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cover of episode White House Calls Out Amazon, SoFi CEO Weighs in on Earnings and Regulation

White House Calls Out Amazon, SoFi CEO Weighs in on Earnings and Regulation

2025/4/29
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Bloomberg Technology

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Possibility surrounds us in digital innovation, evolving markets and disruptive ideas. And while promises can inspire dreams, proof is the catalyst for transformation.

Developers like you are building the future, but you need the right tools to move fast and go further, right? That's where Microsoft comes in. With Microsoft, you can do it.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. Innovation, money, and power collide in Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Caroline Hyde and Ed Ludlow. ♪♪

Live from New York and San Francisco, this is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up, the White House takes aim at Amazon after a reported play to display the cost of tariffs on certain products. But the tech giant denies the move.

Plus, Spotify sees a surge in subscribers in the first quarter but shares slide. And the SoFi CEO joins us after posting the first quarter beat and raising guidance showing resilience amid the economic turmoil. But first, we check in on these markets which are also showing some resilience. Ed, we're up 0.3%, but is it bad news? It is good news. We see woefully low consumer sentiment, the worst reading in terms of consumer sentiment in almost five years, but that fuels the desire and the hope

that the Federal Reserve might indeed start to cut rates to support the economy. We're up 0.3%, but some notable names on the downside, and you're looking at one of them. Yeah, very quickly, NXP Semiconductor. It's a story you may have missed among everything else. The stock was down significantly, paired some of the decline to 6%. Two pieces of news, tariffs impact, an uncertain environment hitting the outlook and performance in the quarter, key supplier to the automotive sector, but also uncertainty

CEO Sivit's retiring and then promoting from within. One, do you want to keep an eye on key name in the supply chain, Karen? You certainly do. Meanwhile, let's return to the White House because it is taking aim at Amazon.

I just got off the phone with the president about Amazon's announcement. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. It's another reason why we are on-shoring critical supply chains here at home to shore up our own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing. Look, the comments weighed on shares as the tech giant gears up

to report results on Thursday after the closing bell. Rumaus Kaili-Lines is here to break down the story. All of this based on reporting coming from another source. Amazon has since denied that it was ever under consideration for the main site that they would make it transparently clear that what tariffs add to the price of goods. Just give us the background.

Yeah, Caroline, the White House was responding here to a report from Punchbowl News, citing a source familiar with the matter that suggested Amazon was soon going to post a separate line item for the tariff charge on its website, akin to, for example, what we've seen Sheehan or Temu doing with import charges now that the U.S. has ended that tariff.

de minimis exemption on cheaper goods coming out of China and Hong Kong. Now, Amazon says that that was actually never under consideration for its main website, that yes, the ultra low cost Amazon haul team did discuss this, but ultimately it was never implemented on any Amazon property. So that hostile and political act that Caroline Levitt referred to, an act that not actually has been taken. And perhaps Amazon in this way is not yet actually going sideways with the White House. But the criticism of the company that Caroline Levitt

lobbied today, did not end there. I would note she also referred to Amazon as a China-aligned company and referred back to a Reuters report going back to 2021 about Amazon partnering with a Chinese propaganda arm, essentially that Amazon...

allowed itself to respond to an edict from Beijing or cooperated with an edict from Beijing around negative views of a book published by the Chinese government of speeches from Chinese President Xi Jinping. And she really pointed to that as an example of the China alignment of this company. She also, as we heard her say there, talked about the importance of turning away from China, buying American and onshoring American manufacturing. So what this means for the company's relationship with this White House?

Overall, obviously a question now after it has gone to great lengths to ingratiate itself with this administration. Remember, Amazon donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural committee. Jeff Bezos himself attended that inauguration, has spent time with President Trump trying to fortify their relationship. And that relationship, the president's and Bezos, is one that Caroline Leavitt said she did not want to speak to this morning.

The chairman and, of course, founder of the business, Kayleigh Linesby. Thank you. Let's turn our attention to another key story, Spotify shares. They're slipping after the company reported operating profit that fell short of analysts' estimates. That's even as the numbers, they grew. Here to discuss, Blue Meg's Ashley Carmen. And really, it felt there was a lot of good news that ultimately was outshone by a profit hit. Yeah.

I think investors are just a little bit jittery. They're seeing Spotify forecast potentially a miss in their estimates for gross profit margin as well as monthly active users. So I think they're just kind of like, is this going to be the future and the trend or is this just a one off kind of moment here? And Spotify says this is a one off moment, of course.

Ashley, the long term Spotify wants you to think about is a world where they move into podcasts, audio, video, more, and they might also raise prices along the way.

Exactly. So over the past couple years, they've branched into audiobooks. They're now launching this creator partner program where they're trying to get essentially YouTubers and video podcasters to put videos on the service and compensate them based on consumption rather than advertisements. So they're really trying to pioneer some new formats and diversify away from music.

Bloomberg's Ashley Carman, thank you very much. In other earnings news, shares of SoFi are higher after the fintech company raised its full-year forecast. SoFi CEO Anthony Nodo is here with us. Good morning to you, Mr. Nodo. I think there was a lot of focus in the quarter on the momentum from the loan platform business, particularly the interest and demand from private credit. Talk to me more about that, Anthony, and where you see that business going forward.

Sure, we had a tremendous quarter and a great start to 2025 with 33% year-over-year growth in total revenue to $771 million. And that was up 33%, our fastest growth in five quarters. The loan platform business, as you mentioned, was a key driver of that. Very strong results there. We basically paid a fee by these asset buyers.

that want us to underwrite loans against a specific credit box that they outline. We leverage our underwriting capabilities, our marketing capabilities, and our servicing capabilities, and we get paid a fee for that. It's something we started about a year ago. We've already originated $6 billion of loans in that particular business, and in the quarter is about $96 million of revenue

So it's almost $400 million on an annualized basis. We expect it to be over a billion dollars or a third billion dollar business over the course of time as the demand for that product continues to increase. One area that we haven't tapped into yet, but that we will, is taking some of the loans that we decline. We decline about $100 billion of loans a year and making those available through the loan platform business as well for those that want a near prime type of credit asset.

The other area you want to tap is crypto, right? You alluded to entering into stablecoin markets. Tell us more. Yeah, we're very fortunate in that we've built. This is another record quarter for member growth. We're at 11 million members now. We added 800,000 members in the quarter and 1.2 million products, up 34%, up 35% respectively. We want to continue to give our members a full suite of financial services products.

SoFi Money is the largest product that we have today. It was up 41%. Deposits were up 52%. Our invest business saw an acceleration of 21%, and we expect that acceleration to continue. Crypto would be another asset class to add to the invest business, allowing people to buy, sell, and hold crypto coins.

it's something we used to do um and it was eliminated because of our bank license but now the occ's put out an interpretive letter that allows that business to be part of a bank again so we'll continue to evaluate the landscape for changing regulatory environment but we'd like to not just only offer crypto for buy sell and hold but also have it transcend all

of our businesses. So using blockchain and crypto in the lending area, the spending area, in addition to our third party technology platform services, offering those types of infrastructure services to financial service companies. Anthony, you've got a really optimistic tone. And of course, you beat and you raised this on a day when consumer sentiment is basically at the lowest in five years. How do you have that confidence that consumers are going to continue to be of demand for you?

Yeah, we're seeing really strong demand for our goods and services. Our customer is a higher-end customer than the typical average American, about $150,000 in household income and a credit score on average of 750 from a FICO standpoint. We're taking share from the five largest banks in the country, so we're not as dependent on the cyclical environment for our growth because we're really a secular grower. That said, our credit performance has also been very strong, which is

subject to the macroeconomic environment, but we saw in our fifth quarter in a row of improvement in 90-day delinquencies. We saw continued improvement in our net charge-offs. So overall, the consumer's looking quite strong as it relates to credit and the demand for our other products like SoFi Money and SoFi Invest. I mentioned deposits were up quite meaningfully as well.

The last data point is debit spending. We're annualizing about $14 billion of debit spending now from our installed base, and that's been quite strong also. So you raised your guidance, but really only reflecting the beat in this quarter just gone. So why not race more broadly? Are you being conservative here?

Yeah, well, we raise not just for what we beat. We also raise for the full year and our guidance for Q2 is above consensus on both revenue and profitability. You know, we have really strong momentum where we said on the call that we're going to step on the gas and accelerate our rate of product introductions and the iteration on our existing products.

We feel like our competitive position is so strong and the opportunity is so significant in front of us that we should accelerate our level of investment and rate of innovation. So we feel great about it and we want to make sure we can compound at these great growth rates of over 30% for a while.

Anthony, I'd like to check out what you're saying on social media as much as what you said in the earnings call transcript. And you always use the phrase rapid innovation. Where are the rapid innovations? And is that something you guys are focused on doing in-house or is M&A going to be a part of your toolkit for the balance of the year?

All of our products, we want them to be the fastest, we want them to be the most convenient, to have the best selection and the best content. So we're continuously iterating on each one of our products against those four dimensions in addition to making the products better when they're used together. As an example of that, we introduced a subscription product called SoFi Plus.

It's the best value in America for a financial subscription product at over $1,000 of value. You pay $10 a month for it and it gives you access to a number of different benefits that you would not otherwise get if you didn't use that product. 90% of our existing members have signed up

of those that have signed up for the product, 90% are from our existing member base, which says people want to use more of our products that we offer, and this product makes it more accessible for them to be able to get those great benefits in using our products together. So a really encouraging sign. And against the people that are already our members that are taking out SoFi+, it's actually triggering them taking out a third product 30% of the time. So pretty strong performance from that new product, which is an iteration of

that we're constantly trying to drive across the five dimensions that I mentioned. Finally, what's your interpretation of how this administration is looking at regulation, looking at supporting the crypto industry as it relates to you? But I think fintech broadly is a bit more under the microscope, Anthony.

The early signs in the first 100 days is that it is a more favorable environment from a regulatory standpoint. It's really critical that we continue to provide a safe and secure way for our members to use our financial services products, and that is our priority regardless of regulation. So we want to have great NPS scores. We want to be a trusted household brand name.

But it does feel like the regulatory environment is going to allow us to offer more products to our members that they need. As an example, we'd love to be able to do secure lending off the cryptocurrency, which I believe it would be a great product to lower cost of debt for our members. In addition to that, potentially being able to offer a stable coin that could have some type of interest bearing element to it and being used for payments.

Anthony Noto, SoFi CEO, good to have you back with us here on Bloomberg Technology. Thank you very much. Okay, some breaking news crossing the Bloomberg terminal. Russian President Vladimir Putin is insisting that Russia must take control of four regions of Ukraine...

that it doesn't currently fully occupy as part of any potential agreement to end the war in Ukraine. This is Bloomberg reporting, citing sources. Remember that the administration in the United States has an April 30th target deadline for a ceasefire. As we report, the demand that the Russians are making deals a blow to President Trump's efforts to reach that ceasefire. Negotiations...

Bloomberg is reporting at an impasse for now, but according to sources, Putin wanting to take control of four regions in Ukraine. Caroline. Now coming up, President Trump, well, he's also said to offer some tariff relief for automakers, Ed. We'll have more on that next, but let's just get back to the fintech side of the space. PayPal...

up 0.8%. It's had a volatile day of trade. It's left its full year forecast for earnings unchanged, unlike SoFi, because they say they have uncertainty in the global macro environment, despite, of course, reporting a pretty strong first quarter. This is Bloomberg Technology. Possibility surrounds us in digital innovation, evolving markets and disruptive ideas. And while promises can inspire dreams, proof is the catalyst for transformation.

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President Trump is set to offer some tariff reprieve for automakers, lifting some levies on foreign parts for cars and trucks made in the U.S. The move comes as President Trump is set to travel to Michigan for a rally to mark his first 100 days in office. For more, let's get out to Detroit and Bloomberg's David Welch. On Bloomberg Technology, we're probably principally interested in the EV supply chain, David. But what do we know about this levy reprieve and how does it impact the automakers you cover? So what

What we know so far is that they will do something probably to give a reprieve on tariffs on parts, which is one of the most difficult things for the administration and really anyone to calculate. They were going to tariff the non-US content even of vehicles that qualified for a tariff-free status, say under USMCA. And then they also are going to try to do something that's called de-stacking, where you remove tariffs or you give the automakers a credit back.

if they had already paid a tariff on metals used in a part that was coming across the border. So think for example of a hood on a vehicle, if a company was paying a tariff on that because it's steel of 25% and another 25% because it's a part that'd be 50%, so they're trying to eliminate that sort of double charge.

But the bigger one would be if they give relief on parts. Now, the problem here, Ed, is we don't know the details of it, which is why when General Motors suspended guidance, they didn't give us new guidance. They may do that Thursday, but even I don't think they completely know yet because they need the details. So the car companies themselves are looking at this and saying, okay, we need to know exactly what the administration is going to do with all of these tariffs before they can even give any kind of financial projections and understand the impact on their business. Yeah. Briefly, whiplash, we're not seeing much...

well, resolved for the stocks are still underwater on GM, for example. What more clarity are you expecting to get from any of these CEOs at this moment?

I think they really want to know just how much of the parts themselves will get tariffs and if there's also any change to the vehicles themselves. GM, Stellantis, they bring in some very important vehicles from Canada and Mexico. GM brings in one of its best sellers, entry-level vehicles from Korea. Will any of that change? So, you know, the administration has said that for companies that make products here, they're going to give them a break, but we don't know exactly what it is yet. And I think parts is really the big one, though.

Tesla is actually off by 1.5% amid all of this news. David Welch, we thank you very much. Meanwhile, sticking with earnings and just the broader tech landscape right now, how to invest in it. Michael Reynolds is with us, Vice President of Investment Strategy at Glenmead, managing $45.6 billion in assets. And look, the ongoing changes coming from the administration is exhausting for investors and in CEOs and anyone to keep track of. How, therefore, are you looking towards perhaps big tech earnings coming Wednesday, Thursday, and how you price any of it?

Yeah, so we're looking at tech perhaps for Q1 putting 15% earnings growth on a year-over-year basis, but we're sort of in this situation where investors are asking themselves, well, does it really matter all that much what the results are when you know there's really big changes coming on the horizon when it comes to tariffs and electronics aren't really exempt from that?

I think a good analogy for that I've been using is actually a baseball analogy. Just say your pitcher got through a really tough inning. Well, okay, that's great. We're glad you did that. But their slugger's up next inning, and you've got to get through that. It's that sort of next piece when there's something on the horizon that really is a big risk that you want to hear more from these C-suites about. So we think it's actually more important to be parsing through –

the guidance and the statements out of C-suites on what they see for the rest of the year rather than the actual results themselves from Q1. Yeah, for example, Apple likely to get a lot of pull forward as consumers rush to buy their phones before perhaps prices went up. What do you think in terms of the narrative we've got of steering into India in terms of supply chain? Are CEOs managing to get ahead of some of these moves? Well, there's no shortage of...

business is being dynamic in the US and that's something that you see really across the board and tech is really behaving that way as well, perhaps trying to get ahead of some of these supply chain reconfigurations. That's happening in real time. And I think investors are also thinking through when consumers may actually start to see these prices start to arrive in the stores with their tariff impacts

And electronics are probably some of the first places you could see it because a lot of our electronics come from abroad and there's actually decent turnover in terms of inventory when it comes to electronics.

There is a little bit of a reprieve because we got that exemption of some electronic parts for tech, which helps, but it's probably not gonna be all encompassing. So it's actually electronics alongside apparel and toys and games, which could be one of the first places consumers could start seeing those higher prices. And it's gonna be really important how they react to that. Are they gonna balk at those prices or are they gonna consume no matter what? - Mike, what you just said a moment ago with big tech focus on guidance, what happens if big tech doesn't give us any?

Well, that's just a really uncertain environment and uncertainty has been the name of the game for all of April for certain.

Investors have been repricing, I think, the valuation multiples they've been awarding to the Magnificent Seven, MegaCap Tech, whatever you want to call it. Those have come down a lot, but by our estimates, those are not actually really within the vicinity of fair value just yet. So you could start to see a little bit of a risk premium baked in if investors are still asking a lot of questions that can't be answered yet.

We're interested in course of the hyperscalers, Amazon kind of at the core of that. The calculus seems pretty simple, not so much how much money they make or earn, but how much money they're willing to commit and spend. And that applies to Microsoft as well. How closely do you watch the capital expenditures?

We're watching CapEx really closely. One of the big themes over really the last decade is the market's been punishing companies that have been really capital intensive. And for quite some time, a lot of these Mag7 companies really weren't all that CapEx intensive. But as you've had a lot of companies investing in AI, building out data centers, what have you, we would argue that if the Mag7 were their own sector, they'd be one of the most capital intensive in the S&P 500, save maybe utilities and real estate, which are classically capital intensive.

So it sort of makes sense to see the market sort of repricing these companies on that CapEx intensity alone because you don't always have a guarantee that you have the earnings flow through on that investment. It's always pretty uncertain. Michael Reynolds, Vice President of Investment Strategy at Glenmead. Thank you very much.

Time for Talking Tech. First up, a judge in Spain's national court has opened an investigation to determine whether the countrywide blackout on Monday was caused by a cyber attack. Spain's grid operator said the blackout that impacted Spain, Portugal and parts of France was not due to any external attack.

based on preliminary analysis plus alibaba has unveiled its latest ai flagship model called the quen 3. the company claims that its newest model rivals the performance of deep seek including in math and coding it also introduces a mixture of expert model for an efficient way to mimic human reasoning and amazon's first batch of 27 production satellites have reached low earth orbit amazon's

Kuiper satellites lifted off on Monday with CEO Andy Jassy saying they were, quote, operating as expected just hours later. It's the first launch of a planned 3,236 satellites that Amazon intends to use to sell Internet connectivity to rival Elon Musk's Starlink. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York.

and Ahmed Ludlow in San Francisco. Quick check on these markets, Ed, because we're clinging to gains when it comes to the Nasdaq 100. And that, as we see, some pretty awful consumer sentiment hitting overall. We're seeing a near a five-year low. But will the Fed step in? We're up a third, call it a tenth of a percent right now. We're looking at...

crypto still managing to outperform we're at four tenths percent we're at ninety four thousand eight hundred ninety four now so clearly been seen as some sort of haven amid the tariff turmoil move on have a look at what's happening in terms of those earnings that we really do start to digest

I'm looking ultimately at the overall semiconductor index, which is lower to the tune of three quarters of a percent. You call that NXP. We, of course, lose the CEO. He's handing over the reins, even though he's only 56 years old. He's retiring. What does that mean about the place in which the business is that he leaves? As we start to see, of course, real concern about the uncertainty amid these tariffs. I'm looking, though, at Cadence that manages to outperform on its earnings. We're up almost 5%. They beat, they raise. They also see, though, Tesla on the downside, 1.5% off.

That's as we see RedBent Atlantic, an analyst coming out saying, I stick by my sell rating. This company is going to see volumes declines going forward, Ed. OK, let's get back to today's top story. The White House denouncing Amazon's reported plan to display the cost of President Trump's tariffs on products. Listen to this.

I just got off the phone with the president about Amazon's announcement. This is a hostile and political act by Amazon. It's another reason why we are on-shoring critical supply chains here at home to shore up our own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing.

The White House comments come as the tech giant getting ready to report results Thursday after the closing bell. Actually, the stock's decline much more muted than it had been at the market open, now down about nine-tenths of a percent. Bloomberg's Matt Day, who covers Amazon, joins us with more. And actually, in the last 20 minutes, Amazon revived their statement, their response to the White House, just hit our inboxes. So let's start with that, Matt. What is Amazon saying in response to the White House's claim? And give us the full details of the story.

So Amazon says that they were never considering any sort of tariff-like disclosure on their main retail sites. What they were considering was they've got a low-cost goods service called HAL. It's very much in the mold of Timu, designed to ship things directly from China. They say they were considering some sort of disclosure there related to closing the exemption on duties for products shipped in that manner, but that they have no plans to do anything on the main site. And now they're telling us that they don't plan to and there's no future for this.

There is no story here, despite the reporting coming from Punchbowl, Matt, but the damage almost already done when it comes to the narrative that was drawn upon by the White House administration. And it even went as though Caroline Levitt went further, putting in an old report from Reuters that was dated, well, in the previous administration.

Yeah, a little bit of a shoot first, ask questions later from the White House for sure on this before Amazon had cleared this up at all. But this kind of validates Amazon's been really quiet on tariffs since they've rolled out, right? Not a whole lot of public statements. We saw CEO Andy Jassy interviewed about this time a week ago and was asked on tariffs and was sort of vague on the company's plans. They don't see a whole lot of value being in the news at all on this and would rather stay out of it. And you're kind of seeing why this morning.

I think it's helpful to our audience, Matt, to help them understand how Amazon.com works from the inventory standpoint, from the vendor standpoint. So on April 9th, we reported that Amazon canceled some inventory orders from China, and you included the reporting that those cancellations put the tariff exposure back on the vendors themselves. Just explain how that marketplace works.

So Amazon sells things in two primary ways. One is they go and grab a bunch of goods in bulk like any traditional retailer, Walmart, Target. They buy it, they import it. They also have third-party sellers that sell directly. That report that we had, one of the ways Amazon gets its goods here is it consolidates shipments and it tells the sellers, "Hey, listen, just give it to us at the factory or thereabouts. We'll take it and we'll import it for you." They told some of their vendors, "Listen, you guys are responsible for this yourselves.

essentially putting them on the hook for for tariffs. Bloomberg's Matt Day, thank you very much. Let's turn to cyber security. Demand for cloud protection is expected to surge as more businesses adopt AI capabilities. We discussed that with Palo Alto Network's acquisition of Protect AI in yesterday's show. The biggest move in this space, however,

is Google's $32 billion deal for Wiz. Joining us to explain the strategy behind it all is Raz Hertzberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Wiz, also VP of Product. The innovation that Wiz came up with was a super fast way of scanning virtual machines. Virtual machines make up cloud computing. That is what Wiz does. What is the benefit to Google in having that technology? Is it that Google uses it itself or is it something that gets offered through GCP? I think that's what people are trying to understand.

So it's a very good question. Like the mission that was from day one, from inception, was helping every organization in the world build securely on cloud and secure everything they built and run in cloud. And that means any cloud, right? It means like AWS. It means Azure. It also means GCP. And the mission was a big mission. I mean, securing everything organizations build and run in cloud means securing the modern development stack.

And Wiz, I think the growth Wiz had, I mean, Wiz was just founded. We started like five years ago. It's a major rate of growth that I think proves how critical this mission and this problem is for modern organizations today. And Google truly shares that mission. And the mission they share with us is exactly that, securing everything, securing every cloud, no matter what an organization uses, Wiz is the tool to enable it. I can say that on our side, the

The logic for the acquisition was we think we can actually support this exact mission of helping organizations secure everything much faster using the partnership with Google to the sense of being on the bleeding edge of AI technology, which will enable us to build even faster and help ship that mission faster. There is a process that will play out. All deals have that. There will be regulatory concerns. I get that.

Give me the back story. How did it come together? Who came up with this great idea that Google and Wiz should be one? I think it truly comes to sharing that mission. I think the Google team is as committed and as passionate to really giving organizations freedom to build securely on cloud and to enable them to remain secure. And so the partnership is very natural for us in that sense.

And Freedom is also given, Raz, to continue to serve on other cloud offerings as well. How much as a product strategist that you are, are you thinking about continuing to roll out for other organizations, not just the enterprises that Google serves?

No, absolutely. And this was also very clear, I think, in the way that Google themselves talked about the acquisition. The mission is to support AWS, to support Azure, and also to support GCP. But we are remaining with the exact same mission, and Google shares that exact same view. So, absolutely, we'll continue being the best solution for any cloud.

and Google Cloud Platform perhaps would still like you to make M&A. Raz, what's so interesting is the way in which you were organically growing, but you're also inorganically growing. Are you still going to be able to do deals? Are you still going to be folding in new teams and acqui-hires?

So that's a great point. Wiz has been very fortunate over the past year and a half we've done really three acquisitions. In all three of those acquisitions we've been, I think we approach it in a very deliberate way, meaning Wiz acquired companies where we really believed in the people and the technology, but then we didn't really sell the technology versus like all three companies kind of joined Wiz and then stopped what

what they were doing and rebuild their product and rebuild their solutions on top of the native WIS product because one of the challenges we see in cybersecurity is actually giving end users, giving security teams, giving developers

a really good product that has a seamless experience. So that's what we've been doing over the past few years and nothing has changed in our strategy. I think we're always on the lookout for making the product even greater and for great teams and great solutions in this space. Raz, something you mentioned a moment ago, you founded 2020 by Asaf, Yinen, Roy, Amy. In my career, I've covered companies that have grown very fast and sometimes too fast, they stumble along the way.

What is it that is unique to Wiz? What is the differentiator? Is it just the talent pool you hired? Is it the brainchild of the underlying code base? I think people don't understand how you pulled it off. It's a good question. I can share that even internally, it's something we think about often and I think about often. I think a lot of the secret is to really get to this level of fast pace and excellence. There's many different things Wiz had to execute on.

almost perfectly. And it's for sure the tech, but it's also the go-to-market strategy. I think one thing that always drove us from day one was really living the problem we're solving for. We are a team that lived cloud security for the past decade and deeply understood the core, core challenges organizations face. And also from day one, I mean, Wizz today is proud to serve more than...

More than 50% of the Fortune 100 companies, Wiz is their solution for cloud security. It's by partnering with those companies and really listening to our customers from day one, our entire focus is solving for their problems. We wake up, all we care about, the customers, their problems, and that has driven every single decision this company made, including hiring, including go-to-market, including pricing, everything. How do those customers feel right now? How willing are they to continue spending on relationships like with Wiz?

Perfect. I mean, we've seen... There's no economic uncertainty, tariff recession. Let's take a beat before we sign up to a new deal. You know, Wiz was founded, like the months we started, was March, like when COVID hit. That March. So that also seemed like a very bad time to be selling really anything ever or to start the company. So I think we've been, you know, we're used to it. I think actually if there's some things that...

never stop in some way. And like technology progression, the adoption we see across AI, there's a lot of incredible things that are pushing companies even faster to the cloud and making them, I think, look for ways to build securely. Raz Hasberg, great to have some time with you. CMO, VP of Product Trusted over at Wiz. We appreciate it. Meanwhile, coming up, 100 days of Trump's second term. Well, that's also mean 100 days of Doge. We'll discuss the impact on the tech sector and Elon Musk.

As next, there's a bluebird technology. Possibility surrounds us in digital innovation, evolving markets and disruptive ideas. And while promises can inspire dreams, proof is the catalyst for transformation.

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So I'd say 100 days in. We need another 100 days to kind of see where the policy directives are going and to try to have a better understanding of how what's talked about so far, particularly with respect to trade, is ultimately going to be put in place, how it's going to play out. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon speaking earlier today with Francine Lacroix discussing the impact of President Trump's first 100 days in office. Let's get the tech perspective. Bloomberg's Mike Shepard joins us now. The highs, the lows for tech since January the 20th, Mike.

It's been quite a consequential stretch, Caro, for the tech industry, and they've really been there from day one. On January 20th, you'll recall we saw all those high-profile leaders from the industry, from Elon Musk to Sundar Pichai to Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and even Tim Cook with prime seats at the inauguration. And since then, it's taken off. The industry really got a seat at the table. The president made some early commitments on advancing and reintegrating

revamping our artificial intelligence policy. And he was also able to claim some credit on big promises of investments in the U.S. by companies like TSMC and Apple and so forth. And yet, Ed, we're hearing all of this concern now surrounding the industry because of trade, because of tariffs, the uncertainty economically that it creates overall for the U.S., and also the risk that it poses to supply chains and increasing costs for companies and consumers alike.

One of the examples was Nvidia pledging to build $500 billion worth of goods, $500 billion worth of AI sales, which the administration incorrectly claimed to be a $500 billion investment. Even so, you mentioned the word policy. Now, tariffs is one thing. You have people like David Sachs in the White House as the AI czar. Have we got anything codified yet?

Anything through Congress would you go through? Yeah, go for it. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, that's a great question because lost in the shuffle and all the turmoil surrounding tariffs are those policy efforts that we know are being worked on and crafted right now on artificial intelligence and also on crypto policy as well. David Sachs is the czar inside the White House for both of those areas, and they're crucial to the industry. How this policy gets defined...

could determine what regulations ultimately end up being, not only from an agency perspective, but also how Congress may try to legislate it. But of course, when we talk about Congress, they have so much on their plates now also that is consequential as well for the tech industry. And that is a big tax package that they are trying to push through to get done better.

by July 4th, at least according to Scott Besson, when you talk to lawmakers, it's a different question. They feel like they need a little bit more time to be able to pull that all together.

Meanwhile, of course, companies trying to navigate all of these changes. I mean, one who's navigating it today and we reported on extensively is Amazon, of course, getting caught in the crosshairs. They've come back and said this was never going to happen in terms of identifying tariffs and how much it would add to individual prices on the site. But we hear from CNN that in fact...

President Trump has called Jeff Bezos, the chairman of the company, the founder of the company, to complain, according to CNN. That's in a post on X about Trump's calls with Bezos. How are CEOs just trying to navigate? How are previous founders, given how much money they previously gave to Trump in some cases?

Well, this is such an interesting question now for companies because they are seeing the risk of what this administration is trying to bring in policy-wise. The press secretary this morning sent a very clear signal to corporate America that disclosing the cost of those tariffs would be considered a hostile political act. It was a shot across the bow.

and they want to make sure that companies are falling into line with the policy and not working against it and complaining about it in public. And there are other ways that the administration has levers to pull. One, we talked about the policy taking shape on AI, but there are other areas too, and antitrust and competition enforcement is another area that we have been paying attention to. There are two major antitrust trials underway right now, one involving Meta, and the other,

penalties that could be levied against Google over Chrome and dominance in that area. And these are two areas where the industry has been trying to push for a break, but so far not seeing one.

Bloomberg's Mike Shepard in D.C., thank you very much. Now, meanwhile, Elon Musk's doge is reaching 130 days since his formal inception. But the Tesla CEO's political ambitions have cost him nearly $113 billion in his personal wealth, with Tesla stock falling 33% since Trump's inauguration. For more, Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner joins us. You've been writing about this for down a hole.

about how through the lens of Tesla shares, it's been painful for Musk. But if you look at some of his private companies, we broke the story Friday night about XAI potentially raising money. They've had some advantages there, Kurt.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of interest in being associated with Elon Musk right now. There has always been that way, you know, Ed, but even more so now that he's close to President Trump. And so we've seen him, you know, out raising for X and XAI, for SpaceX, for some of these other endeavors. And so I do think that despite all of the negative consumer backlash we've seen with Tesla, there's still a lot of interest on the business side, especially with investors to try and get into the Elon orbit.

What's now confusing people is how much Elon's time will be dedicated to the White House going forward. The 130 days is what everyone keeps citing in terms of something tangible. But many close with Elon will say, no, no, he's going to still be a really big resource to the White House going forward. And what does that mean to his brands?

Well, not just people close to Elon, Elon himself, right? On the earnings call, I believe he said, hey, I am leaving, but we'll stick around one to two days per week as long as the president wants me to be here. He may even stick around through the entire administration to make sure that Doge continues to keep doging. And so it does feel, we kind of, I think, refer to it as a soft exit from government. To me, it felt as much performative for Tesla investors as anything, right? Tell them, hey, I'm coming back. Give them that news that they're craving. But

But also reiterate, I'm not necessarily leaving entirely. And I think that's what, you know, we will see. I think we will see him continue to stick around. Kurt Wagner, we thank you for the latest. ChatGPT users, well, you can now go shopping using the chatbot. OpenAI announced the feature just yesterday in a move set to challenge rivals like, of course, Google. Bloomberg's Rachel Metz is here with more. And technically speaking, you're sort of going to a different website via the app.

Yeah, but this is similar to what a lot of companies that offer reviews online are already doing, such as the Wirecutter, for instance, which is owned by the New York Times. They'll show a review, and then there would be a link, and you would click out to the website. And they're opening eyes doing a similar thing now with ChatGPT. So if you search for, say, I think one of the...

If you say, like, show me a nice nude lipstick for under $20, in theory, it would give you several options. It would give you sort of a condensed review of them. And then it would also have on a sidebar links to buy them from different websites.

If you do buy that lipstick and you've clicked on the link through ChatGPT, what I found interesting in your reporting is that OpenAI won't collect affiliate revenue from that transaction. So what's your understanding of the business model or plan going forward?

I think right now it's just like a lot of the things that OpenAI does. They test a lot of things and then they expand them. So it could change. They could have some ideas for how they want to make money. I don't know if in the future they will also not be taking affiliate revenue. That

actually surprised me a bit when I asked them, are you going to be making money off of this? Because that seems like a really easy way to make some money, right? It seems like passive income stream. But they were very clear that they are not making money off of affiliate revenue when people buy a product. And they also, the products they're showing you are not ads. Right. Right.

Briefly, Rachel, I thought the long-term goal was that my agent is going to go off and buy everything for me. I'm not even going to have to click out into a different website, for example. Is this just like a stepping stone? I think that there's probably going to ultimately be a bunch of different ways that people are going to want to buy things. And I think that it is possible that at some point it'll be much more common for people to say, I want this kind of thing now.

go buy it. I authorize my credit card. I know MasterCard is trying out some ways to do payment via agents. So we could certainly see that in the next few years. But I think right now what we're seeing is just giving people more options to stay in chat GBT.

Bloomberg's Rachel Metz, thank you very much indeed. That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. This is what markets look like right now. It's like 100 sort of muted gains, even though, well, it's basically flat. Economic angst, Spotify down, beat on subscribers, not on profit. There's some weakness there. And Amazon, our top story of the day, the White House accusing them of hostile acts, a report they deny. Caro.

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