Elon Musk Sued by the SEC, Awaiting TikTok's Fate
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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, the SEC goes after Elon Musk, suing the tech billionaire over alleged disclosure violations with Twitter. Plus, Elon Musk's other company, SpaceX, continues to make strides with two lunar rover probes headed for the moon. And we'll hear

from DC as we await a decision from the Supreme Court on TikTok's fate this week. TSMC, I shine a light on TSM. These are the depository receipts traded here in the United States. Even as they traded lower in Asia, they're higher here in the United States. This as we get yet more

more focus coming from the administration of Biden trying to limit the access of TSMC, Samsung, other chip makers into China, into Huawei, for example. But actually, are some of these details around what the administration has announced actually better than the market had anticipated? Peter Elstrom can articulate it. Bloomberg Intelligence coming out with a note saying actually some of the limitations perhaps aren't that bad for phones, for PC chips in particular.

Yeah, that's right. So what we are seeing is the Biden administration is really rushing out a couple of last rounds of regulations before they leave office and hand off to the Trump administration. In the latest round, what we're hearing is that the Commerce Department is asking TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor, which makes chips for Apple and Nvidia, and also Samsung, other foundries, to put new restrictions on

on their business with Chinese customers in particular. The reason is they know that there was a Chinese company that was an intermediary for chips that were made by TSMC and then ended up in the hands of Huawei Technologies, the Chinese company that has been blacklisted by the US and is not supposed to be able to get these kinds of chips. And instead they got that. So now the Commerce Department is asking for new regulations where

these producers, TSMC and Samsung, will need a license from the U.S. before they do business with certain companies in China for the most advanced semiconductors. Peter, do we expect these measures to get the same kind of unwelcome reception and objections that the ones unveiled on Monday regarding AI technology received?

That was really an exceptional situation. You're referring there were a new round of AI restrictions that hit NVIDIA in particular. NVIDIA issued a very sharply critical comment at that time saying this is not the time for the Biden administration to be putting in new rules.

especially just days before they step out the door and hand off to another administration that may have different priorities. The Biden administration, to be fair, did give a very long comment period. Those rules are not going to go into effect until well into the Trump administration. But you raise a good question. These chip companies are not happy about seeing new rules kind of rolled out almost daily now that are going to affect their businesses going forward, especially from an administration that's not going to be around to enforce them. Bloomberg's Peter Elstrom, thank you.

In other chip news, Intel, the once dominant chip maker now struggling to revive its business and finances, plans to turn its venture capital arm into a separate fund with a new name. Bloomberg's Ian King is here for more. Ian, thank you for joining us. How much of a blow is this latest development for this storied company? This Intel capital venture arm has invested and put money into the likes of ASML and VMware.

Yeah, I mean, it's not really a blow for the company. It's more an admission that we really need to be focusing what resources we have on the core mission, which is better products, better production, because those are the things that are going to get us back in the game. The venture capital arm is kind of a prototype. It's a kind of

the venture capital arm for corporations and been a model for years and something that they've used to promote other parts of the industry, other technologies. And so you could argue that it's kind of peripheral to the job at hand right now. The job at hand is, as you say, focusing in. What then are the other moves, Ian? You've reported a lot about the future of Altera, for example, which has a significant holding in.

Yeah, I mean, it has these investments that it's made over the years, these companies that it's brought in, like Altera, like Mobileye. And this started under the previous CEO, Pat Gelsinger. They're saying, look, these things aren't realizing the value that they should be doing, so we need to find a way to monetize them. So currently, Altera, which I think it paid about $15 billion for back in the day, is looking for investors, people who will bring in money to own part of that as it tries to take that

particular unit to an IPO along the, you know, in the future. Ian, what is our timeline on a successor? And then also when we might hear how this new venture arm being separated will be finally rebranded? They have a lot of moving parts right now.

Yeah, I mean, there's an awful lot to track with what's happening with this company. They have not given a timeline for when they will bring in a CEO, but they need to do that. They need to do this quickly if they're going to change direction and make it work because it's not like things are getting better.

In terms of what's happening with Intel Capital, they've said it's going to be really a separate entity by the second half of this year. They wouldn't answer our questions about what it means for the finances and where the money is going to come from. All they've said is that this will free this venture capital unit up to raise capital from external sources. And that obviously implies that they're not going to give it as much money as they had in the past, if at all.

Inking, always the latest on Intel, we thank you. Coming up, did Elon Musk just cheat Twitter shareholders at more than $150 million? The SEC claims so. We discuss the alleged disclosure violations that happened way back when he spent more than $40 billion on Twitter. This is Bloomberg Technology.

Elon Musk is being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is claiming that the tech billionaire cheated Twitter shareholders of more than $150 million by waiting too long to disclose his growing stake in Twitter as he prepared a takeover bid. For more, we're joined by Bloomberg's Nicola White here in Washington. Thank you for all your reporting on this.

on this case has been building for a while and yet it did not in the usual way that a lot of these two which is with the settlement and i think too yes and i think that's pretty on brand for a lot less great so uh...

Normally, these kinds of cases are usually settled because they are, even though this has generated tons of headlines, it is a very, very straightforward case. Did you file this form or not? And did you do it on time? And Elon Musk did not, according to the SEC. And not only did he not file it on time, he did the wrong form. So the SEC said in the process...

he made a hundred and fifty million dollars and you know that really didn't go over well for the rest of Twitter shareholders. A hundred and fifty million dollars not so well for Twitter shareholders, Nicola. You've done the math. Alex Spiro, of course the lawyer for Musk is saying this is a sham. Ultimately he was just a day late. He didn't mean to be doing any of this and usually you get a sort of hundred thousand dollar fine. Not a lot more than that. So can you just take the other side of the question here? How much do we know that there was intent?

Well, there's lots of questions we don't know, right? But according to the SEC, he knowingly was purchasing, stockpiling all this stock while he was also considering a takeover, a very, very, as it turns out to be very public, takeover bid of Twitter. And while he was doing that, I mean, that triggers just straightforward SEC disclosure requirements, and he didn't do it. And that's where the SEC just...

It comes down to a black and white case of did you do it or did you not? Nicola, in fighting this, is Elon Musk hoping for a better deal under Trump? Trump has picked Paul Atkins, who has railed against enforcement and what he sees as high penalties in securities cases. Is he likely to get a better hearing with a new administration and new SEC chair? One would think that would be the case.

But again, there's a lot that we don't know because when it comes down to it, this is a pretty straightforward case. The SEC could have taken a more controversial angle. They could have said, you committed fraud, you allegedly committed fraud, and they didn't go that far. So it's a strict liability case as it's known in securities law. Did you do it or did you not? So some securities lawyers that I've talked to have said, this is, again, pretty straightforward and

may not be such a controversial thing for Paul Atkins to pick up. Now, Paul Atkins is on record over his years and years in the public eye of advocating for lower penalties. So who knows? Nicola White, we'll stay across it. We thank you. Meanwhile, let's talk about another Elon Musk company, SpaceX, continuing to make strides in rocket launches. The company successfully launched a pair of commercial satellites carrying astronauts

two lunar rover probes headed for the moon. Here with more on the commercial space race, Chad Anderson, he's Space Capital Managing Partner joining us now. And look, we have perhaps got a slight pushback in the next SpaceX launch that we're anticipating, but let's just talk about these lunar rovers in particular. What does this mean for the space industry?

Sure. I mean, 2025 is going to be a massive year for the space economy, and you don't need any more proof than what's happened in the first couple of weeks, right? So yesterday, SpaceX launched 130 payloads, different satellites to orbit on a transporter mission. Our portfolio companies made up half of those satellites, so that was a lot of fun to watch.

This morning they launched two lunar rovers on the same rocket, one of which is a Japanese lander and another is Firefly based in Texas. And they're robotic precursor missions for NASA in basically with sensors to do exploratory work in preparation for humans to go and land there. And there's another lunar mission that's launching next month. So while these

landers are on their way to the moon. We're going to launch another one as well. And like you mentioned, it was supposed to happen today, but it looks like weather's pushed it till tomorrow.

SpaceX's next-gen launch vehicle, massive, fully reusable launch vehicle. It's going to bring the price of accessing orbit way down. It's going to transform the space economy and really accelerate all this growth that we're seeing so far. So Starship, we wait, we watch. We also anticipate 1 a.m. today, New York time, where the Blue Origin, which...

competes against Vulcan 9, maybe a bit bigger in terms of payloads, is actually going to get up with its test flight. What does that mean, this sort of introduction of yet more competitors to the space? Well, this is really important because at the moment, SpaceX dominates, right? Good for you. Yeah, I mean, it's great for a lot of people who are invested in the company. They are launching the majority of rockets. I mean, 2024 was a record year. SpaceX launched 100.

over half of the global launches last year. They launched over 90% of all the mass that went to orbit, went through SpaceX. They are the best option on the market and in some cases the only option on the market. So to have other players and other competition is going to be huge.

We've been looking at the interesting thing between SpaceX and Blue Origin is just, you know, you got Bezos and Musk, right, who sent to billionaires. But, and they were, the companies were founded at the same time in 2002. Up until a couple years ago, they had invested the same amount of money into both companies. And you look at what SpaceX has done over that period, right, just really dominated the market, enabled all of this entrepreneurship, innovation, and private capital. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has been launching these sort of luxury trips to the edge of space with these small rockets.

New Glenn is their vehicle that is going to launch satellites and enable them to do all those things like lunar missions and everything else that Blue Origin wants to do. So it's really important that they get this vehicle up, and it's really important for the rest of us because competition is good. It ushers in innovation and brings prices down for everyone.

Chad, what do you see the incoming Trump administration doing to help foster the space industry from your standpoint? And what are some of the things you would like to see the new president do when he takes office?

Well, I mean, we certainly expect to see a greater emphasis, a greater promotion of the space economy, a greater integration of commercial capabilities into government programs. I think we've already seen in this transitionary period the geopolitical turmoil. I think a lot of that's going to spur additional growth in defense spending, a lot of which is going to go to space companies.

there's going to be an increased reliance on the providers that have the capability. SpaceX, again, is chief amongst them. They're most likely to benefit here, not just because

of his first buddy status, but also because they have the best solution on the market. And again, in some cases, the only solution on the market. So the government is going to rely even more heavily on Star Shield and their government businesses, but others are going to benefit as well with more competition coming online, more novel new capabilities. We do expect to see streamlining of regulation and pro-growth stances to really help some of these new and novel space capabilities come online this year.

Chad, let's talk about some of those regulations and some of the regulatory pressures that the industry has faced. What are some of the specific areas of relief that the industry would like to see? Well, regulation plays a key role in a lot of space activities. Interestingly, though, the U.S. government has actually been very responsive to this. For example, I mean, there was an Australian company that launched a satellite that could look

and evaluate and see other satellites and what was going on there. You couldn't do that in the U.S. and many other countries, but there was a regulatory loophole in Australia that allowed them to do that. As soon as they launched that satellite, the U.S. government responded and enabled U.S. companies to be competitive, and we're now seeing a lot of that data coming down. So we've already seen responsiveness from a regulatory front. I think

An interesting angle here is that we expect to see a sort of about face on climate policy. And so I think climate solutions are going to be a key area for private capital as they were during his last term for companies to come in and provide innovative solutions funded by private capital. Chad Anderson of Space Capital, we thank you.

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Now, as we all await a decision from the Supreme Court on TikTok, let's just look to the future of social media under the incoming Trump administration and perhaps an alternative to content moderation as we know it, middleware. It's essentially software built into tech platforms which gives users, rather than platforms, the power to moderate their own social media experiences.

One of the people who'd been looking into it, authoring on it, Rene Duresta, social media researcher at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy and co-authoring the report on this very topic. And what's so interesting is where the examples are being used and technically what this third party would offer. So is it already in decentralized platforms like Blue Sky? And what exactly is it helping us do as a user?

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited for talking about this publicly. It's been so much an obscure academic area of research for a long time. So middleware tries to give users the ability to better control their experience. The two areas that we talk about this really mattering in are content curation, meaning deciding what you're going to see in your feed, and then content moderation, so deciding what you are not going to see in your feed or what you're going to see less of or what might have a label over it.

Middleware right now is most visible on Blue Sky because Blue Sky is providing an opportunity for users to go onto the platform and create their own feeds where you can subscribe to something like a topic where you say, "You know what? I really want to follow a feed about my favorite sports team. I really want to follow a feed about gardening, books, you name it." Somebody's created that feed and they've curated the people in it.

and you can kind of add a little emoji to a post that indicates that you want it to show up in the feed. It's just a really interesting way to get more granular and have more control. And on the flip side, you can do the same thing with labeling. If there are certain people that you don't want to see content from, if there are certain classes of content that you just don't want to see, you can subscribe to a labeler and that labeler will label content and take it out of your feed or hide it from you. So it's a really

interesting opportunity to go there and to have this much more modular kind of create your own experience. Renee, this sounds like something that would have a fair amount of appeal for users who've been frustrated by their experiences, especially in the last year or so in some of the major platforms. But there does seem to be a catch, and that is you need interoperability and you need the buy-in of those platforms. And the paper even makes note of that. How do you get past that hurdle?

Well, one of the reasons why we did the paper now is arguing that the adoption on platforms like Blue Sky or even platforms like Mastodon, which preceded Blue Sky, this protocol-based social media, provide an opportunity to experience it without trying to prevail upon the giants to do it themselves.

paper is written about middleware in the past frank fukuyama at stanford wrote one in 2019 arguing that this would actually be a really effective tool to reduce centralized platform power right to devolve more power down to the user i think you are seeing signs that platforms want to do that you're seeing elon musk talk about giving users more control over the feed

You're seeing Mark Zuckerberg make some pretty remarkable pendulum swings in particular directions. That's alienating a large part of the user base. Saying like, hey, actually here you can control it yourself, I think is something you're going to see from them. They're going to start to try to opt in in small ways and give users small opportunities. But otherwise, you're absolutely right. It is very much at the pleasure of the platforms that such a thing can exist when dealing with one of the large centralized giants.

And we've seen at some of those centralized giants that moderation has been a labor-intensive endeavor. How would middleware not suffer from the same sort of challenge? And who would do the heavy lifting?

This is where I think the trade-offs actually are, obviously. We're starting to see people in the community who are doing this as almost a labor of love for their community. It's very much like, hey, I as a member of this community, maybe a marginalized community, don't want to see content from these people who I think are likely to harass me. And so you're seeing labelers exist to meet a very particular niche need.

What we write about in the paper, though, is that ultimately you do have to create some sort of economic means by which it's not just a volunteer labor of love in order for it to scale in any material way. So we tried to present as balanced a view as possible. Here is a vision for what's possible in the world. Here are the challenges and the ways that we need to get past it.

But I think, again, as you're noting, you're seeing a moment where people are fleeing. People fled X, I should say, on the left because they didn't like Elon's changes to moderation and the vibes that it created. People had previously fled to Parler and Truth Social when they were on the right and didn't like certain dynamics. So I think that you're starting to see users begin to realize that they don't have to commit to one site. And this is where I think there's a real interesting opportunity moment.

My name is Doresta from the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, bringing middleware into the broader conversation. We appreciate you for it. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology. I'm Caroline Hyde in New York. And I'm Mike Shepard in Washington.

As we await the Supreme Court's decision on TikTok, we're joined now by Representative Raja Krishnamoorthy, a Democrat from the state of Illinois. Thank you so much, Congressman, for your time. You were one of the co-authors of the legislation that is now in the justices' hands at the Supreme Court. Obviously, we're hearing from the arguments on Friday that it will likely break in favor of the law.

Assuming that it's upheld, what are your expectations for its enforcement under the Trump administration, which would be essentially responsible for it?

I think the Trump administration will enforce the law. I talked to Michael Walls, the national security advisor, who's a friend and colleague of mine from the House. And they're as concerned as we are about the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, being able to control TikTok. We all want to see TikTok survive and flourish, but that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok, which I hope they do as soon as today.

You're on both the intelligence and the China Select Committees. You've heard the evidence as to why you're worried from a national security perspective. But we've also heard from ByteDance time and time again that it's very difficult to separate and ultimately be able to sell off. And they're saying, look, we're going dark on Sunday if this is upheld. You will not be able to access this app. Does that worry you for the user base?

I think this is called negotiating tactics. At the same time that we hear this, we hear that thanks to your reporting at Bloomberg, the CCP is now entertaining a sale of the company. Look, we in the Congress don't have to legislate around the priorities or prerogatives of the Chinese Communist Party. Their decision-making is up to them. But our law requires that ByteDance sell TikTok, and I hope that they comply with the law soon.

Would you like Elon Musk to be that purchaser? Oh, I'm not going to make any decisions about who should be the purchaser. Let the free enterprise system along with our government regulators decide that. But suffice it to say, I think your previous guest is from the McCourt

school at Georgetown and Frank McCourt, after whom that school was named, is one of the big bidders right now for TikTok as well as Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank. There's a whole line of people waiting to buy TikTok if only ByteDance would pick up the phone and answer their calls.

Congressman, what would a prospective buyer need to demonstrate to satisfy your concerns that there is a full and complete separation from China?

There's some very specific requirements within the law. But for instance, one of the issues is likely going to be that the new buyer is not going to rely on the CCP's algorithm. And of course, that there's real separation between the buyer and where they store the data of users and buyers.

of access from China. That was the whole problem, by the way, with Project Texas, which was the effort by TikTok to try to convince both the Biden and the Trump administrations that American user data was safe from authorities in China. Repeatedly, that was found to be untrue. And repeatedly, TikTok executives came to Capitol Hill and told falsehoods about the separation that didn't exist.

Congressman, we've seen as odds grow that TikTok will go dark indeed on Sunday, users talking about using other Chinese-based apps, for instance, like Lemonade or Red Note. Do those present any sorts of security concerns for you and your colleagues on Capitol Hill? And would this law apply? Well,

After years of investigation of ByteDance, we know that ByteDance's applications are problematic. One of them is TikTok, as we've talked about, and another is Lemonade. So Lemonade would also be covered by this particular law. With regard to any other social media applications that might be controlled by a foreign adversary,

A future executive branch determination would be needed to take action under the law. And so I'll leave that to the Trump administration and other future administrations to decide. - This becomes ultimately though a potential game of whack-a-mole. And also there's the ongoing argument that sure, you get rid of TikTok, maybe even Lemonade, but ultimately China's able to observe us through other websites, through the internet writ large. What else do you think needs to occur here?

you know, one thing that doesn't get covered is the data broker law that went into effect the same day that this particular bite dance divestiture law, um, uh,

took effect as well. And that data broker law prevents basically data that's harvested from other websites in the United States from being sold to entities that are controlled by foreign adversaries. So implementation of that law will be crucial under the Trump administration and others to make sure that we can kind of help to wall off some of this data from the CCP and other foreign adversaries.

More broadly, we've seen the market reaction from a potential movement away from TikTok. Meta shares done well on the back of it, so too have Snap. Does that raise concerns from a competition perspective for you?

Well, I think that probably the market is responding to the fact that users are migrating to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, to Snap and to other platforms of their own volition because they know that this particular platform may not be...

advisable to be on if ByteDance doesn't comply with the law. Now, again, I hope ByteDance does comply with the law, and I hope that TikTok is able to survive and flourish. There's still time to do that. Just without the algorithm, Rajay Krishnamoorthy, of course, Democrat representative for Illinois, great expertise there. We thank you very much.

Coming up, Robert Hilmer, founder of Gowana Capital, will join us to discuss his firm's latest efforts to back some of the most highly coveted private tech companies. This is Bloomberg.

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What is the secret to getting into these sorts of allocations, first of all? And then what are you looking at next in 2025?

Well, great to be here. Thank you. So we address the marketplace through two key deal channels. So firstly, we invest directly in these companies through primary rounds. But uniquely, we also invest via the secondary market, which involves providing liquidity to early investors and employees.

So I wouldn't call it a secret, but what we've uniquely packaged is the ability to partner with these great tech companies and provide them with growth capital, but also be a liquidity provider to owners of stock. And through both of those deal channels, we've built some pretty incredible portfolios. How much easier, Robert, is it to access ByteDance on the secondary market right now? How much are you focusing in on that company and the concerns around TikTok?

Well, I don't want to comment on any particular company. Why not? You own it. Yeah, I can't comment on any specific companies or fundraising at the moment. But what I can tell you is as a firm, we are laser focused on what we've called the global tech leaders. So why is ByteDance therefore still a tech leader?

Well, look, ByDance is obviously an incredibly large company, so it's been very successful with its business model amongst many other companies like Figma, Rippling, Anthropic.

So we have these 30 companies that we've isolated that we think will accrue a disproportionate amount of value over the next 10 years. You must have been taking calls, though, from investors that are perhaps worried about the geopolitical influence on some of these key names. Has that been a key concern for any of them?

So the way we invest is we don't take any extremely outsized positions in our funds. So we have certain parameters around percentage of portfolio, etc. So that any one company never represents 20 or 30 percent of a portfolio. So the feedback we've had from our investor base is that they want to continue backing Goanna because as we look forward,

In my opinion, there's never been a more exciting time to be investing in technology with these secular tailwinds, AI, software, data infrastructure, etc.

Robert, you just brought up AI. That seemed to be such a focus in 2023 and especially last year. But what about quantum computing? We did see a bit of a brushback pitch thrown at this technology by Jensen Wang. How does that affect your thinking toward quantum and toward other areas? Yeah, look, so we can't, as I said, I can't focus or bring up any specific companies. But when we look across companies

a number of sub-sectors within technology, software, data infrastructure, and AI. I think there is...

an amazing tapestry of opportunities over the next 10 years. Some of those companies that we're really excited about are Rippling, Anthropic, Figma, amongst many others. And so we're laser focused, as I said, on these global tech leaders and partnering with our investor base on helping them get exposure to those really important companies.

Robert, how does the change of leadership here in Washington affect the way you view the table of opportunities that's been set in front of you and your company? It's certainly very exciting at the moment. So I was just in Australia and Hong Kong. And what I can tell you globally, though, is there has never been more interest, at least in my career,

in investing in the United States and specifically investing in US private tech companies. The world right now wants more exposure to the US and US tech companies than I have ever seen.

And yet, the valuations are pretty frothy if you're looking at yet more and more $3 trillion companies that are publicly listed. Are you starting to hear that there's a worry about we're hitting a top level with some of the market capitalizations on the private market? How long can we sustain these levels?

I don't think so. That's not too much of a concern. I think when you look at multiples in public markets, while they're certainly not cheap and they're full, I don't think they're bubbles at all. For the mega cap, there's multiple companies that are around 20 times earnings, which is, I think, quite reasonable given the growth profile and the earnings they generate.

To be clear, we obviously focus on private markets, not public markets. And so for us, our timeline is over the, let's call it three to seven year type outlook. So when we look at these companies, we're looking into the years, not the quarters. And as I said, when we look at the global tech leaders that we're focused on for the next few years, we've never been so excited.

a couple of outliers that are on the public markets like Palantir or Tesla trading 170 times future earnings. So there are some outliers, obviously, and I'm interested as to whether or not you're frustrated that there aren't enough outliers actually going public.

Well, we enjoy some of these companies staying private longer. Obviously, that's the universe we focus on. So we're not frustrated. But I think what's important there is these decisions to list by some of these companies were made, let's say, 18 to 24 months ago when markets were very different. And so I think what you're going to see is the plans to list were made

18 or 24 months ago. And so I think for investors, there will be a lot of exits for those in private markets over the next two to three years.

Go on, a capital founder, Robert Helmer. Very different model. We appreciate it. Thank you. In other news, Microsoft is actually attempting to lure more people to use its AI chatbot. The company announced it will rebrand its ChatGPT rival from Microsoft Copilot to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. Basically, the company is hoping to move, actually raising visibility, the adoption that actually this is a chatbot, making that evident.

Colossal Biosciences. It aims to de-extinct species that left the Earth long ago. Today, the company is announcing a new $200 million funding round to further those efforts. We're welcoming Ben Lamb, CEO and founder of Colossal Biosciences, to the show. And you're now a deck of corn valued at more than $10 billion. What are you going to be using the money for at the moment, Ben?

Well, our three flagship projects, the mammoth, the thylacine, and the dodo are all on track. And the thylacine is actually ahead of schedule. So we're doubling down right now on the existing species. We're doubling down on some of our newer technologies like our multiplex editing genome engineering tools, as well as our artificial womb work. And then we're also looking at ways that we can accelerate some of those technologies in the conservation.

I'll get to conservation in a minute, but you're of course renowned for using CRISPR technology to get us there, but also to be birthing animals ex utero. I mean, are they the next steps? And how would actually we functionally get to a mammoth, for example?

Yeah. So, so where we are in the process of the mammoth in the thylacine is actually we're in the editing phase. We've collected all the ancient genomes. We've done all the ancient DNA assembly. We've done all the comparative genomics to the closest living relatives, which we also had to go build those genomes because they didn't exist in some server somewhere. And now we're using those targets and from our systems and our AI to actually go make those edits. We're still a little bit further away on the Dodo, but since we're in the editing phase, uh,

we now feel that we could also devote more attention to the artificial womb side. All of our first species will be born through surrogacy. So that means through another animal, through a surrogate animal, but long-term, we hope that not only our extinct species, but hopefully, uh, critically endangered other species can be born ex-utero using these artificial wombs. So we have a 17 person team, uh, working on the artificial womb work right now. And I think that hopefully if we're successful in the next two years, we'll be able to birth the first animal that's ever been born, uh,

fully exuterine, which will be much smaller than a mammoth, right? It'll be something from a lab like a mouse or a marsupial. 435 million is what you've raised so far, though. That's a lot for a 17-person team. Where is that money ultimately having to be best placed? I'm sure expenses are huge, but is it labs? Where is the real expense here? Yeah, so we actually have 170 scientists full-time at Colossal.

17 specifically on just that new artificial womb team. But then we also fund 40 academic postdocs from 17 of the top universities around the world. We have 90 plus academic advisors and partners around the world. And then we fund research in academic labs. So when you add all that up, it's about 220 people that are

actively working in kind of this global consortium toward this project. And then Colossal has two labs in Dallas, a lab in Melbourne, Australia, and a lab in Boston, Massachusetts. It's all working on that. All of it needs the latest and greatest infrastructure and technology, both through genetics and engineering, and then also things like robotics.

Look, I'm going to ask a pointed question. Roll with me here. But you're a man who's made his name in AI applications that's so hot right now, in space in particular, so hot right now. We're literally seeing, you said, you're interested in biodiversity, ultimately in climate, and part of the West Coast is burning. And I'm interested as to why this is the best place to be putting your talents, to be resuscitating mammoths into the world when we can't conserve what's currently living.

Yeah, many people told me, given that I was in AI before it was cool and defense tech before it was cool, that I should just stick to that and not move into this before some of these things. But when we started the business, there was a trend line that was terrifying. That was we were going to lose up to 15, 1.5% of all biodiversity between now and 2050. Fast forward a few years, that's been reforecasted by external scientists to 50%, 5-0. We are going to potentially lose up to 50% of

all biodiversity between now and 2050. And so we know that modern conservation works, but it doesn't work at the speed at which we are eradicating species and changing the climate and changing the planet. So we need new tools against the fight of loss of biodiversity. And so I view it as we need a de-extinction toolkit. It'd be better to have a de-extinction toolkit and not need it than need a de-extinction toolkit and not have it. So I felt like this was probably the best place for me to spend the next decade or so of my life.

- Well said. How many people are on that journey from a VC perspective? TWG Global, was it easy to get more people to commit? - You know, I'd say that the success that we are seeing both on the scientific discovery, so every single announcement that we make, there's not one, but typically two to seven scientific firsts in every single announcement that we make, which is pretty remarkable. I think that it's a testament to the team that we've really brought together, both internally and externally,

that has given investors a lot of confidence on the progress that we've made. And so I've never had any raising of capital be easy. I've heard stories about how people raise tons of money on napkins in Silicon Valley. That's never been my life. But no, I think that we've had tremendous support from Mark Walter and Thomas Toll and others that have been involved in the business for quite some time.

Ben Lam, it's great to catch up with you. Come back when you've got your next scientific breakthrough. CEO of Colossal Biosciences. We appreciate it. Another $200 million in the bank. Now that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Tomorrow, don't want to miss it, Andrew O'Founder, Parmalaki, joining Bloomberg Technology for live exclusive interview. Also, don't forget on our podcast, you can find it on the terminal as well as online on Apple, Spotify and iHeart. From New York, from Washington, this is Bloomberg Technology.

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