they have documentary that
other people are going to be able to use now.
But there's a lot of people who believe that they
utilized both open AI's model probably running up in Microsoft's
Azure service, as well as metas open source models to
(12:03):
build upon to build Deepseek, And that's what's being investigated.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Right now, Alex Is there anything that Microsoft and other
open and open ai and other providers can do to
perhaps prevent this from happening again? If not deep Seek,
then perhaps another competitor from China.
Speaker 10 (12:23):
Well, this is the challenge that they're going to have
that Microsoft's business model is that you can go to
Microsoft Azure and you can throw down a credit card,
you can open up an account, and you can ask
them to create a private copy of open AI's models
for you that you can use for your own purposes.
This is how Microsoft plans on monetizing their multi billion
(12:45):
dollar investment in open Ai. That is a great thing
for them, that's a great thing in theory for both
open Ai and the customers that you can have a
version of open Ai that in theory does not expose
their model weights to the customer and does not expose
the customer's private enterprise data to open AI.
Speaker 9 (13:05):
But what has happened is that people have figured.
Speaker 10 (13:07):
Out ways that you can ask a model many many
millions or billions of questions to suck all of the
data out of it. So imagine you have an ancient
wise professor, and you're able to ask that wise professor many, many,
many questions and then effectively become a.
Speaker 9 (13:24):
Copy of that professor.
Speaker 10 (13:26):
That's exactly what can happen here, except at machine speed.
You can do that over days, weeks, or months, and
that is the business model that Microsoft is operating here.
So detecting that kind of behavior might be theoretically possible,
but that's also exactly what they're selling. And so I think, yes,
they're going to look into what Deepseat did here, but
(13:47):
it will only be a cat and mouse game to
try to determine whether somebody is actually utilizing the models
in the way Microsoft wants them to and wants to
get paid for, and whether or not they're trying to
actually copy those models.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Is we want to ask you a little bit more
about the detail of concerns anxieties privacy. Teresa Peyton joined US.
She's former CEO for the White House. Here's what she
had to say about worries on using deep Seat.
Speaker 11 (14:11):
This is an untested app. I would caution people not
to put too much proprietary company information into it, and
until there's been an opportunity to actually do something called
ethical hacking or red teaming pen testing of the actual
app and learning more about how is your data treated,
(14:32):
where is it stored, how do the algorithms work. It
is open source, but things do still need to be
put through their paces.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Of course, deep Seat was the number one app downloaded
on Apple. We've also now got Ali Baba announcing its
latest powerful AI model. Should similar reticence be used by
US companies?
Speaker 2 (14:50):
By US people? Adds?
Speaker 10 (14:52):
Okay, So this is where it gets complicated and we
got to be really careful here to separate out two
different things. There is the deep Seak app that people
are downloading on their phones. That app, that data goes
straight to China. Right, So if you're downloading deep Seek
on your phone, or if you're going to deep Seak's
website and you're typing in query that app, that data
goes straight to China. That's available to that Chinese company,
(15:13):
that is probably available to the Chinese government without any problem.
So yes, absolutely, companies should not be allowing their employees
to download the deep Seap app onto their phones. If
you're a company and you download the open source model weights,
that data does not go back to China. Now there
are some potential risks right now.
Speaker 9 (15:32):
Those risks are pretty much theoretical. The deep seek model
weights do have an ideological.
Speaker 10 (15:39):
Twist towards the CCP, so if you asked you about
Tineman square, it won't answer. It will not create, for example,
a Winnie the Pooh story about Shishan Pin.
Speaker 9 (15:50):
So it corresponds to the.
Speaker 10 (15:52):
Rules the Chinese government has created about the ideological consistency
of AI, but that is not a security risk. That
being said, there are some interesting theoretical ideas people have
come up with about backdooring AI when it's used for
security sensitive uses, but right now that is not as
big of a deal. I think a more interesting question
(16:14):
for enterprises that are looking to use the deep Seak
model WAKES is the legal issues. If it turns out
that deep seek was trained off of metas and open
AIS models, what does that mean for the legality of
using deep seeks models. Deep Seak has open source theirs,
but they do not have the ability to get rid
of any legal issues that are caused by open AI.
(16:35):
Of course, open ai is being sued for their use
of training data that's open that. This is one of
the issues with AI. The intellectual property issues have not
been solved. We're dealing with eighteen, nineteenth and early twentieth
century copyright ideas and we're trying to apply it to
these twenty first century problems. And it's a real legal
(16:55):
mess that the legal system is years behind what the
cutting edges in technology.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Alex Stamos, Sentinel One Chief Information Security Officer, Thank you.
Coming up, we'll cover deep Seek's impact on the chip
world with Andrew Feldman from Sarah Bras.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Not all hardware providers are worried about deep seek advantas.
The partner of Nvidia that sells chip testing equipment just
lifted its full year forecast almost forty percent in anticipation
of elevated spending around AI, and it downplayed the impact
of deep Seek's big debut. Now let's bring in someone
else in the field. Andrew Feldman, CEO Sarah Brus, a
(17:38):
company building computer systems for complex AI deep learning applications. Andrew,
your company is trying to go toe to toe with
a big competitor and that is Nvidia. What do you
draw in terms of an underdog story from what we
saw the other day with deep Seek?
Speaker 12 (17:57):
Okay, I think this is an enormously exciting moment for
the community. I think it sends multiple powerful messages. Clearly,
they used less compute, they used fewer people and produced
something quite impressive. Now, I think that's a reminder that
those of us who are underdogs and are competing against
(18:17):
the eight hundred pound gorillas in the industry, small teams
of hardworking people with big ideas can produce industry changing results.
And that's what we do at Cerebras.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Yeah, Andrew, they used you, they used Cerebras inference offering.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
What did you see?
Speaker 4 (18:36):
What have you taken on in terms of the amount
of share necessity they need in this moment?
Speaker 12 (18:43):
Sure, So we are now in beta with our deep
Seak offering. And as your last guest said, there are
two ways to use deep Seek. You can use it
through their app, and I think he's absolutely correct that
that that data you can assume goes right to China.
Or you can use it through a company like us
or Perplexity or collection of others that are offering the model,
(19:07):
and we of course have all sorts of protections for
your data such that you can be assured it will
go nowhere. There is tremendous demand for this type of model.
One of the things that separated this model from previous
models was that its ability to reason and to do logic,
and those type of models in particular outperform the other
(19:31):
forms of models, and they do that by using more
compute during inference. And this is something that the whole
industry has been grappling with and we are today the
fastest of this and what that means for you, the
user is a better user experience, quicker answers, less waiting,
and that's what's really moving the customers right now.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Andrew Cerebras had been planning an IPO, do you have
an update on that? And we also understand and that
an interagency panel in Washington known as SIPIUS has been
reviewing all of this.
Speaker 5 (20:05):
Do you have an update there? I don't, But I.
Speaker 12 (20:10):
Think the deep Seek model was put out right around
Trump's inauguration.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
I don't think that was an accident.
Speaker 12 (20:19):
I think this was an effort to communicate at the
geopolitical level to the US that the previous administration's regulations
hadn't worked, that the Chinese engineer was capable of doing
extraordinary things even in the face of the regulations imposed
(20:41):
by the previous administration's commerce team.
Speaker 4 (20:45):
What's so interesting about this You talk about the geopolitics
and perhaps all that sort of timing use with Huawei
and its innovations, But briefly, many and perhaps worried Siphius
maybe have anxiety around your relationship with G forty two
and it's ultimate relationship with Chines, your overseas locations. How
do you tackle that in this environment?
Speaker 12 (21:04):
Look, I think we have a strategic partnership with G
forty two. They are the national champion AI company for
United Arab Emirates, and they are one of the US's
staunchest allies in the Middle East and have a long
track record of supporting US interests and being good allies.
(21:25):
I think one of the things that Deep Seek has
taught us is that.
Speaker 9 (21:29):
We will need the community and we will need our allies.
Speaker 12 (21:32):
That we thought perhaps that the US could run this alone,
that we had the computer companies like Cerebras, like Nvidia
and a m D and we had the open eyes
of the world. But I think what we're learning here
is that we will need the entire US ecosystem in
(21:53):
this AI battle.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Andrew Feldman, thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
CEO Cerebras.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Come back when you do. You have a bit more
news on the IPO potentially coming up.
Speaker 4 (22:02):
Activist investor Kristin Hull joins us to discuss what she'll
be looking for when Tesla releases its results later today.
I remember an activist investor what she makes of Elon
Musk's involvement in government, in the German government. This is
bloue Meg Technology. Welcome back to Blue Meg Technology. I'm
(22:34):
Caroline Hide in New York.
Speaker 5 (22:35):
And I'm Mike Shepard in San Francisco.
Speaker 4 (22:37):
Check on these markets, Mike, because we've got some anxiety
ahead of the FED, of course, and indeed ahead of earnings.
We've got Microsoft Meta Tesla after well, nasdak off by
four ten percent. The bitcoin though, is getting a bit
of a risk on trade where at one and a
half percent, maybe because of what Trump Media has just
announced a pairing into financial services. They're launching a fintech
brand name Truthfi. In collaborations with Charles Schwab up eight
(23:00):
and a half percent Sally Bakewell here to discuss what
are we expecting this sort of a move from an
entity related to the president.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
I think we could have expected it.
Speaker 13 (23:10):
I mean, Trump has just launched his trump coin, he
has already declared himself a huge supporter of cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
He's the crypto president.
Speaker 13 (23:19):
So I don't think it's a huge surprise that Trump
Media is delving into the financial services world with this investment.
Speaker 9 (23:27):
Now.
Speaker 13 (23:27):
It's notable, though, that Donald Trump he actually transferred his
shares in Trump Media last month to a trust which
is controlled by his eldest son, so he no longer
directly owns any of Trump Media, but he is the
sole beneficiary of that trust. So I think this is
just an example of how the Trump Empire is deepening
its push into crypto and fintech. And it's interestingly timed
(23:50):
because just last week Trump made comments about, you know,
traditional banks and how he said that they were effectively
debanking the Conservatives. He's sort of made a barber Bank
of America CEO Brian moynihan, as well as JP Morgan
chief Jamie Diamond, so he's a big fan of the
crypto the fintech world.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I think it is fair to.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Say Sally in effector is the Trump Media group trying
to create something that Elon Musk has dreamed about for
all these years, that is a one stop social platform
with everything, messaging, finance, you name it.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, so far, what do we know?
Speaker 13 (24:27):
We know that Trump Media is investing two hundred and
fifty million in this effort, and that money actually is
going to be custodied by Charles Schwab, which is also
going to advise it on its investments and its strategy.
It's going to offer separately managed accounts ETFs, and other bitcoin,
crypto and bitcoin related products. Now, getting into the financial
services space is something that a lot of companies have done.
(24:50):
Just yesterday, social media platform x announced that it was
partnering with Visa on its digital wallet in order to
be this everything app that Musk has lo talked about.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
And we've seen the.
Speaker 13 (25:01):
Likes of Amazon creeps only into financial services, as has
Apple with the wallet. So it's a difficult world to
enter in many ways. There are a lot of incumbents
such as zell and Venmo, which holds substantial portions of
the market. But equally, a lot of these companies also
want to diversify their revenue, and this is one place
(25:22):
that they can do that.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Bloomberg Sally big, Well, thank you so much. Tesla releases
its fourth quarter earnings later today, and investors are going
to be closely watching for information on new products and
sales volume, and they also want to know how CEO
Elon Musk's new role in the Trump administration is impacting
the electric vehicle maker.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
Let's bring in Kristen Hall.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
She's the founder and chief investment officer at NIA Impact
Capital and somebody who follows Tesla very closely, Nia, this
is a real moment for you.
Speaker 5 (25:53):
If somebody watches this company very closely.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Tough sales numbers earlier this month from the company, we
see the new president pulling away the EV subsidies and
the CEO of Tesla himself quite distracted by politics. These
are choppy waters for any company. How is Tesla going
to navigate them?
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me today.
Speaker 14 (26:15):
This is a tricky company and all investors are going
to be watching for these earnings today. We want to
see that there's a commitment to growth and that there's
an ability for execution, and of course we have questions
can the CEO execute on these and do we have
a board that's going to support all of the growth
that we need to see from this company.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
What are you looking.
Speaker 3 (26:35):
For in particular when it comes to the business including
self driving and perhaps some of the other businesses that
have emerged for Tesla, including AI and robotics.
Speaker 14 (26:47):
Yeah, so that's a good question, right because as investors,
we want to see growth, and we want to see
a plan, and we want to see guidance. And what
we know from these earnings reports from the past is
consistently there will be surprises. We can expect that we
want to see that there are sales growth in their
main revenue source, which is automobiles, right, and yet Europe
(27:09):
dropping in popularity. Actually worldwide, Tesla has been dropping popularity,
and so we have competition coming up in the market,
both with regular automobile makers as well as some of
the Chinese that are coming in and so it's a
complicated terrain for Tesla right now to navigate, and so
we're going to want to see that there's a CEO
in control with a plan.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
You are so important in terms of a voice because
you're an activist investor, and ultimately you're questioning often the
role of elo Musk, the way of policies he.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Invokes, the way he acts.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
But notably at the moment, Tesla doesn't seem to be
particularly related to fundamentals. We point out that their shares
are nearly doubled since the last time we got earnings,
and the numbers haven't been that great since then if
you think about the deliveries numbers instead, this is a
proxy on Elon's closeness to politics. How do you distinguish
that for yourself as an investor?
Speaker 14 (28:02):
So, Caroline, thanks for the question. This is a complicated company,
particularly when the CEO is as involved with the federal
government as is. Oftentimes you would see if there's a
role granted from the federal government that you would drop
your current day job, and yet we're not seeing that happening.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
So we do.
Speaker 14 (28:19):
Believe that every company deserves a full time CEO, and
so we have lots of questions there. We also have
questions about human capital management and how is Tesla going
to be able to attract, retain, promote top talent, because,
as we know, this is an innovation company, and innovation
does derive itself from really loyal client base, both on
(28:42):
the client side and then also on the employee base,
and so we're looking to see how is the company
going to manage this.
Speaker 4 (28:49):
For years, though, since you first bought into Tesla, you've
been trying to communicate with the company and pushing against
some of the activities that we've seen, whether it be
consents around on to DEI, whether it be certain perceived
anti Semitic compents coming from Elo Musk in the past
that I know you've written about.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
There's also, though, of course, the latest.
Speaker 4 (29:06):
When we come to the concerns around gestures recently made
around the inauguration of Trump made by Elo Musk and
indeed his support of IFD, which is deemed a right
wing group in Germany. Nothing seems the matter when you're
putting this to ultimately a share price that goes up
into the right.
Speaker 14 (29:23):
So you bring up some really interesting points. This company
does seem to stand alone as far as its meanness,
and that it's continued to grow. Other companies would not
get the same reactions with that type of CEO and
those types of behaviors. We as investors are really looking
for the long term possibilities here, and when you have
such a controversial CEO, we are seeing, as you point out,
(29:45):
sales are dropping, popularity is dropping, the brand has been damaged,
and so how is the board and the rest of
Tesla going to step in and see how are we
going to see sales growing when we are having a
lot of controversial issues. As I pointed out earlier, we're
also seeing not only two clients at where I live
in California, many many are switching to Rivian and other
(30:08):
EV brands specifically based on the brand and some of
the issues that they see that they don't want to
be associated with. And we're also seeing that for employees,
who's going to want to work for Tesla in such
a volatile environment. These are questions that investors have.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Kristin, It's been a year since Tesla dropped diversity and
inclusion language from its ten K, and we've seen since
then other companies and even the federal government following suit
in some fashion or another. Do you see this tide
changing at all? And what sort of pressure will you
be able to apply to Tesla at upcoming meetings?
Speaker 14 (30:43):
So for all of our companies, we really want to
see strong human capital management. And so whether you call
it DEI or whether you call it supporting your employee base,
we really want to see Tesla and other companies hold
their employees on the asset side of the balance sheet
as opposed to on the expense side. We want to
see that Tesla is showing that they will invest in
(31:03):
their employee base because we know that again, to execute
on all of the innovation that they promised, they're going
to need to have strong, loyal employees and that's going
to mean strong programs and so again, whether it's called diversity,
equity inclusion, whether it's merit based hiring, we want to
see that investment and we need to see the transparency
around that. So with Tesla, we and NIA have been
(31:24):
asking them to remove forced arbitration from employee contracts because
that does conceal a lot of what's going on, both
for managers and for investors as well as for other employees.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
Kristin how, chief investment Officer for NIA Impact Capital, thanks
so much for joining us today and do not forget
to check out the elon Ink Podcasts FINGO card for
this round of Tesla's earnings.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
You can find it on the.
Speaker 4 (31:47):
Terminal Online Work out what words are used, how many times,
and if they're in line with that card coming up.
TikTok still needs a US buyer to avoid a bad
in the States.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Seventy five day extension.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
Signed by President Trump run out in April. We'll talk
to Jesse Tinsley about the old cash bid he's put
together with none of them, the mister Beast. This is
bringing back technology.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Could a widely popular influencer become an owner in a
hugely popular social media platform.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Mister Beast is reported.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
To be speaking with multiple groups of investors about buying TikTok.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
One of those groups is led.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
By Jesse Tinsley, the CEO of Employer dot Com. Jesse
Tinsley joins us now. Jesse, thank you for being here.
Let's get right to it. How involved is mister Beast
with your group's bid? Has he fully committed to joining
your team here?
Speaker 15 (32:46):
I think mister Beast, as we said last week, I
think we hope that he joins as many bus as
as possible.
Speaker 6 (32:51):
He's positive influence.
Speaker 15 (32:52):
For young people and people ever read globally, and so
we're excited to have him in his group backing our
bid among others as well.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
So he's not formally signed on to your bid. He's
just seeing whoever wins contacts.
Speaker 15 (33:06):
So I think there's some some articles that came out
last week and mister Beast and his group are definitely
signed on with our group and it's but it's non exclusive,
so we hope he can work with as many groups
as possible.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
And what about your bid?
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Who else is involved other than yourself and potentially mister Beaste.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 15 (33:26):
I think we were We were not obviously a very
large bid by by any means.
Speaker 9 (33:31):
Right.
Speaker 15 (33:31):
We're a bunch of technologists and founders and there's folks
like David Bazouki from the CEO and co founder of
rope Blocks, as well as Nathan Coley, co founder and
CEO of Anchorage, among a bunch of other technologists and
folks that I think can stabilize, you know, TikTok can
put in a really good place for users and data
(33:51):
integrity across you know, across the US based population.
Speaker 6 (33:56):
We're We're excited with the group we have.
Speaker 15 (33:58):
We have as almost a great effort as opposed to
some of these larger bids.
Speaker 6 (34:01):
And I think we have folks that can come in
and make a huge impact. We're really excited with the
group that we.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
A Jesse, what have you heard back from BYT Dance
and who at the company are you dealing with specifically.
Speaker 6 (34:14):
Yeah, that's a good question. We have heard back from
BI Dance directly.
Speaker 15 (34:17):
It's been a bit of radio silence on their side,
but we're looking forward to chatting with them the next
couple of weeks. It sounds like there's some movement with
different conversations we've been having across a bunch of different parties,
and I think it's right now. We're scared with the
way things are trending. And yeah, so no direct contact
with by Dance.
Speaker 6 (34:36):
Thom's farm.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Really fascinating about who's alongside you Roadblocks. I totally get
the idea that you want to therefore be aligned with
social media and with discussion and groups and interaction of
young people. But Jesse, you have made your name in
human capital. Why are you interested in this asset?
Speaker 2 (34:55):
What change do you want to make?
Speaker 6 (34:56):
Yeah, the fantastic question. I think. Obviously data's background.
Speaker 15 (35:01):
Roadblocks directly seeks the lines a lot with the same
values that I shared. It's one of the reasons that
we added him directly is I have two young daughters
who will soon be on on social media and hopefully
my goal and whoever whoever wins roadblocks, whether it's myself
or another group, I hope that you know that it's
safe enough for the where I feel comfortable with my
(35:22):
young daughters going on.
Speaker 6 (35:24):
TikTok for the next six ft full months.
Speaker 15 (35:25):
And I think right now, the way the algorithm is set,
where the data is, how the data is being used,
I would not feel that comfortable doing that thus far.
So I think that that's kind of my goal and
the values that I see an ndidate for for US.
Speaker 6 (35:40):
Stone after this stood correctly.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Jesse, President Donald Trump has made selling TikTok to US
buyers or reaching a deal a priority.
Speaker 5 (35:50):
What kind of contact have you had with the White
House and what.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Sort of support are you getting from Trump administration officials
on your bid.
Speaker 15 (35:57):
Yeah, we've done ongoing dialogue with the Trump illustration, and
we feel very comfortable with our bid in terms of
how we've actually set it up. We have a bunch
of we've already preset a lot of the team in
terms of board of directors and board sub committees with
around finance, technology and everything else.
Speaker 6 (36:15):
So we feel really really good.
Speaker 15 (36:16):
We have an all us back vaccine with all of
the data and servers and technology moving here.
Speaker 6 (36:22):
So definitely gonna be a challenge to move TikTok.
Speaker 15 (36:25):
But over from byte Dance and there's so many servers
and move it here.
Speaker 6 (36:31):
But we feel really comfortable with our bid correctly.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
Ultimately, it sounds like you're making one just for the
good of humanity, for the good of your kids.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
I mean you.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Said, I think accidentally said you were making whoever wins
out on roadblocks, and you might say whoever wins out
on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
But help us take this really seriously.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
You've already named some really significant people who are in
this with yourself are a significant entrepreneur and founder. But
help us understand how serious the nature it is of
this bid and how much money you've got behind it.
Speaker 15 (37:03):
Jesse, Yeah, so definitely definitely a very large bit, I
think Bell I'll measures we basically have I think the
other public number fit that's been floated as a twenty
big billion by another group essentially ours and significantly higher
that offer ends today got.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
The money behind at Jesse Tinsley, He tells our CEO
of employer dot com thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Microsoft and Meta reporting after market closed today. All this
admits concerns around artificial intelligence spending. Let's bring in Bloomberg's
Ryan Blestelica.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
Ryan. Meta and Microsoft are two very different stories.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
When it comes to capex, Meta seems to be getting
a little bit more of a pass.
Speaker 16 (37:53):
Why is that, Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah,
it's a great question. So last week they came out
gave a new cappex target that was significantly above what
people were expecting.
Speaker 9 (38:03):
And while a lot.
Speaker 16 (38:04):
Of AI spending has come under scrutiny lately, the stock
actually rallied. It seems like the overall takeaway was people
view them as investing from a place's strength. And then
earlier this week, amid all the sell off and volatility
related to Deep Seek out of China, Meta also rose again.
That was sort of seen as a validation of its
own AI model Lama, which is open source, getting a
(38:25):
little bit of a bid from deep Seek, which is
another open source model, So it's sort of a validation
of their strategy there.
Speaker 4 (38:32):
Meanwhile, Microsoft expecting eleven percent increase in revenue, but they've
got to vindicate their spending and indeed where the open
AI is is valuable without Since the deep Seek news.
Speaker 9 (38:42):
Yeah, absolutely so that's this company.
Speaker 16 (38:43):
They've disappointed the past couple of quarters, just based on
their share price reaction. Some concerns about the strength of
their cloud business. Is it growing fast enough for people
to justify paying the high multiple that Microsoft has, especially
relative to Meta.
Speaker 9 (38:56):
That's going to be a real focus here.
Speaker 16 (38:58):
And obviously that was the name that a I saw
a lot of weakness earlier this week on the deep
seek news.
Speaker 9 (39:02):
A lot of implications.
Speaker 16 (39:04):
For you know, how much money is being cloud into AI,
at least based on the traditional sort of architecture. Now,
if deep seek is able to do this in a
more efficient and cost effective manner, that really kind of
changes the economics behind some of the spinning that they've
been doing.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
I'm les Delca. Got to be busy, thank you. Moving
on to two other companies also reporting after the Bell Service.
Now in IBM, let's get to it.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Boombergs Brodie Ford and.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
Software is having its moment because of deep Seek. What
do we expect from IBM?
Speaker 17 (39:29):
Absolutely so with IBM, their method of AI monetization thus
far as argument in their consulting business. Everyone's watching their
bookings around AI as it relates to consulting because that's
kind of a good place to be in with the
picks and shovels question because you know, no matter what happens,
even if the customers don't actually end up buying it,
ib able to help you set it up right. So
that's a good setup for Jeni at this moment. See
(39:52):
how folks are watching for that as well as their
own software business largely.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
And Brodie on Service now Generative AI is also a
big part of their story. Tell us what you're looking
for this afternoon when they drop the application.
Speaker 17 (40:06):
Software vendors were struggling a little while as it relates
to AI, but right now with the agent moment, there's
a lot more optimism, especially with deep seek. People say, hey,
are models getting cheaper. Maybe that's scary if you're in Nvidia,
but if you're a company that's going to buy those
models and then deliver them to your customers, that's actually
very good.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
We see that the.
Speaker 17 (40:27):
Service now is at about an all time high right now,
and you know, folks are whole. It's down a little
bit today, but yesterday they close that an all time high,
so investors are excited about the potential for the application
layer to really kind of start having its moment With Jennai.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
Both of these stocks had their moment in twenty twenty
four though. Yes, IBM up thirty percent more than bestince
two thousand and I service now and its best year
up fifty percent. So is it all about just talking
up the AI narrative as much.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
As they can.
Speaker 17 (40:56):
That's a huge part of it. IBM had such a
great year last year because they were one of the
rare reacceleration stories with software. I mean, you could poke
at their growth right and say, oh man, it's only
two percent this and that, but their software business is accelerating.
I mean, the idea that IBM would become a serious
software contender, you know, five six years ago wasn't the
(41:16):
most popular take, but today we've seen that it really
has played out.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
Bertie, Is there any weak spot in either of these
companies as they're heading into this afternoon that investors are
going to be concerned about?
Speaker 5 (41:29):
In particular?
Speaker 17 (41:30):
One X factor is that they are both pretty big
government you know, vendors, and obviously what doge right, I mean,
if the whole promise is that we're going to cut off,
you know, spending on unnecessary things.
Speaker 12 (41:43):
Right.
Speaker 17 (41:43):
Elon famously doesn't love to pay software bills at his
own companies, right, And so some investors have said, man,
is this going to be a concern when it comes
time to you know, a company like service now Is
sells so much into the federal government.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
I correct myself, seve Now up fifty in twenty twenty four,
is actually up eighty one percent in age twenty three.
We'll see what it delivers tonight, Brady Ford. Great to
have him across both of the earnings. And that does
it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Don't forget to
check in on all of the earnings after the bell,
but also check out our podcast. You can find it
on the terminal as well as online on Apples, Spotify,
and iHeart from New York from San Francisco. This is
(42:21):
Bloomberg Technology.
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