Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels, where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made.
And I'm Caroline Hepke in London. We're the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast.
We're up early every weekday, keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world.
We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled, and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going.
From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now.
And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy.
We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.
So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens.
It's smart, calm and to the point.
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Chapter 2: What motivated Warner Bros. Discovery to reopen negotiations with Paramount?
That blew up right over the weekend on social media. And what I'm trying to do is understand the story of how public market investors are treating this versus what we see in private markets. That clearly is a consolidation of different platforms, right? Just try and unpick that for me. I think it's really a debate between the old and the new.
And I think when you can't model the old, going back to that SAS assumption on free cash flow multiples, and you're looking at this acceleration on agentic, people just are getting out of the way, to be quite honest with you. And they're going to six other sectors that are more infrastructure related.
And the feeling is that some of the traditional SaaS companies will have problems going from a traditional SaaS model to a consumption model, which is all agent-based. And it's a mess.
Chapter 3: How are AI concerns impacting stock market performance?
It's an absolute mess if you're a software investor trying to model these companies. Ted, with respect, I don't think you really answered my question, which is the contradiction of the old and new economy, software more recently being impacted, and then are we or are we not in an AI bubble? You mentioned cash flows.
One of the interesting pieces of math that people are doing is the capital expenditures commitment of the hyperscalers and its impact on cash flow or proportion of cash flow. Basically, cash flow is getting wiped out. How do you feel about that? I think it's a problem.
Chapter 4: What details surround Thrive Capital's record fundraise?
X of Google and Meta, which have their supporting businesses on the advertising that can actually make up that free cash flow. Where I get pushback is names like Amazon and even Microsoft to some degree, to a more limited degree.
But if you look at Amazon, I mean, they essentially had to lay off a very large component of their white collar business.
employment base to maintain even getting to neutral free cash flow. So it is an issue. One of the things that we are not talking about is memory. And when you have this token, I would say acceleration, and you have inference also expanding, we have a huge memory problem.
And I would almost put it at a crisis level where you're not going to have enough memory to support this compute over the next two years. That's a real issue out there. Next week, NVIDIA reports its earnings and it's the biggest beneficiary of the capital expenditures numbers we talked about. To this point, it has shown massive real top line growth.
What would it need to show or evidence to carry the rest of the market with it next Wednesday evening?
I think, number one, they have to assure investors that they don't have a memory problem, which they don't.
I mean, Jensen was so far ahead of this memory issue by locking up supply. That's number one. Number two is... Some of the Blackwell numbers, as well as transitioning, the timing of Rubin is also very, very important.
This is a real change in infrastructure on Rubin. And I think anything that they can assure investors that's on track and the adoption of Rubin from a system perspective is not cannibalizing any of their business as it relates to
For example, Google's TPUs or inference solvers. They've got to play in both realms. Ted Mortensen of BED, I think you've set us up for a number of weeks to come. Thank you very much indeed. Now coming up, Ford's charges ahead with a more affordable next-gen EV. Shares a little softer but came back after headlines hit. We're going to go under the hood next. This is Bloomberg Tech.
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Chapter 5: What led to the tension between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount?
It's like improvement by a thousand cuts. And they've managed to shrink the size of the battery on this EV. The battery is the most expensive component of an electric vehicle, while at the same time extending the range by about 50 miles. That's just one of many engineering gains they made.
which is the reason they can field this vehicle at $30,000 as a starting price, which is $20,000 below the average price of a new car in America today.
We spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Doug Field, which was a really interesting exercise.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of Netflix's waiver for Paramount negotiations?
There is a pathway here, right? It starts 2027 with a pickup truck, and they go basically from skunk works to reintegrating back into the might of Ford with distant...
maybe distant keith ambitions on l3 systems what's the sort of timeline from here of this uev platform please yeah not exactly that far distant they're going to come with the eyes off the road level 3 semi-autonomy in 2028 so a year after they launch this vehicle they'll offer buyers the option of getting this semi-autonomous size off the road hands off the wheel
So their point is they can put a feature like that on an inexpensive car in the 30,000s, which is unusual. Normally, those sorts of advanced technology features show up first on very high-end luxury cars closer to six figures.
Right.
The approach from Ford thus far has been to electrify the big winners, thinking Mach-E, thinking F-150 Lightning. That's gone now, right? And the focus is China. So put that context out there for us, why this approach, ground up, starting from fresh, is the right way to counter the cost basis of a Chinese EV company.
Right. So the advantage the Chinese have is in price. I mean, there's a Chinese EV in China for $10,000. Not likely that would come here, but they have a big price advantage, even if you make a car ready for the U.S. market. But they also have a technology advantage. They have... you know, cars that are essentially an extension of your smartphone, smart cars.
So you need to compete against them both on price and technology. That's what Ford says it's doing with this because of the approach they've taken. It's not just an affordable vehicle, they say, but it's a desirable vehicle with lots of good features.
Bloomberg's Keith Norton, who again has led the charge on covering this industry and this company for a long time. Appreciate it. Let's talk about Apple. It's touting an in-person experience event in New York, Shanghai, and London for a March 4th product launch, suggesting a lower-key showcase than often held at its Cupertino campus.
Let's get out to Bloomberg's consumer tech and Apple managing editor, Mark Gurman. There's the event and how they'll do it, right? Different to the kind of keynote-style format Cupertino but it's harder the products and I think you were on very recently kind of telling us what we should expect from this Yeah, there's a lot in the pipeline for the first half of this year.
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Chapter 7: How is the AI trade affecting major tech companies?
People have flown multiple drones together. That's not the same as a swarm. A swarm really is where the drones talk to each other They interact with each other and ultimately potentially carry a payload or a weapon and can drop that weapon on a target.
Weaving in AI to do that for automatic targeting recognition and in this case to take a command from someone giving a voice instruction and turn that into a movement or an action is relatively uncharted territory.
I should say that SpaceX and XAI did not respond to our request for comment, which is pretty normal procedure for them. What they are doing is hiring some interesting roles, bi-coastally, but in the classic talent pools of Silicon Valley. What areas?
This is DC in the West Coast. And of course, SpaceX, a long-term defense contractor, but never in offensive weapons, nothing ever so explicit. And XAI, I mean, this is grok, this is X, what we're all going to post this story on afterwards. They are now hiring for people with clearances. And that's a real change. They're looking for people with secret clearance and top secret clearance.
Bloomberg's Katrina Manson, top reporting. Thank you very much. There are so many other news headlines in the world of tech. Time now for Talking Tech. And first up, Anthropix talks to extend a contract with the Pentagon are being held up over additional protections the company wants to put on its clawed tool.
Anthropic wants to put guard rails in place to stop Claude from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or to develop weapons that can be deployed without a human involved. According to sources, the Pentagon wants to be able to use Claude as long as its deployment doesn't break the law. Plus, Thrive Capital has raised more than $10 billion for its largest fund.
Yet, the venture firm founded by Josh Kushner draws far more demand than it could accept, turning away billions of dollars from prospective investors. The interest underscores the success of several of its portfolio companies, including OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe. And sticking with Thrive Capital, the firm just backed a startup building optical transceivers that are crucial for data centers.
The startup is called Mesh Optical Technologies and was founded by SpaceX alumni. And it's raised $50 million, led by Thrive, to scale manufacturing of the technology in the United States. The company's co-founder and CEO, Travis Brashears, joins us now. This is such an interesting field. It's one that NVIDIA has looked at. The use of optics in GPU is also, or OPU is being looked at.
Let's start with what you're offering, the actual technology itself, which we wrote about this morning. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. We just announced our company, Mesh Optical, coming out of stealth here. We are standing up high-volume optical manufacturing of these optical interconnects that are used for all GPU clusters.
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