China Considers Musk as TikTok Lifeline
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Live from New York, I'm Caroline Hyde.

And I'm Mike Shepard in Washington, in for Ed Ludlow. This is Bloomberg Technology. Coming up, could Elon Musk be TikTok's savior? China is analyzing the option to save the social media company in the United States and work with the next administration. Plus, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang goes to China this week as the company is slapped with curbs on the sale of its AI chips abroad.

And off to the space race with a space infrastructure startup, Loft Orbital, out with new funding news to operate its satellites in low Earth orbit. But first, we check in on these markets, which have been moved around from a volatile perspective. On the positive side, inflationary headwinds cooling if you look at some of the wholesale prices. Does that bode well for CPI tomorrow? But then we have the ongoing narrative of how we impose tariffs tomorrow.

on other countries, in particular on China in the next administration. We're currently trading flat as we have scoop after scoop coming from our Washington-based colleagues. Bitcoin, though, managed to fend off some of that risk sentiment. We're currently trading 2.2% higher, perhaps more looking towards where we could see Trump in the next administration eyeing crypto. Move on to have a look at what's happening in terms of the individual movers. And I go to a key story of the day. We are, of course, going to be analysing

if Elon Musk could indeed take over the US operations TikTok. It is being eyed by Chinese officials, but it has its impact on Meta, which also has been falling low, I might add, because there's some concerns surrounding the fact that, well, they're going to be offloading some of their lowest performers at a faster rate. We'll get to that in a moment. Snap currently off by 6%, if indeed TikTok US offloads

could be staying for longer here in the United States. If, of course, by January 19th it's deemed that it has to be banned or divested, could that divestment come to one Elon Musk riding to the rescue? Let's get to all of this at Bloomberg's Sarah Fryer. And Sarah, where has this narrative come from that Chinese officials, not by dance, but Chinese officials might think that Elon Musk could be a good owner of this key social media company?

Well, from what our sources tell us, they have been evaluating the potential options for TikTok should the ban go through, which it looks like, you know, based on the Supreme Court arguments and how that went, that it's very likely that we will see the law be enacted.

Elon Musk appealed to the Chinese government because he already has experience dealing with businesses in China through Tesla. He has a longstanding relationship with that country.

The thing I want to give pause here on is, I mean, this is the Chinese government's idea. The whole point of this entire exercise of trying to disentangle TikTok from its ownership was to reduce the links to China. So would they really go, would the U.S. government really go with a solution that involves somebody that...

is expected to be friendly with China. Well, maybe it won't matter because of Elon Musk's close ties to Donald Trump, which the Chinese government is also seeing as a positive, according to our sources. He has been at Trump's side day in and day out. He gave more than $250 million in support of his campaign. So it's this really complicated web of, we're trying to get, the U.S. government is trying to get this app

out of connection to the Chinese government. And the Chinese government has a say in how that happens because of the TikTok algorithm. So it's getting very complicated very fast.

Sarah, back to Elon Musk, but more from the perspective of him as a social media platform owner already. How would acquiring TikTok work for him? Is this something he has floated before or thought about before? And how would he come up with the financing, too? It would be a pretty expensive purchase. Well, it...

it would be relatively insane to do this. I mean, he just bought TikTok. I'm sorry. Excuse me. He just bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. And he's still paying off those loans. So he's not very liquid. He's the richest man in the world, but his money is not very accessible to him. If you were to buy

TikTok or propose such a thing, it would certainly cost many billions. We don't know exactly how much, but some estimates put it around $40 to $50 billion for TikTok US. It could be a different price depending on the diplomatic situation.

in that kind of a deal. We don't know yet if TikTok, if it would be sold, which nobody's talking about just yet in the company, if it would be sold, then would it happen in a competitive process or would it be more of a diplomatic process

between China and the U.S. and the company and whoever wants to buy it. So some people are already working on it. I know Franklin Court was on your show last week with Kevin O'Leary. They have a bid. So it is something that could be an Elon Musk financing situation, but it could also not even get to that point.

Briefly, Sarah, the irony of all of this is some other Chinese-owned social media companies are doing really rather well. People are moving off from TikTok potentially to find new homes, and you go to Apple's App Store. What's trending? The top apps are from China, and I think that this is just indicating that the U.S. consumer

is already embracing multiple Chinese apps. There's Shein, there's Timu, there's a lot of nascent social apps that are booming right now. And so I think that this is going to be a whack-a-mole problem. One of the solutions to the TikTok potential ban could be that they just rename a new one.

Bloomberg, Sarah Fryer, thank you. Now let's bring in Sarah Kreps into the conversation. She is the director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Sarah, this question of TikTok is coming to a head now.

Any buyer would have to really demonstrate a complete separation from China. How would they go about doing that? What would be the process once this sale were to actually emerge if ByteDance and China agree? I mean, it's such an interesting question, and it came up in the Supreme Court hearing last week. And the TikTok lawyer said he did not even think it was possible to divest or separate China

TikTok from the owner ByteDance. He said it could take years if it's even possible. So at the same time, the U.S. Solicitor General in those same hearings said that she thought that maybe the Chinese government was playing this game of chicken and might at the last minute float some sort of alternative. But

But the TikTok lawyer, I think, sort of shot themselves a little bit in the foot in the sense that he said, this is really complicated. And as your last guest was just saying, essentially the US TikTok is bite dance and the Chinese government now stepping in at this stage is confirming what the members of Congress thought a year ago and years ago, which is that there is this Chinese government control over a US social media company. It's hard to see how you can do that.

Certainly not by the 19th. And as the TikTok lawyer said, if at all. Sarah, how would this fit into the broader exchange and relationship between Washington and Beijing over matters including trade and other technology-related security issues? Is this something that China could offer perhaps as a bargaining chip as Trump takes office? Yeah, I think it's pretty savvy in two ways. One is that the

they're very mindful of the influence that Elon Musk has as an advisor in the incoming administration, but also that the incoming administration really seems to want to be making some, some, uh,

like opening a door for better relations with China. Both of these countries in the last several years, including in the first term of the Trump administration, technology really was at the center of this rivalry. And so they've gone back and forth and TikTok is emblematic of this rivalry, but we see this in the chip space,

in particular in the chip space and AI just yesterday that the administration, the White House, the Biden administration in its last days issued a new policy, an AI diffusion policy, trying to make it more difficult for China to access U.S.-made chips.

I want to reiterate to our audience that of course no comments have been made by, thus far, the Chinese officials. We know that Elon Musk hasn't responded to this report and indeed ByteDance itself has called it fiction. But I am interested, Sarah, to push us forward. What the outcome seems to be of a potential TikTok ban has been a movement onto other Chinese-owned social media companies. How big a national security issue is that then?

Well, it's interesting to me, either they don't understand the law or they are banking on the fact that it will be just too difficult to enforce. Because last week on TikTok, they were trying to push people to Lemonade, which is also ByteDance owned. Now they're trying to push people to Red Note, also Chinese owned. And so all of those social media platforms would be covered under the law.

There must just be an assumption that enforcement of this will just be a cat and mouse game. And maybe the incoming Trump administration, who again seems warm to the idea of, or has looked and indicated that they don't support the ban, might just turn a blind eye to these kind of complicated ownership structures or what's red note or what's lemonade? Oh, that's Chinese owned and just kind of staying enough behind it that something gets to perpetuate it.

But at the same time, what I think the members of the national security risk here was that you had 170 million Americans in one space. And actually, to the extent that they migrate elsewhere,

That's actually a win. Interestingly, Xiaohongshu, or Red Note as it's known, seems to be organic movement, actually, going over to that particular app. It's not related to ByteDarts, but as you note, Lemonade certainly is. So push us forward as to...

You said how difficult it is to disentangle US TikTok from ultimately the rest of the parent company. China has some sort of authority here, even though, of course, there's not much direct ownership over ByteDarts, but because they can control who gets to have access to algorithms sold by Chinese companies. Do you think in any way the Chinese would ever want its algorithm held by a US company, whether it's Elon Musk-owned or otherwise?

No, I just don't see that scenario because it's too lucrative. Essentially, TikTok is this very sophisticated and very effective algorithm, and this is highly valuable to ByteDance. And there's no incentive for them, other than to keep operating in the U.S., but to share any of that.

And so I don't, again, as the lawyer himself said last week, I don't see how you can actually disentangle these because then TikTok, without that algorithm, just becomes any other social media platform.

Sarah Kreps, it's great to have your expertise, Director of Cornell University Tech Policy Institute. Thank you. Let's just re-look at Metashares for a moment. As I mentioned at the top, the company is planning to cut about 5% of its lowest performers. This is all according to an internal memo sent to employees. Now, the memo reads, "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster."

And of course, coming from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the memo also mentioned intentions to backfill these roles this year. All, of course, with an eye on where the focus is around AI for the company in the future.

The Biden administration is rolling out measures to boost car manufacturing and AI development in the U.S., even as it looks to sharpen curbs on Chinese technology and free up and tee up potential restrictions for Donald Trump to enact. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Mackenzie Hawkins for more. Mackenzie, you've done so much reporting over the past year on this wave of restrictions on everything from semiconductors to AI technology.

This is the final shot from the Biden team. Looking ahead, do we see the incoming Trump administration holding on to some of those curves? So this week, we've seen almost a new regulation or two every day targeting China's tech industry and trying to boost America's. And National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said yesterday that he does anticipate that Trump will maintain a lot of the China contours that Biden is setting up in his 11th hour of his administration.

But Trump is a wild card on China and many other things, so it remains to be seen over the coming months what policies of Biden's he will keep intact and which ones he'll do away with.

remind us how expansive these new rules are, what indeed it includes, because it's not just AI chips. So the restrictions announced today are actually targeting Chinese automotive technology. We have restrictions on the import of cars that contain certain software and hardware from China. And it's specifically internet connected cars, but that's pretty much every car. You can almost think of a car, as the Biden administration does, like a smartphone on wheels. And the goal

is to prevent China from gaining access to Americans' personal data as they travel along American roads. But this is also a preemptive measure because there aren't actually that many Chinese cars in the U.S. thanks to tariffs of over 100% on Chinese EVs.

Mackenzie, looking more broadly, some of these restrictions, including the ones in particular unveiled yesterday on AI technology, have started to hit a nerve. We heard NVIDIA really objecting pretty loudly. Do we expect some of those objections to now really take hold and have some influence?

So what we saw yesterday was the administration expanding what has now been several years of curbs on the export of AI chips to China and a bunch of other nations to the entire world with caps for specific countries and caps for the maximum amount that can go to any one company. This set off a massive opposition in the tech industry led by Nvidia, whose chips are going to be the most affected. And absolutely, they've been lobbying really hard. They're hoping that they can get a better ear than they feel like they've gotten the Biden administration when Trump takes office.

We saw them put out a pretty heavily worded statement to kind of nodding toward the Trump administration having a less aggressive regulatory approach. And even NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said before the curbs were officially announced yesterday that he is sure that Trump will do the right thing. So we'll see what happens. Bloomberg's Mackenzie Hawkins, thanks so much for tracking it. And look, let's hone in a little bit more on NVIDIA and Jensen Huang because while Washington is slapping on these new curbs,

And at a time when Beijing is investigating the company's own domestic presence, well, Jensen is embarking on a trip to China. And it's this week. Let's discuss Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom to more on this. Peter, interesting timing. Jensen Wang visiting the key capitals.

Very sensitive timing. We know that Jensen Huang is going to be in Taiwan this week. He's going to attend a party there on Friday of this week. But after that, we've heard, according to sources, that he's going to go over to mainland China, as you mentioned. He's going to stop into Shenzhen for a New Year's party, we understand, to celebrate with some of the employees there. And then his plans are to go to Shanghai and Beijing after that.

He could still change these plans. As you pointed out, this is a very sensitive time. It also comes just ahead of Trump's inauguration. There's some expectation that maybe he would go to that too. But he is building a more substantial business within China at this point. They've been adding employees there, especially around autonomous vehicles. So the company had a bit of a setback as McKenzie was laying out.

earlier with these new regulations around AI exports that affects Nvidia very, very directly. They've been outspoken about wanting to oppose those curbs, but Jensen Wang is still trying to build a bridge between some of these different markets that are so important for his company.

Peter, one destination that doesn't seem to be on Jensen Wang's list right now is Washington or Mar-a-Lago, the incoming president's base of operations. Do we expect him to actually pay a visit, pay a call to Donald Trump? So many other big tech CEOs have done so already.

Yeah, so far, I would say. So far, we don't know anything about his plans to attend either Mar-a-Lago or the inauguration, as you mentioned. I would stick a pin in that and see exactly what happens at this point. It'd be very surprising if he does not try to build that bridge to the Trump administration. As you say, so many of the tech companies have done this. Of course, Elon Musk has sort of led the way, but many, many others, including Mark Zuckerberg, have also been trying to

build a closer relationship with the Trump administration as they come to power and they're going to begin implementing these policies that are so important to the companies. And there are very few companies that have more at stake than NVIDIA and by extension, Jensen Wang. So I'd be surprised if they don't meet sometime soon. And indeed, he spoke with our own Ed Ludlow last week saying if he's invited, he'd love to go. But Peter, how...

Is it unprecedented or unprecedented, is it, for a CEO such as Jensen to be going out to China when, of course, he is upping his spending on EVs and R&D? Do lots of other companies, when facing this sort of antitrust issue and indeed political overhang, tend to make visits?

Well, we see a lot of these companies. Remember, it was not that long ago that globalization was the standard of business every place in the world. You saw many of these business leaders going to China and other parts of the world to build whatever kinds of global operations that they possibly could. I would say Tim Cook at Apple is another one who very regularly visits China. They have a huge operation there, of course. Their partner, Foxconn, builds most of the iPhones that we use around the world in China. Right now, they're trying to do more of them in India, too. But you see Tim Cook

Jensen Wang, many other business leaders are going to China because it's important either for their manufacturing operations, their research and development, or in some cases, the marketing of their businesses. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, thank you. Coming up, Databricks gets over $5 billion in financing from lenders. We'll have all the details next. This is Bloomberg.

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Software maker Databricks has clinched more than $5 billion of financing from lenders including Blackstone, Apollo and Blue Owl Capital, according to sources. This would be its largest debt raise to date. Let's bring in Brody Ford for more.

Brody, what does all this money from this big raise mean for the company? And how does it help in this competition? They are going toe-to-toe with Snowflake. We just had the Snowflake CEO on yesterday. The two companies have really locked horns in this space they're in. Absolutely. We've been seeing a lot of headlines with data bricks and billion numbers. A lot of big numbers, big headlines. You might say, what's going on here?

The answer is that in a different reality, if we were in 2019, 2020, Databricks would have been public already. But there's a trend right now where these big startups, Databricks, Canva, Figma, they're pushing the label of startup a little bit by staying private quite long because they're able to access these huge pools of funding from private institutions.

And so Databricks often talks about the virtues of remaining private a little longer, right? They're able to do things like make big acquisitions or hire aggressively. They say that a lot of these AI startups, their monetization didn't work out and so they're gonna try to either bring in the right people or bring in their technology.

This allows Databricks to, one, offset some of the tax burden from employees selling their shares, and two, just continue to invest in the business in a pretty aggressive way. And that's what's so interesting, that they're alleviating the tax burden for employees. This liquidity moment, they can satiate with the secondary market. They don't need to IPO.

Effectively, their fundraise last month was IPO size. They raised $10 billion, you know, right? And the fact that they then have to raise $5 billion in debt to help their employees offset tax burden shows you just kind of the gargantuan scale of Databricks at this point.

Extraordinary amounts, but still a lot of new AI products and acquisitions to be making. All things Databricks and Brady Ford, we appreciate it. Coming up, we're going to be speaking with D-Wave CEO, Alan Baratz, as quantum computing stocks face yet another week of volatility. Plenty more around the company that has risen some 400% since October, when everyone got very exuberant about one willow chip coming out of Google and the movement of quantum. This is Blue Mode Technology.

Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Mike Shepard in Washington. Let's quick check on these markets, Mike, because, look, we've got macro at play in many ways and some cooling of inflationary pressures. It's interesting that Bitcoin remains on the higher side as risk sentiment is still a little jumpy at some of the tariff headlines. We're at 1.8% higher for Bitcoin. Move on and have a look at some stocks you have got to have been keeping an eye on throughout 2024 and now back in 2025. It has been a volatile path for Bitcoin.

for some of the most highly known but still relatively small quantum stocks, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti, Quantum Computing. We shine a light on some of the moves today because we've got B. Reilly analyst Craig Ellis, really once again affirming a positive view on the sector, the long-term potential, the recent developments offering some encouraging technical advances, he says. Of course, this comes on the back.

of some rather cooling words that came from Nvidia's CEO last week. Remember Jensen Wang saying, "Maybe it's going to be 20 years until you get very useful quantum computing." What's the take from the C-suite? Alan Baratz is with us, T-Wave CEO. Wow, what a ride your stock has been on, but what a company you've been slowly building here, and I want to get your first take

20 years? Sound right? No, not right at all. So there are many different approaches to building quantum computers. Some of them will take many years to mature. But at D-Wave, we selected an approach that is actually commercial today. And this is a really important point. We have customers that are using our systems today in support of their business operations. So not 20 years, but today.

Alan, can you talk a little bit more about those products and how customers are already putting it to commercial use? Sure. So the approach that we've taken to quantum computing is called annealing. And it's quite different from what everybody else in the industry does. We've been working on this for 15 years. We're on our fifth generation system. So we have companies like NTT Docomo.

that is using our quantum computers to optimize resources at cell towers, allowing them to support up to 15% more phones per tower. We've got other companies like Pattison Food Group, we've got companies that are getting near commercialization, companies like Interpublic Group, or companies like MasterCard.

Alan, to follow up on the development and this timeline that is much in debate now, there is another question hanging over quantum computing, and that is the degree of government support that the industry might need and might be seeing. What more can Washington do to help support development in this area?

Yeah. So government support is certainly important, although I will say that at D-Wave, we've built our business primarily on commercial customers. We have over 70 commercial customers. But government support is important. And we've actually got an issue right now. The National Quantum Initiative, which is the premier U.S. government funding mechanism for quantum, was passed

during Trump's first administration. It was due to be reauthorized almost a year and a half ago, and under Biden, it still has not been reauthorized. So we're hopeful that with Trump coming back in, that will be reauthorized to provide incremental funding to the quantum industry.

There have been incremental and significant breakthroughs of late though in quantum. The reason your shares have been up and to the right significantly since October, November, December has been the announcements, for example, on the Willow chip coming from Google. How seismic was that? Because as you articulated at the top,

There's lots of different ways of doing quantum here. Yeah. So one of the main issues that must get addressed for what's called gate model quantum computing, which is the approach that pretty much everybody in the industry has taken, other than D-Wave. We do both, annealing and gate.

error correction is critical to gate model systems. In fact, there's no evidence at all that without error correction you'll ever be able to do anything useful with a quantum computer. Well, the Willow announcement basically for the first time showed how error correction could work on a quantum computer at an interesting scale. So this was a very important advancement.

Why then, and I'm just going to play hypotheticals with you, why then do you think Nvidia, which actually partners with Google Quantum's team, is casting some sort of shade on how quickly this could be useful? Because I think that when you're talking about gate model quantum computers, we are many years away. How many from your perspective?

It could be 7, 10, 15, we are many years away. But what Jensen got wrong was that he didn't recognize the fact that there's more than one approach to quantum. And so I'm guessing he has in his head only gate model,

which has some very significant challenges still to be overcome, versus annealing, which is quantum computing that's in use today. Alan, what are some of the limitations that are currently posing a challenge or even an obstacle to further development of the kind that you just talked about?

So, when it comes to annealing quantum computing, which is the systems that we have in the market today, we're already capable of supporting business applications at commercial scale. But we are continuing to work on growing the size of our quantum computers to solve even larger problems and being able to solve them even faster, although we can solve things pretty fast today. I mean, we've been able to solve problems in the area of material simulation in minutes

that would take well over a million years to solve on classical computers. So we're pretty good today, but there's a need for increasing size and speed even in quantum computers, and we continue to work on that. What's interesting is you got swept up, your share price got swept up in the exuberance when perhaps there were breakthroughs being made in a different type of quantum computing.

We've got plenty of other players all seeing retail investors jump in, new exuberance around the next field of innovation. How has your shareholder base changed? You're offering potentially up to $150 million in new shares. You're making the most of it. Yeah. So first of all, I would say that the Willow announcement

is applicable to gate model, and we are building a gate model system as well in addition to our annealing system. So that is applicable to work that we are doing. It's just that with our annealing computers, that's not required today, and we are commercial today.

As far as financing the company, we recently announced that we now have over $170 million in the bank. So we've got the cash we need to execute. We will always be looking for opportunities to increase that if we can do it with limited dilution. We are very sensitive to dilution in the stock. Alan Baratz, D-Wave CEO, we thank you.

Coming up, we'll be joined by Loft Orbital Chief Operating Officer Alex Greenberg to discuss the space infrastructure startup's latest funding round. This is Bloomberg. 89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority, according to research by Boston Consulting Group. But with AI tools popping up everywhere, how do you separate the helpful from the hype? The right choice is crucial, which is why teams at Fortune 500 companies use Grammarly.

With over 15 years of experience building responsible, secure AI, Grammarly isn't just another AI communication assistant. It's how companies like yours increase productivity while keeping data protected and private.

Designed to fit the needs of business, Grammarly is backed by a user-first privacy policy and industry-leading security credentials. This means you won't have to worry about the safety of your company information. Grammarly also emphasizes responsible AI so your company can avoid harmful bias. See why 70,000 teams and 30 million people trust Grammarly at grammarly.com slash enterprise. That's Grammarly at grammarly.com slash enterprise.

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Loft Orbital has announced $170 million in new funding. The space infrastructure startup helps customers deploy and operate satellites in low Earth orbit. For more on this, we're joined by the company's COO, Alex Greenberg. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. First, we want to ask you, how do you plan to deploy this latest injection of capital? Where is it going to go and how will it help you?

Yeah, so first off, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it and excited for the opportunity to chat with you. So following this round, we're really going to be focused on two key things. First and foremost, we are focused on launching satellites that we have in our backlog for our customers. So we've booked over 30 satellites that we are set to launch over the next couple years. We've been investing in our production scale and our automation and our fleet management capabilities. So we're really focused on deploying these satellites rapidly, fast,

for our customers who have entrusted us with their missions to get to space. And then the second thing we're focused on is actually more of a forward-leaning nascent market, but that's the ability to fly our customers' AI applications in space. So we have a lot of customers who are not content on just collecting data. They actually want to make their satellites a lot smarter so that things can be detected in real time. And so to do that, they're developing AI apps

and Loft is enabling them to deploy those apps to our satellites as easily as you deploy software to the cloud. So we're not the application layer, but we're really the infrastructure layer, the servers in space, if you will, that allow those apps to function. AI knows no bounds, not even Earth. I'm interested, Alex, what your customers...

ultimately want to achieve by going to space? NASA, Microsoft, US Space Force, the European Space Agency, what are they using your low Earth orbit satellites to really achieve? There's really three fundamental things that we're enabling with our satellites. So we're not focused on one specific application, we're an infrastructure company that enables our customers to deploy any mission in orbit.

but it really comes down to three things. There is connectivity and data, there's national security and sovereignty, and then there's understanding our climate. So we have customers across all three of those areas, but that's fundamentally what space is being used for today, and those are pretty big problems that are impacting all of humanity.

You've raised a lot of money, a lot of French VCs involved, given the CEO himself is French. But I'm interested as to the competitive nature of space right now and the fact that someone very close to the next administration is pretty prevalent when it comes to SpaceX. How are you finding your niche? How are you seeing the industry evolve? Absolutely. So taking a step back, we started the company eight years ago. My co-founders and I had worked in the industry for a while.

And what we saw is that it just took too long to get satellites in space. So it can take up to five years from when you kick off a satellite mission to when it actually launches. And for an industry that needs to iterate quickly, that has to innovate, that has to provide real value to customers,

Five years is just way too slow. And so we set out to start Loft to get customers to space in months, not years, and be the fastest, most reliable, and just simplest way for customers to get to space. So that's really where we differentiate. And I think today, you know, what you're seeing is commercial space is entering a golden age. I think there's no better time to be a space company.

Luckily, we've been building this company for eight years. We've raised over $300 million of venture capital over that time. We now have over $500 million of aggregate contract value over the life of the company since inception with some of the customers that you mentioned. And so we're really ready to focus on scaling over the next few years.

Alex, Caroline referred to Elon Musk and his proximity to the president. And, of course, his SpaceX is one of the biggest presences in the entire field. Now, what sort of opportunity do you see the incoming administration offering you in terms of

expand to business and also what sort of challenge? Yeah, well, so first off, SpaceX has really changed the game in space by, I wouldn't say making launch a solved problem, but certainly by lowering the barrier for companies like us to get to space. So we're really thankful for SpaceX and their contribution to the industry.

I think this incoming administration has a history of being very friendly towards commercial space. So budgets that we rely on for our customers are certainly going to go up, and that's very good for us. But I think space is more than just a U.S. issue. It's actually a global issue.

Loft has an office in Toulouse, France, and that enables us to do business with customers in France, both in government and the commercial side, as well as in the broader European Union. So that's in Europe, but we also see demand for space from countries that don't really have their own native industrial base, but want to have more sovereignty over their space infrastructure. So a few months ago, we actually announced a joint venture in the UAE where we've created the very first company in the Middle East dedicated to high-volume satellite production.

That's a joint venture with an excellent partner in the UAE, and the first satellites will be built in the UAE starting in 2026.

Alex, do you foresee expanding more into the area of national security and defense? That really does seem to be a theme of some of the other Silicon Valley investors who have aligned themselves with Trump, and they do see some opportunity. Do you as well with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies? Absolutely, and we actually already have. So I think we have over $100 million of contract value in the aggregate with

U.S. defense customers. We, a couple years ago, set up a subsidiary called Loft Federal that has the ability to do work with classified customers that's based in Colorado. So we are very focused on the U.S. government, both on the civil side and the defense side,

as a key customer for us. We've set up the company to be able to serve that customer. We're really excited for the fact that they've embraced commercial space over the last couple years and we see that as a trend that's going to continue and increase. Alex Greenberg, COO of Loft Orbital. Thank you. Caroline. Mike, it's time now for Talking Tech and First Up.

Well, the EU is considering expanding its investigation into Elon Musk's ex for breaching content moderation rules. And the social media platform is currently being probed under the EU's Digital Services Act for allegedly failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation.

Plus, Google is facing its first UK investigation under tougher digital antitrust rules. The Competition Markets Authority is set to decide on whether the US tech giant is distorting the market in its search and online advertising services. The announcement comes as Google fights an order in the US to sell its Chrome web browser, of course. And Microsoft has named Jay Parikh

as Executive VP of the new AI Engineering Division. And it is set to oversee groups on AI platforms and supercomputers and agents. Prior to joining Microsoft, Parik worked at Facebook, building our tech infrastructure there and the data centers.

AI's use cases, well they're extending way beyond the office. Pressy Taste AI for example, a company bringing the power of artificial intelligence into the restaurant space, helping manage crews, even predict demand. We're joined now by the CEO of that company, Ingo Stork, as well as Union Square Hospitality Group founder, Danny Meyer, an investor in Pressy Taste. Danny, I start with you because in like the hospitality investments is where you've made this investment, but you've actually got a plethora of AI investments.

And at what point do you decide that artificial intelligence was going to change up your game of restaurant here? We're facing, as we always have in our industry, really a business model where we have pretty thin margins. The restaurant industry is notoriously competitive. But I think what a lot of people may not realize is that by the time you're done paying your rent and the talent on the team and the food costs and the insurance,

and the florists and all the expenses that only go up over time, you're not left with much. And so we're constantly needing to find ways that we can become more productive. And machine learning, it turns out, is really, really good at a number of things. It helps us to not only have much better data with which we can take much better care of our guests,

buy the proper amount of food because we never want to run out of food. And on the other hand, we don't want too much food. Have the right amount of labor and talent on the floor. Never want to have too little. You never want to have too much. We don't necessarily have the ability to think about that and be very, very present to offer great hospitality for our guests. And so the more that we can find outstanding applications for machine learning, AI,

What it does is we get to be a lot smarter, but we also get to be better at hospitality.

which is precisely where you want to be getting better. Sticking to that kitchen knitting, meanwhile, Ingo, you have been applying AI in the real world for a long time, whether it be in academia, you moved across to really wanting to change up the back of kitchen. What drew you there and how quickly have you managed to scale? Well, I have been in machine learning. I did my PhD in machine learning when I still needed to explain everyone what that is. But now I'm

I'm you know since a couple of months almost like it's just two years where chat GPT or Google AI other chat agents came to market it is now a big big hype everyone you know has AI capabilities now in a chat bot but the chat bot

you know, they have their limitations. You cannot have it drive your car, you cannot have it prepare your meal. You need specialized AI capabilities, such as, you know, using computer vision to identify what is going on, machine learning predictions that breaks down, okay, what does this weather forecast and this POS forecast and this trade area information mean for my kitchen right now?

in those 15 minute increments so my crew can do and deliver the best to optimize those razor thin margins that exist in the restaurant AI.

um for this specialized ai that's what pre-c taste ai brings to the table and it's basically also the the missing puzzle piece why software couldn't couldn't you know come into the kitchens kitchens are often still run like in the 50s and ai is the missing puzzle piece that can help to bring um true help to those uh kitchen operations danny you've got some interesting puzzle pieces from investments you've got seven shifts seven rooms

Pressy Taste AI, Converse Now. You're a man who's often gone forward breaking boundaries when it comes to tipping culture, when it comes to talking to your own workplace. How have they reacted to artificial intelligence? With fear? With excitement? Oh, with excitement. Everybody who we hire is somebody who is a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all.

And we're all looking for ways we can learn to be better. If you look at the different companies that you're showing right here, each one of these is providing the opportunity to make us better at the thing we were doing anyway. So there's nothing there that we were not doing before.

It's just much quicker, much smarter, much more productive. And everybody likes it because once you learn it, by the way, when you get a new toy, if I get a new update to my Apple phone, my iPhone,

It takes me a day to get used to it. But once I get used to it, I get exactly why they made those changes. So I don't want to say that the first day we put something into practice, everybody goes, oh, hallelujah, we have a new reservation system. We have a new scheduling system.

We have a new way that we can talk to our guests, a new way we can get to know our guests. And in the case of Prezi Taste, a new way that we can actually deploy our talent to be as productive as possible per task. That's the thing I want to be clear about Prezi Taste, which is really cool, is that

It knows all of our recipes. It knows exactly what we sold, what we're selling. It can actually see how busy our restaurant is, and it can give the kitchen in real time the predictions about how much food you should be preparing to replace what just got sold, how much food you should not be preparing, who should do it.

And it's the kind of thing that managers have done an OK job of year after year. But now those managers instead are taking their time to taste the food and make sure it's perfect before a sauce goes out. They're taking the time to be with our guests. We so appreciate having you both. Presley Tate CEO, Ingo Stork Union Square Hospitality Group, Danny Meyer. This is Bloomberg.

I think a

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