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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios.
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Speaker 2: Podcasts.
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Speaker 3: Radio.
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Speaker 4: News.
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Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
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Speaker 6: All right, Scarlett, have you seen any good movies this summer?
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Speaker 1: This summer, yes.
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Speaker 6: Was the Odyssey the big one?
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Speaker 3: Yes, I saw the Odyssey.
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Speaker 1: I saw Tony, the biopic on Anthony Bourdain.
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Speaker 2: Oh, yes.
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Speaker 1: You can be thinking of him as just Tony, but yeah.
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Speaker 2: It's been a.
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Speaker 6: Pretty good summer for the movies, and in that vein, it has been a pretty good summer for movie deals. The Paramount Skydance has closed its acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. It's a $ 110 billion deal. We have media reporter Hannah Miller here discussing this with us. Hi, Hannah.
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Speaker 2: Hi.
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Speaker 6: All right. Tell us about this deal. It is enormous.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's huge.
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Speaker 4: This is a big deal in the film and entertainment industry. So, yeah, today, Paramount, Skydance and Warner Brothers closed their merger. And the company is now called Skydance. And this has two of Hollywood's biggest film studios, two major streaming services, HBO Max and Paramount Plus, two major news networks with CBS and CNN. All of this is united under one ownership. Are those brands going to stay distinct?
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Speaker 1: I mean, is HBO and Paramount Plus going to merge the apps at least? Is CNN and CBS going to stay separate entities?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, so right now, it seems like they want to preserve those brand identities, that there are going to be these distinct brands underneath the Skydance name. But yeah, I think the big question is whether the streaming services are going to be combined. At our recent Bloomberg Screen Time event, we had Casey Bloys, who is from Warner Brothers. He's heading up the streaming efforts. And he said, yeah, maybe a bundle would be an option.
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Speaker 6: What is the appeal of having a company that is this big? I mean, obviously David Ellison's been on a little bit of a tear. What do you think the goal is here? Is it just like one media company to rule them all or is there something else going on?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, so David Ellison has talked about uplifting the entire film industry with this merger. And he really wants to invest in content and boost production of films. And as part of an antitrust settlement, Skydance is actually required to produce 30 films a year that will be in theaters. If they miss that measure, they actually have to pay a financial penalty for each movie that they fall short. So that's pretty interesting. David Ellison has only... been confident that they will meet this goal. And his claim is that, you know, they're going to boost production in Hollywood, that they're going to bring great movies into theaters, and that they're going to get people back into seats.
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Speaker 1: Boost production like with humans as opposed to with AI and, you know, in Hollywood when so many of the movies are made outside of the U.S., you know, in cities like Toronto or Vancouver. I wanted to ask you about how Warner Brothers is no longer going to be distinct anymore because it's now completely absorbed because they had this movie Digger. And I think we talked about this yesterday with Tom Cruise. And boy, that was. I mean, it did not deliver, and this was supposed to be the last hurrah for Warner Brothers.
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Speaker 4: It is not a great note to end on for them. And Tom Cruise, he's also a big name for Paramount with the Mission Impossible series and Top Gun. So it was a big flop. That being said, Warner Brothers actually has a lot on the horizon. The new Harry Potter HBO series is coming out in December.
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Speaker 1: Does the world need a new Harry Potter series?
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Speaker 6: I think that's the wrong question, right? They're like building out this universe. They're doing this with star Wars too, right? It's like more is more.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: But I mean, the movies already exist. Sorry for the interruption.
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Speaker 4: I agree. No, I mean, that's a big question hanging over the series. Do people actually want this? Do we need this?
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Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. They've done it.
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Speaker 4: They've invested a ton of money in it. And this is a multi-year project, at least spanning a decade.
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Speaker 1: If the seasons continue to get renewed.
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Speaker 4: So it is a big bet for the company.
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Speaker 6: What about the entertainment industry overall? How is it doing? Is this a good moment to be in entertainment? Is it a growth moment or not so much?
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Speaker 4: You know, we've seen things pick back up. You know, people are going to the movies again. You have stuff like The Odyssey, you know, drawing people into theaters. You have had smash hits since the pandemic. I mean, Warner Brothers had the Barbie movie in 2023. So, you know, there are these bright spots, but there still is a lot of uncertainty. And I think there's a huge concern in the industry that this merger will result in layoffs and job cuts because David Ellison is looking to cut $ 6 billion worth of costs for Skydance.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so let's go there right now in terms of job cuts. Where would you be looking for those job cuts to take place?
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Speaker 4: I think they would be pervasive across the company. Yeah, I don't know if any specific area will be targeted. But people are on edge. They don't know exactly what the plans are going to be. And we've seen leaders try to put forth a positive message. The CEO of CNN, Mark Thompson, is still continuing to manage CNN post-merger. And he sent a memo out to employees saying, you know, I'm in a positive frame of mind about this. I know we have some trepidations. But he did speak warmly about the deal overall.
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Speaker 1: Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
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Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
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Speaker 3: Do you take Ubers often?
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Speaker 1: I do, but I arbitrage between Uber and Lyft once I've used up my $ 15 credit for my Amex Platinum card.
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Speaker 3: Oh, this is a good system.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. So I have to use up the free credits first before I do anything. And then I start arbitraging between the two. But I tend to be thrifty. So if I can avoid using Uber, I will.
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Speaker 3: That is a good strategy.
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Speaker 6: I mean, we have some very interesting Uber news today. Apparently, Uber Technologies has just bought a catering firm, Easy Cater Inc., for $ 2. 3 billion. We are joined by Natalie Lung, Bloomberg News tech reporter, to talk all about this and explain it.
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Speaker 5: Hi, Natalie.
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Speaker 2: Hi.
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Speaker 6: So why is Uber buying a catering company?
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Speaker 2: So most of us know Uber as a ride-hailing consumer app company, but they do have a pretty big B2B corporate business as well, allowing companies to call cars for the executives or even corporate accounts for employees to get a preferred rate. And so this is a push into the catering business, the corporate catering business, and this will boost their delivery unit, which actually makes up nearly half of their overall business.
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Speaker 6: So this is not part of Uber Eats?
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Speaker 2: It will become part of Uber Eats, which is nearly half of the whole entire business, which would be surprising because you might think right handling is bigger, but it's almost on par.
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Speaker 1: Wait, Uber Eats is already half of Uber's business?
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Speaker 2: Yes.
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Speaker 1: And does this deal bring it to more than half?
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Speaker 2: Potentially, depending on how much this grows. Uber is saying this will be accretive to the overall business. And it sets it up actually... pretty well against its rival, DoorDash, which announced its own catering platform for the workplace earlier this year.
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Speaker 6: So when you say business-to-business, will I be able to order something from the Easy Cater Inc. via Uber, or is it not for me? Is it for big corporate events when they're ordering in big plates of food?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, so these are tools that maybe facilities managers or event managers in companies would use to bulk order for employees for events, and they're They even have like a Slack integration where people can do recurring orders. So yeah, this is a corporate too. And another point that is interesting to note that this is Uber's sixth acquisition this year. And they've really been on a buying spree.
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Speaker 1: So when you say that they've been making a lot of purchases, are most of these purchases defensive purchases or offensive purchases? Because DoorDash, as you mentioned, launched a workplace catering service in April. So it feels like, you know, they've done something like that already. Is it we're playing catch up or is it kind of making sure it guarantees its lead?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of both. If we look at, let's say, for the delivery acquisitions, Gatir in Turkey, it's one of the big players there. And then there's also Delivery Hero, which is one of the biggest apps in Europe. And so in that sense, it's defensive against DoorDash, which acquired Deliveroo last year. And there's also other more competitive strategic platforms. purchases like the chauffeuring business, Black Lane or the parking app, Spot Hero. So it's like lateral, horizontal moves and expanding everywhere.
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Speaker 6: This is a really, it's really interesting to hear that Uber has been expanding so much and buying so many things up. I'm just looking, and their stock is down 16% this year. I mean, it's had a, I mean, it feels like the market's been so positive this year. Uber has gone against that trend. What is the strategy here? Are they just grabbing for anything, or is there kind of a long game they're playing?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, Uber investors are sort of hard to please. Like, even when they post, you know, earnings that beat expectations.
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Speaker 6: Well, down 16% does feel, if I were an Uber investor, I would also- be unpleased.
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Speaker 5: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: A lot of the story is actually not related to these acquisitions. It's related to the robo-taxi story. You know, people are seeing Waymo expanding and more than a dozen cities this year, and they have chosen not to partner with Uber in most of them. And so this raises the question, the future of, you know, what Uber might become if Waymo becomes more dominant in the future.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so the Waymo story kind of casts a shadow over Uber. What is Uber's progress when it comes to driverless automated transportation? ride-hailing services.
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Speaker 2: That was a mouthful. They don't make their own cars, but their strategy is to partner with people who make them. They partner with Waymo in two cities, but then in other cities, they partner with companies like Lucid or Nuro and in other parts of the world, some Chinese firms as well.
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Speaker 3: This is very patchwork.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, very small scale as well.
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Speaker 6: Is Uber pivoting? Are they turning into something else? How do you see this company evolving? going forward?
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Speaker 2: They've always been very opportunistic in purchasing and partnerships and so I see them as trying to be everywhere all at once and you know and there might be times where that this might be a loss-making endeavor to go into a new market or area but you know over time they will find ways to make it profitable or even withdraw if it doesn't make sense anymore.
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Speaker 1: What does this mean for Lyft if Uber is doing this? How does Lyft respond?
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Speaker 2: So in terms of the delivery business, Lyft doesn't have a delivery business. So they are much more smaller in that sense. They're only competing on the ride-hailing side. So when robo-taxis sort of become more commonplace, Lyft will sort of have to fight an upstream battle here. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Have you taken a Waymo, Stacey?
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Speaker 6: I have taken a Waymo, and I loved it.
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Speaker 1: Really?
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Speaker 3: It was really interesting.
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Speaker 6: It's really strange to have a car driving you with nobody in it.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know.
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Speaker 3: It was a really.
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Speaker 6: strange experience I do like always talking to the drivers and things like that but it was it was it felt like being in the.
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Speaker 2: Future yeah I was just in San Francisco last week so I did try their new model the minivan model for the Ojai it was a pretty good experience like very roomy my luggage was next to my seat yeah I wasn't used to the luggage like sloshing around a bit but yeah it's definitely a very roomy and like look.
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Speaker 6: At you mavericks you get to pick the music yeah wow okay that's a big one Stay with us.
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Speaker 1: More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
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Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
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Speaker 6: We are going to continue talking about AI a little bit. We've got the great Ed Ludlow, Bloomberg Tech host, here to talk about some very exciting movements with tech stocks this morning.
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Speaker 4: Hello, Ed.
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Speaker 7: Hello, good morning.
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Speaker 1: NVIDIA, right, is close, not that close.
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Speaker 7: It's not as if I'm like sitting here with my party hat under the desk ready for NVIDIA 6 trillion, but it's getting closer on what is like just post earnings momentum, a sweetener for investors, the biggest buyback in history. But there's something in the news cycle that a lot of people miss, which was this semi-analysis report that talked about how Cerebrus had lost out to NVIDIA for OpenAI running the inference phase on GPT 6.1 SOLT. It had been Cerebrus gear that had run 5.6. And so actually there's some near term going on here. And a lot of people ask me a lot of questions like, oh my goodness, what's going on with Cerebrus? And I was like, no, you've missed the other side of this coin, guys, which is that NVIDIA is still the mainstay of everything in the market for compute.
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Speaker 1: Okay, that's the takeaway here. You mentioned Cerebrus. It was a high profile IPO. There's another IPO that we can look ahead towards and that's Moonshot AI. But this will be an IPO in Hong Kong, I believe next year, Ed?
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Speaker 7: Yeah, and you can tell that they're moving and grooving on it because they're going to the private markets and they're doing deals, which is like so normal. There's been in the United States as a parallel, a sort of like bit of confusion about like, hold on, if OpenAI is going public and Anthropic is going public, like why were they so active in private markets just before? completely normal right to bring in in crossover investors and cornerstone investors and with moonshot very much the same thing you know they kind of closed this chapter of their private market's life with a 50 billion dollar valuation but they also the other data set i would look at is look at the token uh deployment from their open models and they have a lot of traction right now but it looks like hong kong is going to be set for them next year yeah.
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Speaker 6: So one other potential IPO I wanted to ask about was DeepSeek, which is apparently looking to go public. And that's a really interesting company because they are open source. What do you see when you look.
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Speaker 4: At that one?
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Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, this is less than sophisticated and I apologize for that. But I just look at DeepSeek as like the slightly bigger and slightly more ahead version of Moonshot. You know, like basically DeepSeek is subject to more scrutiny because the US frontier labs have made accusations against it distillation, right? And that's been in the news cycle. But they themselves are very close on a $ 12 billion round led by Tencent in the private markets. And again, all that does is act as a precursor to a massive debut for them you know, a proper Frontier Lab debut in the Chinese markets context at some point between now and the future, should we just say? I found, guys, it's very risky to say, yep, definitely happening, 27. We just don't know in lots of these cases. Things are sliding all the time.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely. Have you used DeepSeq? I mean, is DeepSeq popular in the U.S.? Yeah.
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Speaker 7: You know, it is popular. There are those like in Silicon Valley, right, for want of a better sort of category of people who initially were like making use of it as a comparator to agents or models that were offered by the Frontier Labs. And that people pulled back because of concern about exposing themselves to a Chinese entity. I played around with it, but largely I've used models and tools from the U.S.-based labs.
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Speaker 1: Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
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Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: Google and Constellation Energy deal has shot Constellation Energy shares up soaring on the day. Let's talk a little bit more about this with Will Wade. He is our Bloomberg News energy reporter. And Will, this is not the first long-term agreement that Constellation Energy has made with a hyperscaler. It's done something similar with Amazon too, right?
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Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was just last week. It was a very similar deal. The hyperscaler agrees to buy power. They commit for a certain price. They don't tell us the price. but for a long time. That gives Constellation the surety of plenty of money coming in for a long time, so they spend the money to upgrade the power plants. And that means there's actually more power. The plants are producing more. They add new equipment, better equipment. So all of a sudden we've got new nuclear capacity, which is something that people really want.
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Speaker 6: Does this mean that Google owns the nuclear power plant, or is it just investing in it?
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Speaker 3: They're agreeing to buy electricity from the company.
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Speaker 6: It's like when airlines buy fuel futures?
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Speaker 3: Sort of like that. Basically, they're buying electricity from Constellation, and Constellation is deciding how to give them the electricity. But they know, and it's all connected, so it's going to be electricity that comes from upgrading these facilities.
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Speaker 1: So do consumers end up benefiting? Does everyone else end up benefiting now that Constellation is upgrading its facilities?
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Speaker 3: Consumers don't really get factored in here. This is the data center companies buying electricity. They don't tell us the price, but generally we know or we think we know that it's a high price. It's higher than consumers are paying generally. So that's a big concern that this is sort of driving up electricity costs. across the board. And we're definitely seeing that. Electricity is going up across the board.
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Speaker 6: Yeah, I know that in areas where there are more data centers, I think around Washington, D.C. is one of the big ones. We've seen electricity prices go up by a lot, sometimes even in the double digits around the D.C.
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Speaker 4: Area.
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Speaker 6: Is that something we can expect to see more of as AI becomes a bigger part of the economy? These companies get bigger. They have to funnel money into this one choke point, which is energy.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, probably. I mean, you identified the area around D.C. We call it Data Center Alley. It's not a big one. It's the big one.
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Speaker 5: Okay.
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Speaker 3: And it is making prices go up.
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Speaker 1: So Constellation signed a deal with Amazon that looks very similar to the one it just signed with Google. Does it have capacity to sign any more deals with hyperscalers or has it tapped out for now?
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Speaker 3: They're kind of at the end of the line here. I actually was texting with them this morning because this is like going to involve like 11 plants and the Amazon one was like another one. They don't have an infinite supply of nuclear power plants. They don't have too much more plants that they can upgrade to deliver new nuclear capacity.
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Speaker 6: You were texting with Constellation this morning?
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 6: What did you ask them?
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Speaker 3: I said, are there any left?
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Speaker 2: And?
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Speaker 3: He said, no, this is kind of it. I mean, he mentioned maybe some small ones in another facility. So it's not nothing, but not a lot.
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Speaker 1: So what about plants that have been shut down in the past? Is that something that Constellation can reopen if it wants to? I would imagine that would take a lot of money.
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Speaker 2: Okay.
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Speaker 3: So Constellation owns Three Mile Island, which they've actually renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center.
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Speaker 1: Wait, they renamed Three Mile Island into the Crane Clean Energy Center?
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: That's a rebrand.
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Speaker 6: Got to rebrand that.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
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Speaker 6: Rebrand.
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Speaker 3: I'll let you think about why they might want to do that. So that was actually the first big restart project. It's the second big restart project. There's another one in Michigan called Palisades that was shut down. It's being restarted. There's one in Iowa called Dwayne Arnold. NextEra owns that. They're restarting it. They're going to give that money to a tech company for data centers. There are other reactors that shut down, but there aren't other reactors that shut down and are good candidates for restarting.
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Speaker 1: What makes someone a good candidate or a facility a good candidate to restart?
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Speaker 3: Well, for starters, some of the ones that they shut down, they're already tearing them apart. Like there's Indian Point, north of New York City. I can't tell you how many times something has happened and my editor sent me a message, does that mean they're going to restart Indian Point? And I've talked to the folks there and they're like, we're literally tearing it apart day by day. I've seen there. I've been up there. They're heavy machinery. And I asked them, they're like, You give us enough money, we could turn around, but every day it gets harder and more expensive. So I don't see too many more restart candidates.
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Speaker 2: All right.
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Speaker 6: It seems like there's almost a bottomless demand for energy right now.
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Speaker 2: Yes.
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Speaker 6: And a limited supply, or at least we seem to be hitting up against limits of our supply. Where do you see this going? How is this going to play out?
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Speaker 3: Well, we know when there's a lot of supply and a limited demand, the prices go up. And that's what we're seeing. So, I mean, the data centers really want nuclear power because it's clean and it runs around the clock. They really want clean energy because a few years ago they all promised to deliver lots of carbon-free facilities. And now they're like, well, how are we supposed to do that? Wind and solar is good because it's clean. It's not available around the clock. Gas power is cleaner than coal. It runs around the clock. But there's so much demand that you can't get the gas turbines you need for years. They're backlogged for years and years. So it's actually a big issue right now. There's so much demand for electricity, and there's just not enough ways to deliver it in the immediate future.
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Speaker 1: This feels like a good problem for the management teams of these companies to have as opposed to the opposite.
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Speaker 3: I mean, if people want to buy everything you can deliver, that's a good problem, yeah.
00:23:08
Speaker 1: How are they managing through that?
00:23:10
Speaker 3: They're trying to come up with ways to deliver power faster. Like the project we announced this morning, the upgrades, they're going to start having power available in 2028. So a year and a half, two years, that's really fast for a nuclear project. Like the Amazon deal, those things don't come online until 2030.
00:23:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker 5: This is the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live each weekday, 10 a.m. to noon Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: Podcasts.
00:00:05
Speaker 3: Radio.
00:00:06
Speaker 4: News.
00:00:09
Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
00:00:24
Speaker 6: All right, Scarlett, have you seen any good movies this summer?
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Speaker 1: This summer, yes.
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Speaker 6: Was the Odyssey the big one?
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Speaker 3: Yes, I saw the Odyssey.
00:00:32
Speaker 1: I saw Tony, the biopic on Anthony Bourdain.
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Speaker 2: Oh, yes.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: You can be thinking of him as just Tony, but yeah.
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Speaker 2: It's been a.
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Speaker 6: Pretty good summer for the movies, and in that vein, it has been a pretty good summer for movie deals. The Paramount Skydance has closed its acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. It's a $ 110 billion deal. We have media reporter Hannah Miller here discussing this with us. Hi, Hannah.
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Speaker 2: Hi.
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Speaker 6: All right. Tell us about this deal. It is enormous.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's huge.
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Speaker 4: This is a big deal in the film and entertainment industry. So, yeah, today, Paramount, Skydance and Warner Brothers closed their merger. And the company is now called Skydance. And this has two of Hollywood's biggest film studios, two major streaming services, HBO Max and Paramount Plus, two major news networks with CBS and CNN. All of this is united under one ownership. Are those brands going to stay distinct?
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Speaker 1: I mean, is HBO and Paramount Plus going to merge the apps at least? Is CNN and CBS going to stay separate entities?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, so right now, it seems like they want to preserve those brand identities, that there are going to be these distinct brands underneath the Skydance name. But yeah, I think the big question is whether the streaming services are going to be combined. At our recent Bloomberg Screen Time event, we had Casey Bloys, who is from Warner Brothers. He's heading up the streaming efforts. And he said, yeah, maybe a bundle would be an option.
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Speaker 6: What is the appeal of having a company that is this big? I mean, obviously David Ellison's been on a little bit of a tear. What do you think the goal is here? Is it just like one media company to rule them all or is there something else going on?
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Speaker 4: Yeah, so David Ellison has talked about uplifting the entire film industry with this merger. And he really wants to invest in content and boost production of films. And as part of an antitrust settlement, Skydance is actually required to produce 30 films a year that will be in theaters. If they miss that measure, they actually have to pay a financial penalty for each movie that they fall short. So that's pretty interesting. David Ellison has only... been confident that they will meet this goal. And his claim is that, you know, they're going to boost production in Hollywood, that they're going to bring great movies into theaters, and that they're going to get people back into seats.
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Speaker 1: Boost production like with humans as opposed to with AI and, you know, in Hollywood when so many of the movies are made outside of the U.S., you know, in cities like Toronto or Vancouver. I wanted to ask you about how Warner Brothers is no longer going to be distinct anymore because it's now completely absorbed because they had this movie Digger. And I think we talked about this yesterday with Tom Cruise. And boy, that was. I mean, it did not deliver, and this was supposed to be the last hurrah for Warner Brothers.
00:03:30
Speaker 4: It is not a great note to end on for them. And Tom Cruise, he's also a big name for Paramount with the Mission Impossible series and Top Gun. So it was a big flop. That being said, Warner Brothers actually has a lot on the horizon. The new Harry Potter HBO series is coming out in December.
00:03:50
Speaker 1: Does the world need a new Harry Potter series?
00:03:54
Speaker 6: I think that's the wrong question, right? They're like building out this universe. They're doing this with star Wars too, right? It's like more is more.
00:04:02
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:04:02
Speaker 1: But I mean, the movies already exist. Sorry for the interruption.
00:04:05
Speaker 4: I agree. No, I mean, that's a big question hanging over the series. Do people actually want this? Do we need this?
00:04:11
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. They've done it.
00:04:13
Speaker 4: They've invested a ton of money in it. And this is a multi-year project, at least spanning a decade.
00:04:18
Speaker 1: If the seasons continue to get renewed.
00:04:20
Speaker 4: So it is a big bet for the company.
00:04:23
Speaker 6: What about the entertainment industry overall? How is it doing? Is this a good moment to be in entertainment? Is it a growth moment or not so much?
00:04:30
Speaker 4: You know, we've seen things pick back up. You know, people are going to the movies again. You have stuff like The Odyssey, you know, drawing people into theaters. You have had smash hits since the pandemic. I mean, Warner Brothers had the Barbie movie in 2023. So, you know, there are these bright spots, but there still is a lot of uncertainty. And I think there's a huge concern in the industry that this merger will result in layoffs and job cuts because David Ellison is looking to cut $ 6 billion worth of costs for Skydance.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's go there right now in terms of job cuts. Where would you be looking for those job cuts to take place?
00:05:06
Speaker 4: I think they would be pervasive across the company. Yeah, I don't know if any specific area will be targeted. But people are on edge. They don't know exactly what the plans are going to be. And we've seen leaders try to put forth a positive message. The CEO of CNN, Mark Thompson, is still continuing to manage CNN post-merger. And he sent a memo out to employees saying, you know, I'm in a positive frame of mind about this. I know we have some trepidations. But he did speak warmly about the deal overall.
00:05:38
Speaker 1: Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
00:05:45
Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
00:06:00
Speaker 3: Do you take Ubers often?
00:06:02
Speaker 1: I do, but I arbitrage between Uber and Lyft once I've used up my $ 15 credit for my Amex Platinum card.
00:06:10
Speaker 3: Oh, this is a good system.
00:06:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I have to use up the free credits first before I do anything. And then I start arbitraging between the two. But I tend to be thrifty. So if I can avoid using Uber, I will.
00:06:21
Speaker 3: That is a good strategy.
00:06:22
Speaker 6: I mean, we have some very interesting Uber news today. Apparently, Uber Technologies has just bought a catering firm, Easy Cater Inc., for $ 2. 3 billion. We are joined by Natalie Lung, Bloomberg News tech reporter, to talk all about this and explain it.
00:06:38
Speaker 5: Hi, Natalie.
00:06:39
Speaker 2: Hi.
00:06:40
Speaker 6: So why is Uber buying a catering company?
00:06:44
Speaker 2: So most of us know Uber as a ride-hailing consumer app company, but they do have a pretty big B2B corporate business as well, allowing companies to call cars for the executives or even corporate accounts for employees to get a preferred rate. And so this is a push into the catering business, the corporate catering business, and this will boost their delivery unit, which actually makes up nearly half of their overall business.
00:07:13
Speaker 6: So this is not part of Uber Eats?
00:07:15
Speaker 2: It will become part of Uber Eats, which is nearly half of the whole entire business, which would be surprising because you might think right handling is bigger, but it's almost on par.
00:07:26
Speaker 1: Wait, Uber Eats is already half of Uber's business?
00:07:28
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:07:29
Speaker 1: And does this deal bring it to more than half?
00:07:33
Speaker 2: Potentially, depending on how much this grows. Uber is saying this will be accretive to the overall business. And it sets it up actually... pretty well against its rival, DoorDash, which announced its own catering platform for the workplace earlier this year.
00:07:50
Speaker 6: So when you say business-to-business, will I be able to order something from the Easy Cater Inc. via Uber, or is it not for me? Is it for big corporate events when they're ordering in big plates of food?
00:08:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, so these are tools that maybe facilities managers or event managers in companies would use to bulk order for employees for events, and they're They even have like a Slack integration where people can do recurring orders. So yeah, this is a corporate too. And another point that is interesting to note that this is Uber's sixth acquisition this year. And they've really been on a buying spree.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: So when you say that they've been making a lot of purchases, are most of these purchases defensive purchases or offensive purchases? Because DoorDash, as you mentioned, launched a workplace catering service in April. So it feels like, you know, they've done something like that already. Is it we're playing catch up or is it kind of making sure it guarantees its lead?
00:08:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of both. If we look at, let's say, for the delivery acquisitions, Gatir in Turkey, it's one of the big players there. And then there's also Delivery Hero, which is one of the biggest apps in Europe. And so in that sense, it's defensive against DoorDash, which acquired Deliveroo last year. And there's also other more competitive strategic platforms. purchases like the chauffeuring business, Black Lane or the parking app, Spot Hero. So it's like lateral, horizontal moves and expanding everywhere.
00:09:31
Speaker 6: This is a really, it's really interesting to hear that Uber has been expanding so much and buying so many things up. I'm just looking, and their stock is down 16% this year. I mean, it's had a, I mean, it feels like the market's been so positive this year. Uber has gone against that trend. What is the strategy here? Are they just grabbing for anything, or is there kind of a long game they're playing?
00:09:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, Uber investors are sort of hard to please. Like, even when they post, you know, earnings that beat expectations.
00:09:56
Speaker 6: Well, down 16% does feel, if I were an Uber investor, I would also- be unpleased.
00:10:00
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:10:01
Speaker 2: A lot of the story is actually not related to these acquisitions. It's related to the robo-taxi story. You know, people are seeing Waymo expanding and more than a dozen cities this year, and they have chosen not to partner with Uber in most of them. And so this raises the question, the future of, you know, what Uber might become if Waymo becomes more dominant in the future.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Waymo story kind of casts a shadow over Uber. What is Uber's progress when it comes to driverless automated transportation? ride-hailing services.
00:10:35
Speaker 2: That was a mouthful. They don't make their own cars, but their strategy is to partner with people who make them. They partner with Waymo in two cities, but then in other cities, they partner with companies like Lucid or Nuro and in other parts of the world, some Chinese firms as well.
00:10:55
Speaker 3: This is very patchwork.
00:10:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, very small scale as well.
00:10:58
Speaker 6: Is Uber pivoting? Are they turning into something else? How do you see this company evolving? going forward?
00:11:04
Speaker 2: They've always been very opportunistic in purchasing and partnerships and so I see them as trying to be everywhere all at once and you know and there might be times where that this might be a loss-making endeavor to go into a new market or area but you know over time they will find ways to make it profitable or even withdraw if it doesn't make sense anymore.
00:11:28
Speaker 1: What does this mean for Lyft if Uber is doing this? How does Lyft respond?
00:11:32
Speaker 2: So in terms of the delivery business, Lyft doesn't have a delivery business. So they are much more smaller in that sense. They're only competing on the ride-hailing side. So when robo-taxis sort of become more commonplace, Lyft will sort of have to fight an upstream battle here. Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker 1: Have you taken a Waymo, Stacey?
00:11:53
Speaker 6: I have taken a Waymo, and I loved it.
00:11:56
Speaker 1: Really?
00:11:57
Speaker 3: It was really interesting.
00:11:58
Speaker 6: It's really strange to have a car driving you with nobody in it.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know.
00:12:03
Speaker 3: It was a really.
00:12:04
Speaker 6: strange experience I do like always talking to the drivers and things like that but it was it was it felt like being in the.
00:12:10
Speaker 2: Future yeah I was just in San Francisco last week so I did try their new model the minivan model for the Ojai it was a pretty good experience like very roomy my luggage was next to my seat yeah I wasn't used to the luggage like sloshing around a bit but yeah it's definitely a very roomy and like look.
00:12:27
Speaker 6: At you mavericks you get to pick the music yeah wow okay that's a big one Stay with us.
00:12:35
Speaker 1: More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
00:12:41
Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
00:12:56
Speaker 6: We are going to continue talking about AI a little bit. We've got the great Ed Ludlow, Bloomberg Tech host, here to talk about some very exciting movements with tech stocks this morning.
00:13:05
Speaker 4: Hello, Ed.
00:13:07
Speaker 7: Hello, good morning.
00:13:08
Speaker 1: NVIDIA, right, is close, not that close.
00:13:12
Speaker 7: It's not as if I'm like sitting here with my party hat under the desk ready for NVIDIA 6 trillion, but it's getting closer on what is like just post earnings momentum, a sweetener for investors, the biggest buyback in history. But there's something in the news cycle that a lot of people miss, which was this semi-analysis report that talked about how Cerebrus had lost out to NVIDIA for OpenAI running the inference phase on GPT 6.1 SOLT. It had been Cerebrus gear that had run 5.6. And so actually there's some near term going on here. And a lot of people ask me a lot of questions like, oh my goodness, what's going on with Cerebrus? And I was like, no, you've missed the other side of this coin, guys, which is that NVIDIA is still the mainstay of everything in the market for compute.
00:13:53
Speaker 1: Okay, that's the takeaway here. You mentioned Cerebrus. It was a high profile IPO. There's another IPO that we can look ahead towards and that's Moonshot AI. But this will be an IPO in Hong Kong, I believe next year, Ed?
00:14:07
Speaker 7: Yeah, and you can tell that they're moving and grooving on it because they're going to the private markets and they're doing deals, which is like so normal. There's been in the United States as a parallel, a sort of like bit of confusion about like, hold on, if OpenAI is going public and Anthropic is going public, like why were they so active in private markets just before? completely normal right to bring in in crossover investors and cornerstone investors and with moonshot very much the same thing you know they kind of closed this chapter of their private market's life with a 50 billion dollar valuation but they also the other data set i would look at is look at the token uh deployment from their open models and they have a lot of traction right now but it looks like hong kong is going to be set for them next year yeah.
00:14:50
Speaker 6: So one other potential IPO I wanted to ask about was DeepSeek, which is apparently looking to go public. And that's a really interesting company because they are open source. What do you see when you look.
00:15:02
Speaker 4: At that one?
00:15:03
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, this is less than sophisticated and I apologize for that. But I just look at DeepSeek as like the slightly bigger and slightly more ahead version of Moonshot. You know, like basically DeepSeek is subject to more scrutiny because the US frontier labs have made accusations against it distillation, right? And that's been in the news cycle. But they themselves are very close on a $ 12 billion round led by Tencent in the private markets. And again, all that does is act as a precursor to a massive debut for them you know, a proper Frontier Lab debut in the Chinese markets context at some point between now and the future, should we just say? I found, guys, it's very risky to say, yep, definitely happening, 27. We just don't know in lots of these cases. Things are sliding all the time.
00:15:54
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Have you used DeepSeq? I mean, is DeepSeq popular in the U.S.? Yeah.
00:16:00
Speaker 7: You know, it is popular. There are those like in Silicon Valley, right, for want of a better sort of category of people who initially were like making use of it as a comparator to agents or models that were offered by the Frontier Labs. And that people pulled back because of concern about exposing themselves to a Chinese entity. I played around with it, but largely I've used models and tools from the U.S.-based labs.
00:16:29
Speaker 1: Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Intelligence coming up after this.
00:16:36
Speaker 5: You're listening to the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast. Catch us live weekdays at 10 a.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts or watch us live on YouTube.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: Google and Constellation Energy deal has shot Constellation Energy shares up soaring on the day. Let's talk a little bit more about this with Will Wade. He is our Bloomberg News energy reporter. And Will, this is not the first long-term agreement that Constellation Energy has made with a hyperscaler. It's done something similar with Amazon too, right?
00:17:11
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that was just last week. It was a very similar deal. The hyperscaler agrees to buy power. They commit for a certain price. They don't tell us the price. but for a long time. That gives Constellation the surety of plenty of money coming in for a long time, so they spend the money to upgrade the power plants. And that means there's actually more power. The plants are producing more. They add new equipment, better equipment. So all of a sudden we've got new nuclear capacity, which is something that people really want.
00:17:43
Speaker 6: Does this mean that Google owns the nuclear power plant, or is it just investing in it?
00:17:50
Speaker 3: They're agreeing to buy electricity from the company.
00:17:54
Speaker 6: It's like when airlines buy fuel futures?
00:17:57
Speaker 3: Sort of like that. Basically, they're buying electricity from Constellation, and Constellation is deciding how to give them the electricity. But they know, and it's all connected, so it's going to be electricity that comes from upgrading these facilities.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: So do consumers end up benefiting? Does everyone else end up benefiting now that Constellation is upgrading its facilities?
00:18:22
Speaker 3: Consumers don't really get factored in here. This is the data center companies buying electricity. They don't tell us the price, but generally we know or we think we know that it's a high price. It's higher than consumers are paying generally. So that's a big concern that this is sort of driving up electricity costs. across the board. And we're definitely seeing that. Electricity is going up across the board.
00:18:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, I know that in areas where there are more data centers, I think around Washington, D.C. is one of the big ones. We've seen electricity prices go up by a lot, sometimes even in the double digits around the D.C.
00:19:01
Speaker 4: Area.
00:19:01
Speaker 6: Is that something we can expect to see more of as AI becomes a bigger part of the economy? These companies get bigger. They have to funnel money into this one choke point, which is energy.
00:19:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably. I mean, you identified the area around D.C. We call it Data Center Alley. It's not a big one. It's the big one.
00:19:19
Speaker 5: Okay.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: And it is making prices go up.
00:19:24
Speaker 1: So Constellation signed a deal with Amazon that looks very similar to the one it just signed with Google. Does it have capacity to sign any more deals with hyperscalers or has it tapped out for now?
00:19:35
Speaker 3: They're kind of at the end of the line here. I actually was texting with them this morning because this is like going to involve like 11 plants and the Amazon one was like another one. They don't have an infinite supply of nuclear power plants. They don't have too much more plants that they can upgrade to deliver new nuclear capacity.
00:19:55
Speaker 6: You were texting with Constellation this morning?
00:19:57
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:19:57
Speaker 6: What did you ask them?
00:19:59
Speaker 3: I said, are there any left?
00:20:01
Speaker 2: And?
00:20:01
Speaker 3: He said, no, this is kind of it. I mean, he mentioned maybe some small ones in another facility. So it's not nothing, but not a lot.
00:20:11
Speaker 1: So what about plants that have been shut down in the past? Is that something that Constellation can reopen if it wants to? I would imagine that would take a lot of money.
00:20:24
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:20:24
Speaker 3: So Constellation owns Three Mile Island, which they've actually renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center.
00:20:30
Speaker 1: Wait, they renamed Three Mile Island into the Crane Clean Energy Center?
00:20:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: That's a rebrand.
00:20:34
Speaker 6: Got to rebrand that.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
00:20:36
Speaker 6: Rebrand.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: I'll let you think about why they might want to do that. So that was actually the first big restart project. It's the second big restart project. There's another one in Michigan called Palisades that was shut down. It's being restarted. There's one in Iowa called Dwayne Arnold. NextEra owns that. They're restarting it. They're going to give that money to a tech company for data centers. There are other reactors that shut down, but there aren't other reactors that shut down and are good candidates for restarting.
00:21:09
Speaker 1: What makes someone a good candidate or a facility a good candidate to restart?
00:21:12
Speaker 3: Well, for starters, some of the ones that they shut down, they're already tearing them apart. Like there's Indian Point, north of New York City. I can't tell you how many times something has happened and my editor sent me a message, does that mean they're going to restart Indian Point? And I've talked to the folks there and they're like, we're literally tearing it apart day by day. I've seen there. I've been up there. They're heavy machinery. And I asked them, they're like, You give us enough money, we could turn around, but every day it gets harder and more expensive. So I don't see too many more restart candidates.
00:21:49
Speaker 2: All right.
00:21:49
Speaker 6: It seems like there's almost a bottomless demand for energy right now.
00:21:54
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:21:55
Speaker 6: And a limited supply, or at least we seem to be hitting up against limits of our supply. Where do you see this going? How is this going to play out?
00:22:03
Speaker 3: Well, we know when there's a lot of supply and a limited demand, the prices go up. And that's what we're seeing. So, I mean, the data centers really want nuclear power because it's clean and it runs around the clock. They really want clean energy because a few years ago they all promised to deliver lots of carbon-free facilities. And now they're like, well, how are we supposed to do that? Wind and solar is good because it's clean. It's not available around the clock. Gas power is cleaner than coal. It runs around the clock. But there's so much demand that you can't get the gas turbines you need for years. They're backlogged for years and years. So it's actually a big issue right now. There's so much demand for electricity, and there's just not enough ways to deliver it in the immediate future.
00:22:55
Speaker 1: This feels like a good problem for the management teams of these companies to have as opposed to the opposite.
00:23:02
Speaker 3: I mean, if people want to buy everything you can deliver, that's a good problem, yeah.
00:23:08
Speaker 1: How are they managing through that?
00:23:10
Speaker 3: They're trying to come up with ways to deliver power faster. Like the project we announced this morning, the upgrades, they're going to start having power available in 2028. So a year and a half, two years, that's really fast for a nuclear project. Like the Amazon deal, those things don't come online until 2030.
00:23:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker 5: This is the Bloomberg Intelligence Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live each weekday, 10 a.m. to noon Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.
