From the heart of where innovation money and power collide. In Silicon Valley and beyond. This is Bloomberg Technology with Emily Chang. I'm Emily Chang San Francisco and this is Bloomberg Technology coming up in the next hour the votes are in the Twitter votes. That is Elon Musk's followers have voted that the Tesla CEO should sell 10 percent of his stake in the company worth about twenty one billion dollars. Will he do it. We'll discuss. Plus another company heads to the metaverse MMD rallying after
landing Metta as a new customer. We'll talk to a MDC Lisa Shu about teaming up with the company formerly known as Facebook and Cryptos New Milestone. The market for digital assets has already quadrupled from 20 20. But will that momentum continue. We'll discuss later this hour. All of that in a moment. But first let's get a look at the
markets and U.S. stocks edging higher with the S&P notching its longest winning streak since 2017. Bloomberg Quicktake Gupta has the full report. Kitty tell us about the day. Well Emily a little bit for a mediocre day. We're talking about the index. The S&P 500 closing a little bit higher but just barely. We can almost call that flat the Nasdaq 100. However in the red by like I said I'm just a little bit marginal move. And you see the New York thing index really that big tech bit unchanged. So a lot of this is going to be positioning of course for the CPI report on Wednesday. But a lot of this is also simply the fact that big
tech today was split. You had Tesla Apple Amazon in the red. You had Microsoft in some of the others in the green. And of course when that happens you do tend to see the market play a little bit of a tug of war. What didn't play tug of war Emily was cryptocurrency currencies up seven point eight percent. That's really where you saw the bid especially in the stock market. A lot of the marathon digital the micro strategies all outperforming today. But let me show you a big chart about the
about big tech in particular because a two trillion dollar club made some news today. Alphabet almost closing. They're hitting two trillion dollars of market cap intraday and then closing at one point ninety eight trillion almost nearing the likes of Apple and Microsoft in that benchmark something to watch in the days ahead. Maybe Alphabet will close above that. Mark let's just take a look at some of the other tech subsectors though because a while though you talk a little bit kind of a flat mediocre day from the indexes the sub indexes semiconductors and the Golden Dragon Index which really houses those Chinese 80 yards very tech heavy. Those actually outperformed today Emily. But let's just get to the breaking news here. Lots of earnings stories after the bell. For that we go to ad lib. Yeah. Straight to Robin Hood down around 3 percent in after hours trading is
disclosed. A security breach in November 3rd. Five million customers. Customer e-mails. Access 2 million. Customer full names access. Crucially though no access to Social Security numbers credit card numbers or account numbers. But clearly that a worrying sign for Robin Hood a stock that was off in regular trading on Monday. Emily your eyes do not deceive you. That does literally say 30 percent on the screen. Roadblocks often surging in after hours after reporting bookings. It's time for sales in the quarter up 28 percent year on year. Basically some staying power for the online video games market
has become out of the global pandemic. Really positive for roadblocks. You were talking about FMD in the intro. A really big move in that stock on Monday up 10 percent its biggest gain since July of last year to a fresh record high. As you said they've won that deal for the server chip to provide that to metal the company formerly known as Facebook making their own little foray into the massive US. And finally I want to touch on Tester. If you bring up that stock on Monday Tesla down four point eight percent biggest drop since June. At one point he was down more than 7 percent which was his biggest drop since
February. Why. I'm not going to tell you why he got so much better to talk tonight about Emily. Back to you. All right. Gupta at Ludlow thank you both. Where we've got someone right here to tell us why. Musk of course as Ed said back with the tweaks. Tesla CEO and largest shareholder tweeting out a poll over the weekend asking his Twitter followers whether or not he should sell 10 percent of his stake. They voted yes. What does that mean. Let's dive into it with Bloomberg's own Diana Hall. So why did he do this. I think frankly that Musk is very
sensitive to the fact that he's now the richest person on the planet and he's the target of people who want to get billionaires to be taxed. And so he he wants to be seen as being is doing good for the world. And he's been mulling a sale of stock for quite some time. You talked about this in the fall. So is this something he had already planned to do. I think he's been planning it. I mean he. So he has stock options that are expiring and he's going to have to pay taxes on that. But now he's also talking about selling a 10 percent stake. So maybe he sells the shares and buys them back. Maybe they're at an all time high. Why not take some money off the table and fund his foundation. I mean he's probably thinking about his legacy and his philanthropy. And you know I think he's been thinking about this for a while. What does this actually mean for the tax
debate. I mean is he is he is this is there some amount of benevolence here or is this something that he would have to do anyway. I mean I think it depends in part on the reconciliation bill. The last I checked taxing billionaires was not part of the package that has. Yes. Yet to be passed by Congress. But I imagine that he wants to do whatever he's going to do with his stock sale before you know to get the lowest tax rate possible. But yeah I mean I think ultimately I mean he will pay taxes on
this sale and that could be good for taxpayers. But you know maybe he's dodging a bigger tax bill down the road. And what does it mean for Tesla and Tesla shareholders. Right. Because the more he owns right the more shareholders might believe he's invested in the company. Yeah. And I think you saw some split among his his fan base because he had always said my money is was the first in and we'll be the last out. So the idea of him selling is kind of causing consternation among some of the
devout. Others are like oh you know he deserves it. He's built this company up to be such a big thing. He should have money and he's not really cash rich. All of his wealth is in the stock but he's certainly not poor either. You know how does this sort of we're seeing more. He seems to be efforts on his part to at least appear more generous with the world hunger. The offer to provide billions of dollars to help solve world hunger. If the U.N. could prove it. Is there any development on that. So I think what's interesting about Musk is that he's the wealthiest person in the world but he's always said that his money is going to go to fund Space X his Mars mission mission. He has a foundation but the foundation makes very small grants to things like his brother Kimball's company. So he's not really known for philanthropy even though he has notions of being involved. I
mean he also pledged 50 million dollars I believe to the St. Jude's Hospital. He's talking to the world to about world hunger carbon capture. But like he hasn't actually spent a lot of this money yet. Right. And he certainly hasn't committed yet. And just because Twitter said yes doesn't mean he's going to do it. Correct. Correct. And there's been no form for. So like this is all theoretical. I mean yes the Twitter the Twitter verse has spoken but like until there's a filing I won't believe it. All right. Bloomberg Santa. Hall maybe watching your notifications. Thank you. Meantime McAfee has agreed to be acquired by an investor group called by Advent International and Primera an all cash transaction with an equity value of 12 billion dollars.
That takes the global online protection provider private. We'll have much more on that later this hour. And coming up M.D. racks up a big win with Metta the company formerly known as Facebook now in M.D. customer. CEO Lisa Su joins us right here next. Talk about what it means just what she thinks of the metaverse and her outlook on the chip crisis. This
is Bloomberg. Shares of Advanced Micro Devices ending up more than 10 percent after the company announced it won metal. Formerly known as Facebook as a chip customer Hamdi also revealing a range of new chips to take on rivals like India and Intel. All of this on the heels of third quarter earnings that were very very strong. Joining me now to talk about it all and much more Andy CEO and
President Lisa Sue. Lisa. Great to have you back with us. So just how big a win is landing Facebook or I should say Metta as a customer for Andy. Hey Emily it's great to be here with you. And I would say it was a big day for Andy. We had you know we really talked about a range of things today in our data center. So we talked about new products in terms of our new products and our new cheap GP products as well as the fact that now 10 of the largest hyperscale ers including Metta are using AMD's epic. So we're extremely excited about it. I think it's really just goes to say a little bit about sort of our long term focus on the data center and really wanting to make sure that we are working and partnering with the most important companies in the world. This now means as you say you are working with so many of these
hyperscale hours including not just met but Microsoft and Amazon and Google. Talk to us give us more color on what it's taken to win over these big customers and cut into market share of your competitors. Yeah. So this has been our focus over the last four or five years has been really to build up the capabilities in the data center. We see the data center as one of the most exciting if not the most exciting market in semiconductors. You know there's
this massive need for high performance computing. And each one of these large hyperscale ers are doing such a unique and innovative things. So we're honored frankly to be partnered with with all of them. I think it says a lot about the technology that you need and sort of the multigenerational roadmap that you need and being able to partner with the best means that you learn how to make your roadmap even stronger going forward. Now I do want to talk a little bit about Metta and it's back on the metaverse. A lot of people still don't know what the metaverse is just how big an opportunity do you think the metaverse will
be. And do you see. What do you see as M.D. role in it. Yeah. So look we're excited. If I just take a step back Emily and talk about sort of high performance computing and you know what we believe and what I believe is that there's really this mega cycle around needing more computing and so many different applications. You know whether you're talking about collaboration applications or you're talking about research applications or you're talking about you know just you know analyzing massive amounts of data. And yes the metaverse is even the next thing you know on top of it. So we believe it's a very
large opportunity if you look at high performance computing in its entirety. I think the metaverse is one of those areas that that many people are talking about in terms of you know how do you really bring together you know virtual reality and mixed reality together with all of the collaboration that we're doing now. I think we have new expectations of what life is like a post pandemic. So it's an exciting vision. And we view it as really an opportunity where you need high performance you know CPR use or microprocessors and high performance graphics and GP use and artificial intelligence and machine learning and visualization and really bringing all of that together. And you know we're unique in the sense that we really do look at sort of the end to end use cases and really work with our partners on making that happen. So we've view just tremendous opportunity in high performance computing going forward. You do have new GP you and CPE offerings and I'm curious why we're seeing you now.
Broaden out some of your offerings when it's that focus and execution that has served AMC so well. Well you know we're excited about the data center overall. Emily and when you really look at all of the expansion it's really an area of secular growth. And as the markets get larger you see more and more specialization. So no question our epic product family and our general purpose data center server processors have done extremely well. And we're gonna continue to be very very aggressive on that roadmap. But the fact is there are these large use cases around high performance computing and A.I. and
those need use and we can put them together in a very efficient way in a system. We also announced today that we're broadening our offerings to include a cloud focused processor line versus let's call it a more general purpose line. And again this is just this expansion of computing really allowing and enabling us to go to one invest more and to really try to tailor and partner with what we think of our customers and partners are going to need going forward. How do you see Genoa. Why your next design for data center chips actually shaking up the competitive landscape cutting into market share for folks like Intel and users of ARM technology that are also trying to break in. Well I think the you know the key in this market frankly is
execution you know strong execution generation after generation. You know our current generation Mahlon processors are fantastic. I mean we're very very excited about the adoption. You know we just announced our third quarter earnings and we doubled our server processors as well as our datacenter processor sales year on year. And that just kind of tells you a little bit about sort of the momentum we have. General as the fourth generation general is very very strong. It really builds on top of the
capabilities that we have with with Mahlon. We add a whole bunch of new IO features. We expand the number of cores in the amount of performance. And what that should mean to our customers is they can do more in the same footprint. Datacenter folks are all about total cost of ownership and how much can they do in a given footprint. And so the fact that General ISE is another big step forward we're going to use 5 nanometer technology of it as lot of new architectural features. We're excited about General. Now with all of these new products you seem to be planning for a much bigger M.D.. Can you get the supply to match these ambitions and help you carry them out. Yeah. So no question. We are planning for a bigger M.D.. The
thought know if we look at our trajectory the last two years have been tremendous growth. We've just guided two thousand and twenty one to sixty five percent. You're on your growth. You know when we started the year sort of in January we thought it was 37 percent. So we've been able to add a lot of supply as well as there's just very strong demand for AMG processors right now. We are working very very closely with all of our supply chain partners. There's an incredible amount of work going to
ramp up overall supply chain capacity and we feel very good about the trajectory of what we see going into 2022 and beyond. And these are all long term partnerships anyway. So it's really about you know how do we plan with our customers in our supply chain partners not just for this quarter next quarter but for 2022 2023 and beyond to make sure that we can meet all of this incredible demand that's out there. Still the chip shortage and supply issues seem to be a continuing crisis for everyone else.
And I'm curious how long you think we're going to see the ripple effects of this. Is this something that you think will continue to reverberate across industries for years potentially. Yeah. You know I get asked that question a lot. I think you've asked some questions of me a few times. I will tell you that I think the environment is such that there's a lot of capacity and a lot of investment that's being put online. So that's positive. You know like I said we saw more more growth and more capability in towards the end of 2021 than earlier in the year. I think the first half of twenty two is still going to be pretty tight but we're gonna see improvements as we go into the second half or 22. And I feel confident that the semiconductor industry is
going to respond to the challenge. And every quarter it'll get incrementally better going forward. It's hard not to keep asking because the situation seems to be continuing and keeps changing. So I do appreciate you giving us an update every time you come on the show. You know you did have a strong quarter great third quarter as you look into 2020 to what's really going to be what
are gonna be the defining trends and defining trends that will drive AMD's growth through the next year. Yeah. Sure. Emily so I think as we look forward you know the most important thing is we are in the right markets. I mean it's a very exciting world in this high performance computing world. You know if we looked at the town where the total market size just you know maybe 18 months ago we might have sized it at about 80 billion or so. We now see that market size or that market opportunity upwards of 100 billion. So there's a lot of need for computing and computing capability. And from an M.D. standpoint I think our product portfolio is the best it's ever been. And it's it's only going to get better. I think we're
excited. We have a whole slew of products that we're launching in 2022 and we'll talk more about that over the coming months. And you know our goal is to continue to partner with the best the best brands in the in the industry and make sure that we're providing them the best solution. So I think it's a great growth environment for us. We're going to continue to work hard at satisfying all the demand out there. But I think we're very optimistic about about 2022. It'll be interesting to see just how much the metaverse proper is part of that growth. I'm curious if you have an idea of when you think we will see this
new universe if you will really come alive especially for the mainstream. Yeah I think people are doing you know a lot of experimentation in the area. Emily and you know as I said you know there are announcements from a number of companies out there and we'll see things you know come come together incrementally over the next few years. But I'd like to think of the metaverse. It's not going to be like one big bang that you're going to see
everything come out. You're going to see really a product's building on each other and capabilities building on each other. And the fundamental underneath that is you need you know great high performance processing technology which is which is what we're working on. All right. AMD CEO Lisa Su always good to have you here. Thanks so much for sharing those new products and that view of the future with us. OK coming up 10 cent making moves to circumvent China's crackdown on video games. We'll tell you how next. And as we
head to break let's take a look at PayPal. The company lowering its full year guidance for revenue and earnings after its former parent company eBay accelerated a shift away from the payments giant. Meantime PayPal has inked a deal with Amazon to allow Venmo wallets to be accepted on the e-commerce site. This is Bloomberg. A few stories we're following Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son says the company will buy back as much as eight point eight billion or 1 trillion yen eight point eight billion dollars or one trillion yen of its stock when it comes out to about fourteen point six percent. This after a decline in the value of its portfolio companies led to a record loss in its Vision Fund Investment unit. The company's shares have slid more than 40 percent from their peak. In mid-March Tencent pulled off a pair of successes with its League of Legends franchise. Not only did it hold a massive EA Sports tournament that drew more viewers
than ever before but it also premiered Arcane on Netflix garnering 130 million views in China just a few hours. Tencent is trying to cope with China's crackdown on the video games industry after saying kids could only play about three hours a week which caused stock prices to drop for Tencent and others across the gaming world. And TV Sheeba is considering splitting up the company as it looks for ways to strengthen shareholder value. The Japanese conglomerate is reportedly going to divide itself into three companies to focus on infrastructure devices and semiconductor memory is earliest 2023. Toshiba has been in turmoil with its shareholders over the best direction for the company and whether it should pursue going private.
Coming up first Facebook then Microsoft making big bets on the metaverse. We're gonna be with the pillion co managing partner former head of Amazon Studios Matthew Ball. His vision for just how big the metaverse will be and who will own it. That's next. This is Bloomberg.
People. Welcome back to Bloomberg Technology Emily Chang in San Francisco. Let's head over to the markets where our at Ludlow has news of that McAfee deal and what it means. Take it away. A little blast from the past but it's like something we rely on each day you know antivirus software security software. Remember my parents Tony McAfee on my desktop when I was a kid. Big deal a buyout essentially from a consortium of private equity names valuing the company at 14 billion dollars including its debt. It's bring out some of the details of this deal. The consortium includes
big names you have can Canada's pension plan involves Abu Dhabi's investment authority cross point. They can offer twenty six dollars a share which is a pretty hefty premium. And when McAfee closed on Friday before the deal was announced on Monday they can have 45 days to consider it. They can look elsewhere. But this is like really good history lesson when you look into McAfee remember. Founded in 1987 by the entrepreneur John McAfee. It was later sold to Intel in 2010. Intel then spun it off to TPP in 2016. And ultimately the company ends up going public in October 2020 just over a year
ago. And you can see how it's performed over the last 12 months or so. Pretty reasonable gains around 26 percent full year 2020 2021. So it's done pretty well. But now we're coming full circle and we take it private again. Just shows the appetite is still out there for software companies. Emily. All right Ed thanks much. Meantime it's still all about the metaverse but should it be. The optimists believe how you learn work and get entertained will all change dramatically in this new world all while creating new opportunities for advertisers investors and creators. For more I want to bring in Matthew Ball a managing
partner at Appealing CO. And former head of strategy at Amazon Studios who was talking about the opportunity in the metaverse long before Facebook changed its name. So Matthew so much has changed in the last couple of weeks. You've got a new name for Facebook. You know obviously making this big bad. You've got Microsoft making its big bet on the metaverse. Do you see this as a world where you know just one or companies will one or two companies will own it or is it going to be much bigger than that. It's going to be so much larger than that. I mean we can look at the Internet as an example. The digital economy is assumed to be roughly 18 to 20 percent of the world economy at eighty seven
trillion dollars. The truth of the matter is the big five tech companies historically considered gaffe though of course Facebook has changed. Its name was only 10 percent of that digital economy. It dependent on myriad different developers semiconductor compute networking and other infrastructure and optimization companies. The metaverse will be similar. Can Facebook though build a competitive platform that younger users want to join and be part of. Can they get beyond these reputational issues and trust issues. Can they certainly. We're looking at a company that is spending
perhaps more on this area than anyone else on earth has a founder in control with extraordinary conviction and three billion monthly active users two billion daily active users. It's very difficult to say that they can't solve that sort of problem but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy. In particular Facebook has a bad reputation that spans roughly a decade with developers. Ultimately developers are going to build the metaverse. Developers are going to be required to attract users. And that requires a skill set that Facebook historically has not thrived in. Well now you see Facebook and Microsoft and even Amazon all of these big tech companies talking about the metaverse. Is this just going to be a place where big tech companies just get bigger or are there going to be upstarts and new players that can sort of take on the the. The companies that own the Internet right now.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that we're going to see some of today's leaders thrive in the next generation Internet or the metaverse. But in particular we'll see new companies come to the forefront. Consensus was that AT&T and AOL with lead in the Internet era that Microsoft's advantages would endure. And in fact none of that happened. When we take a look at the current state of the metaverse some of the thriving companies today have some 50 billion dollar market caps in a year and a half ago were sub 5 epic games unity roadblocks which absolutely blew it out of the park. Today in earnings those companies have a lot of headroom in front of them and they have many different capabilities that today's tech giants do not. Here's a question that just came in over IAB. Are we going to be talking about multiple medal verses in a few years or is there just one.
It's a bit of a taxonomy question. Most people believe that the answer is that the metaverse is the definite article. Just like we don't say there are multiple Internets there's no Facebook Internet Google Internet. There is the Internet. That seems to be the most likely vision of the future for the metaverse which like the Internet is premised upon interoperability. But to some extent that may just come down to how language is used. If we adopt a metaverse as a platform specific definition then we'll
end up with multiple metal verses. It's not really a question of verbiage. Meantime your Metaverse ETF has been on fire and I'm sure that some of this news has helped you talk to us about the future where this is going. As a bet for investors. Sure will Jensen Wang the founder and CEO of Video which of course popped more than one hundred and fifty billion in market cap Friday and Monday believes that the metaverse economy will exceed that of the physical world again. Eighty seven trillion.
Even if you have more modest expectations precedent from the digital economy the Internet mobile Internet suggests that this is a 10 to 30 trillion dollar opportunity that will manifest in a decade or a decade and a half. Our belief is that value will be widely distributed across the semi's that computes the payment companies virtual platforms and other infrastructure providers. Our ETF is designed to provide a diversified portfolio of exposure to those opportunities and we're delighted that investors have been so excited. We announced today that over two hundred and fifty million in a whim has been a mass since June 30th and today we saw another three and a half million shares trade a total of 50 million dollars in value.
Enthusiasm for the subject is only continuing to grow. Meantime I have to ask you about roadblocks. I mean they had this 72 hour long outage where their entire universe goes off line. Then they report these strong results. What does that tell you. It tells me that this is a true secular and most importantly generational shift. If you go back to 2008 Facebook had 300 million and they use today roadblocks as about two hundred and ten million and they use forty seven million D.A. use. That
number is up 35 percent year over year against very challenging mid pandemic comps. And despite that outage we see significant growth I believe as do many others that we're heading towards a future in which hundreds of millions if billions of people around the world participate in these virtual worlds. And as a result it doesn't matter if it's one company one outage a quarter in which kids are going more outside than ever or returning to work. This is a trend that is going to stay. Netflix games some movement on that over the last week as well. How optimistic are you and who. Who does this threaten.
Well the truth of the matter is Netflix is an incredibly high performing company that takes a very long time horizon to change. They launch their streaming platform in 2007 they launch their originals banner in 2009 commissioned their first series in 2011 aired it in 2013 and it wasn't until 2017 or 2018 that most of their spend was on originals. It's very clear that Reed Hastings knows how to execute knows how to build new technical capabilities and knows how to be judicious in his investments and his expansions. That plus the fact that gaming is an ever changing category. We're on the cusp of a R VR. Other mixed reality environments tells me that they have the opportunity to thrive in this category and they've committed themselves to achieving that over some time horizon. All right Matthew Vol a co managing partner. Thanks for giving us a glimpse of the future here. Always appreciate you stopping by. Coming up the crypto world has hit a three trillion dollar market cap as a
theorem. And Bitcoin gained further traction just over the weekend either hitting all time highs just Monday morning. Looking at the rally and how digital currency is playing a role in the larger creator economy. That's next. This is Bloomberg. The crypto market has been on a tear most recently hitting a three trillion dollar market cap. Either a bitcoin of both games
sending the value of the crypto universe quadrupling from its 20 20 year on value. Excitement isn't just around the coins themselves but of course the overall growth of decentralized finance and NAFTA and what this holds for the future of the creator economy. Legion Variant Fund co-founder general partner joins us now. Lee you recently launched a one hundred and ten million dollar new fund for crypto startups. What will you back and how do you make sure you're buying into the reality and not
the hype. Yeah. So first of all we're backing the thesis of the ownership economy variant is very much focused on this particular thesis that all next generation Internet platforms are going to be built operated and owned by their users. And we think that destroying ownership widely among one's user base creates really powerful incentive alignment that is going to allow networks to grow much bigger faster than they could have under the centralized model of building platforms. And we think that crypto tokens uniquely and powerfully enables that by allowing value and ownership to be distributed much much more widely among a larger base of participants. This already exists in small scale and Silicon Valley in the form of stock option grants to employees. But if we think of all of the large
platforms that have been built over the last decade in the creator economy or the gig economy a lot of users have obviously been left out of that ownership equation. And so our thesis as a firm is really to invest in those next generation platforms that are going to distribute ownership over to their participants and create much larger networks than what were previously possible. So take us three five or I don't know maybe it's 10 years out. How do how is this creator economy different than the creator economy today that is owned by let's say the Instagram's and tech stocks and YouTube's of the world.
Yeah. So I think we're at a really interesting moment in the evolution of the creator economy. The creator economy has existed for a really long time really ever since the birth of user generated content platforms. There have been creators on the Internet. I think what's really new and different right now is that a lot of those creators are seeing themselves as entrepreneurs and small business owners and trying to carve out a space for themselves online and monetize the attention that they have from their audience in different ways by offering different types of products. But today that really is existing
on the terms of a few very centralized dominant social media platforms. Creators are not really in control of their content their data their end user relationships how they actually monetize. And so my hope is going forward and I think what is enabled by crypto is a creator economy in which creators are really able to be in control of their own destinies where they're able to set the terms of how they monetize how they own their content. They're going to be able to hopefully be able to take their data with them and not be beholden to any one centralized platform. And I think that's really exist. That's
really exciting and unlocks so many new possibilities for creators. And furthermore I think in that world it's not just about the creator economy. It's actually about the community economy where creators can allow their fans to participate in the upside of their careers and in that world. The lines between who is a creator versus who's a fan starts to blur and everyone is able to share in their success and be very aligned towards the success of the community. You've been really vocal about the
rise of FTSE topping 13 billion dollars in just the first three quarters of this year. How do you expect that to shake out. Like what does it look like next year. Yeah. In general we think that F T's are a really broad new type of digital content and I think they're going to encompass a lot of different types of assets on the Internet. Essentially everything around us in the physical world is like a non-functional asset and I think we're going to see that play out in the digital world as well right now. And FTSE and all of the transaction balling around them is really around FTSE as still digital art and collectibles and people purchasing high value collectibles. But I think in the future you'll see a lot
more use cases for adoptees potentially in gaming or as access to special experiences. And so we're really excited to see all those new use cases play out in the future. What's your take on the recent rally. Does it keep going up. Does it matter.
Yeah. So it's definitely really exciting to see as just a participant in the ecosystem but at the end of the day we are running a long term venture firm and we take a very long view on all of our investments. We're not day traders. We really are investing at the very earliest stages of these companies existences. And we are really therefore kind of immune to the ups and downs in the market. And don't pay all that much attention to it. I think the most exciting projects are going to take multiple years or decades to play out. And we really aim to be the long term partners to those builders.
All right Legion Variant Fund co-founder and general partner. Thank you so much for joining us giving us a view of what's ahead. Coming up it is merger Monday and we're highlighting one of the most recognizable names in cybersecurity. That's McAfee. Details on the 14 billion dollar acquisition coming up. And Marvel's new squad of superheroes secured the top spot at the U.S. box office this weekend. It turtles taking in 71 million dollars in ticket sales. However that was less than estimates.
The movie is about a diverse team of superheroes that have secretly lived on Earth for thousands of years. Directed by Academy Award winner Chloe Zhao and stars Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie. This is Bloomberg. All right. Let's take a quick look at some of the details emerging from the AMC earnings call underway right now AMC is exploring if it's possible to create its own cryptocurrency. Heard that right. AMC also saying it's in conversations about NF TS related to major film titles though these conversations are very preliminary at this time. Obviously we were just talking
about how big the market for NFTE has become in just the last three quarters. We'll bring you more details as we have them. We're soliciting into that. Meantime welcome next door. The social network that connects neighbors began trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker kind after merging with a special purpose acquisition company Khosla Ventures acquisition. Shares of next door surging 40 percent in the first hour of trading and ending the day higher. Next door CEO Sara
Fryer says her focus is on the long run and not the stock price. Next door equals neighborhood. We believe we have a global opportunity on our hands. Of course we're doing it for the right reasons. We're all about purpose and about making it a kinder world. But we also know we have a great business on our hands. A lot of data that allows us to do an ad sponsored model. And we're excited about where the business is going from here. And obviously a part of this process has been getting a lot of capital into the business and about 700 million that you're going to be able to deploy. Talk to us about where you're going
to spend and what is going to be the sort of first order of business. Yeah. So obviously it was a fundraising opportunity because we wanted to bolster the balance sheet where we're going with that investment. Number one is to continue to build out for growth and engagement more neighbors coming to the platform. And as they come to the platform how do we engage them more. That involves ongoing investment in areas like data science machine learning. Course when you've a lot of data you want to make sure that neighbors are getting the best possible experience. Second is our ad platform. And of course what we're building for small local businesses. So that is a big area of investment. And then finally international. Today we're in 11 countries. Two hundred
eighty thousand neighborhoods. But we know we can go global. One thing is obviously happening right now in this sort of social media space generally. Is this move towards social commerce slightly self brag here. But obviously we brought this paper our Pinterest story a few weeks ago. I wonder how a company like Next Door looks to play into that and whether it sees itself as a sort of an acquirer or a potential target for someone else. So on the social commerce front. I mean we have a really high intent audience. When people come they come to get something done usually locally and they stick around. Amount makes for a great audience. When you start thinking about things like social commerce for us today it's a lot more about things like
services. So people come because they want to find the local plumber or maybe a contractor maybe it's a babysitter and they tend to convert very fast. So we do well for advertisers top of the funnel brand and then bottom of the funnel direct response. But over time we absolutely see a way to embrace even more where social commerce is going. I came from a payment platform so it's of interest to me. And I think next year is a really valuable site for all of this. As you say you came from square. You were the CFO there. I'm going to almost take you back to Ed's first question. I spoke with the stock today absolutely breathtaking. And I'm wondering kind of how much of a role you're playing in that clearly a huge one but your history is well-known to Wall Street. They know and like you it seems. How big a how big an impact do you think that is half having. And is that the kind of
the lesson learned here that if you've got that kind of management team in place Spanx still work. You know in the end it's a fundraising opportunity. So you have to decide if the management team A do you need the proceeds. And if you raise them can you invest them in an hour away positive way. And we absolutely felt that the way we chose to go public in the end we
wanted to optimize for what was out there in the market. We find a great partner and Khosla Ventures the note and I had worked together at Square for over seven years. I trusted him. And I know that Vanguard brings a lot of really good long term strategy alongside being a great recruiter. And now it's about execution. I think what the market loves is the business that we've built to date but they also understand the opportunity that's ahead of us. That's what got me excited. Of course in the end we don't look at stocks. Right. Stocks are just one day actions. This is all about the long run. In the end the market
will be a weighing machine. It will trade to fundamentals. And we need to keep making sure we're building a great business to go to keep building those fundamentals. Next door CEO Sarah Fry there. Now to a Bloomberg scoop McAfee going private again. A large investor group looking at a 14 billion dollar deal for the cybersecurity company. For more on this I'm joined by Bloomberg's Liana Baker who leads our deals team from New York. So Eliana why is McAfee thinking about going
private now again. So it's sort of the gift that keeps on giving for bankers. This company has now gone public twice and been taken private twice. But what I'm hearing is that since the IPO last year the company hadn't really been valued for being more than an antivirus player. So maybe in the private markets it will kind of get that attention and care it needs and a better
valuation. So talk to us about the history because I think that certainly adds to the story of why this is significant. What the company would say also is that John McAfee who was a well-known story isn't involved in the company anymore but definitely a huge deal making history here. Intel actually acquired the company in 2010. And since then it had been you know carving out parts of it bringing in private equity in the latest iteration was the IPO. Last year the IPO price was 20 dollars and the company is now going private for twenty six dollars. So you kind of get the
idea that maybe the public markets wasn't the most welcoming home for McAfee. There's been so much tech deal making this year. It's kind of now part of this trend. Private equity firms are looking for targets and this kind of fit the bill. It's been a busy year for tech dealmaking. What else can we expect. Well there aren't many cybersecurity targets left. NAMM LifeLock is one that's public and they did a big deal with Avast earlier this year and it's been just a banner year for tech deals. I'm trying to figure out what could be next.
Although at 14 billion you know this does kind of take up a lot of that financing in the market. There's a really big equity check here. But we're hearing that the market could handle a lot more deals. We could be headed for 5 trillion and global MSA volumes this year. So really the sky's the limit for dealmaking whether it's
private equity firms or strategic with deep pockets. All right. Well we'll be watching for more of your Bloomberg Markets then Bloomberg Markets on a. Baker thank you for stopping by. And that does it for this edition of Bloomberg Technology. Great show. Coming up tomorrow we're gonna be joined by Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley as well as often Lou Rockey the CEO of the health tech company Color. I'm Emily Chang in San Francisco. This is
Bloomberg.
2021-11-09