Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, we've got a great read on what
Speaker 2: is going in the world of consumers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about payments, because I
Speaker 1: got to tell you, Carol, not so hard to pay
Speaker 1: for things in my daily life. Got venmo, I can
Speaker 1: send a few bucks to Bloomberg News. Colleague's doing something
Speaker 1: fun for the Super Bowl.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If I win, nice, Yeah, yeah I win.
Speaker 2: I don't take us all out for pizza.
Speaker 1: You got automatic bill pay, you got Apple pay or
Speaker 1: Google Wallet on the subway. Online you can use Apple pay,
Speaker 1: Google Wallet, Shopify. If those failies, sometimes you got to
Speaker 1: pull out your credit card, You got to type in
Speaker 1: all the info. I don't love to do that. When
Speaker 1: that happens, you still got to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One area that I think is still challenging for a
Speaker 1: lot of people is cross border. So if my friend
Speaker 1: comes to the US, we go to a concert, hard
Speaker 1: for him to send me money to pay me back
Speaker 1: for that ticket. The question when does that get easier.
Speaker 1: It's something that Ken Moore thinks a lot about he's
Speaker 1: Chief Innovation Officer of MasterCard. He joins us from Mastercard's
Speaker 1: tech up in Dublin, Ireland. Ken here, you know, as
Speaker 1: I was preparing for this and we were talking about this,
Speaker 1: it's not that hard to part with money these days.
Speaker 1: Companies have made it very easy. But where do you
Speaker 1: see the big challenges that still remain in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, Carol, Tim, thank you for having
Speaker 3: me on the show. And Tim, thank you for really
Speaker 3: helping prop up the world payments.
Speaker 4: With all that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not so great, Well it is.
Speaker 3: It depends on your perspective. I mean for us, Tim,
Speaker 3: it's really like when people think about MasterCard, they sometimes
Speaker 3: think about us as a cards company. You described as
Speaker 3: there as a cards company, But actually, whilst that's been
Speaker 3: a part of our past and will always be a
Speaker 3: part of our future, it's very important to us. We're
Speaker 3: actually a lot grower than that. Today. We really see
Speaker 3: ourselves as a technology company operating more broadly in commerce.
Speaker 3: So it's not just the card payment rails we have.
Speaker 3: We've got rails in blockchain and fast ach, and we've
Speaker 3: got services like cybersecurity and solutions for park and SMEs.
Speaker 3: So really, you know, for me in my role and
Speaker 3: what I do in MasterCards, and it's really about trying
Speaker 3: to lean into the world of change, right, So we'll
Speaker 3: come to twenty twenty five in a second, but it's
Speaker 3: really about trying to anticipate changes in the world of
Speaker 3: commerce and then building the products and services that are
Speaker 3: going to help us and more importantly are the partners
Speaker 3: and the clients that we have actually thrived.
Speaker 4: Right the world.
Speaker 1: Well, Ken, something interesting happening right now here in the
Speaker 1: US is Elon Musk, who has a history in payments
Speaker 1: with PayPal and even the company before PayPal believe it
Speaker 1: was called zip two, and he wants to make x
Speaker 1: dot com, you know, a payment center. Watching what's happening
Speaker 1: in the federal government, what he's doing at the Department
Speaker 1: of Government Efficiency, does that change the way you're thinking
Speaker 1: about the future of payments?
Speaker 3: No, I mean not really a tim if I'm honest,
Speaker 3: because we believe in offering consumer's choice, and we honestly
Speaker 3: believe that that payments is evolving anyway, so we probably
Speaker 3: welcome that more than feel threatened by it. We found
Speaker 3: incredible ways to partner with a diverse set of companies
Speaker 3: from Apple through to FinTechs over the years, and I
Speaker 3: have no doubt that, and indeed with many crypto companies,
Speaker 3: so I have no doubt but that we will five
Speaker 3: ways to partner in this one as well. I think
Speaker 3: for me, if you start looking at and maybe why
Speaker 3: is he doing this, it's really the world is starting
Speaker 3: to move faster and faster. And sometimes when we look
Speaker 3: at that, we tend to look back and we go,
Speaker 3: oh my god, it's so much faster today than it
Speaker 3: was yesterday. But really we all know changes exponentially. It's
Speaker 3: going to be faster again tomorrow. And if you research
Speaker 3: tells us that by twenty forty, when we look outside
Speaker 3: our window, the world is going to be moving four
Speaker 3: times faster. So if you extrapolate back and you bring
Speaker 3: it to something that's a bit more reasonable, so twenty
Speaker 3: thirty five years from now, it's going to be about
Speaker 3: one and a half or twice as fast as it
Speaker 3: is today. And that's an awful lot of change, and
Speaker 3: that gives us some real kind of challenges, but also
Speaker 3: some opportunities in payments. And that's really why we wanted
Speaker 3: to lean in because our clients don't just buy a
Speaker 3: product or service from US today by a partner that's
Speaker 3: willing to invest ahead of them and partner with them
Speaker 3: to kind of help them realize those changes in the
Speaker 3: right way because they know we care about the same
Speaker 3: things that they care about. And that's going to be
Speaker 3: true for Elon and his company as well. So that
Speaker 3: pace of change is really going to accelerate, not just
Speaker 3: in crypto, but much more broadly across a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of different of trends.
Speaker 2: Hey, Ken, one thing I do want to ask you,
Speaker 2: and just playing off of Elon Muskin, you know, we've
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time today and certainly over the
Speaker 2: last few weeks about his involvement in the US government
Speaker 2: and access to a lot across various departments, and you
Speaker 2: do wonder about, you know, what he's learning, what it
Speaker 2: means to kind of have that inside position, and do
Speaker 2: you feel like that that potentially puts a company like yourself,
Speaker 2: whether it comes to fintech, innovation or payments and so
Speaker 2: on and so forth, that his initiatives could have an
Speaker 2: advantage over what you guys might be doing.
Speaker 3: Now, I have to be honest, we don't really think
Speaker 3: about that, Caroly and Tim, I mean, we trust the
Speaker 3: elected officials of governments to do the things that are
Speaker 3: right for them, and we want to partner and we
Speaker 3: want to respond to them. So we don't, if I'm honest,
Speaker 3: give too much thought to that just now, because honestly,
Speaker 3: there's so much going on in payments that there's a
Speaker 3: lot of opportunity for lots of actors, be they you know,
Speaker 3: semi state, be they government, be they FinTechs, or be
Speaker 3: they established kind of players, to actually all have a
Speaker 3: role in it, because that pace of change is coming
Speaker 3: at us so fast and we see it playing out
Speaker 3: in so many areas. Right you know, we've got we've
Speaker 3: got a report which we just pushed out in the
Speaker 3: MasterCard newsroom today which really talks about seven trends that
Speaker 3: we really see playing out between now and the end
Speaker 3: of the decade. And crypto and others are part of them.
Speaker 3: So those are part of those trends, as are you know,
Speaker 3: the role and the rollout of new payment networks themselves.
Speaker 3: But really when and that report is really available for
Speaker 3: you for all of your guests, and hopefully you've had
Speaker 3: a chance to take a sneak preview at it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I saw the cross border payments was a
Speaker 1: theme there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really is, and you know you've given some
Speaker 3: great examples already on the call here today where you know,
Speaker 3: the world we've really been focused on kind of you know,
Speaker 3: giving consumers both choice and flexibility both domestically and you
Speaker 3: know that's true of every country around the world. And
Speaker 3: whilst that's been fantastic, it's also meant that we have
Speaker 3: some challenges in interoperability. So if you take real time payments,
Speaker 3: you take crypto, the example you gave and the example
Speaker 3: that you're using in some of your earlier conversations as well,
Speaker 3: if you take open banking, there's there's just a lot
Speaker 3: of different payment rails out there. And also we're moving
Speaker 3: more than just fiat currency these days, cryptocurrencies, ata identities,
Speaker 3: there's there's a whole lot of stuff. So what we
Speaker 3: really see is that first trend being around moving that
Speaker 3: this kind of fragmented payment system to much more of
Speaker 3: a global intectable system by standards and regulator.
Speaker 2: We get a run Ken Moore, thank you so much,
Speaker 2: Chief Innovation Officer. Over at MasterCard.
Speaker 1: We've heard the twenty twenty four election be called the
Speaker 1: podcast Indeed, both Trump and Harris made their case directly
Speaker 1: to voters, Trump obviously more effectively. The fragmenting of media, though,
Speaker 1: has been happening for years. A lot has been written
Speaker 1: about it newspaper editors. They're not the ones who call
Speaker 1: the shots anymore. You've got influential individuals going directly to
Speaker 1: their audience using social media, podcast platforms like stubstack and more.
Speaker 1: What is a newer phenomenon, though, according to our next guest,
Speaker 1: is to how conservative Silicon Valley billionaires such as Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: Peter Tiel, David Saxon Moore have used media in recent
Speaker 1: years as influence. Owen Higgins is a journalist, author, and historian.
Speaker 1: His new book, owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right
Speaker 1: Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is out today.
Speaker 1: He joins us from Wyndham, Maine. Owen, good to have
Speaker 1: you with us. Congratulations on the new book. We were
Speaker 1: talking about this on our editorial call earlier. Carol pointed
Speaker 1: out that the wealthy and the media nothing new. Think
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post and before that, the
Speaker 1: Graham family, the Murdochs, the Sulzbergers, the list goes on,
Speaker 1: what is new about the phenomenon that you write about?
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for having me, guys. I think that what's
Speaker 4: new about this phenomenon is these are wealthy individuals within
Speaker 4: the Silicon Valley sphere who have decided that they would
Speaker 4: prefer to have a more subservient media, and so they
Speaker 4: have worked to destabilize institutional media to the benefit of
Speaker 4: alternative media ecosystems that they control or they at least
Speaker 4: have some investment in. I don't mean to make this
Speaker 4: sound conspiratorial or as if there's some kind of you know,
Speaker 4: cabal all kind of planning this together. Silicon Valley's theory
Speaker 4: has often been to move fast and break things, and
Speaker 4: I think that's kind of what they tried to do
Speaker 4: here with independent and alternative media and what it's had
Speaker 4: this knock on effect, a positive effect, I think from
Speaker 4: their perspective of damaging and deteriorating these more institutional mainstream
Speaker 4: and critical independent media institutions to the benefit of an
Speaker 4: alternative media ecosystem that, as I said, is more subservient
Speaker 4: or at least will put forward the kind of ideological
Speaker 4: points of view that they want and not challenge them
Speaker 4: in the ways that they would not like to be challenged.
Speaker 2: You know, Owen, Elon Musk, Peter Tiel, They're in your book.
Speaker 2: You mentioned them. But there's two names that for some
Speaker 2: might not be as familiar, and that is Matt Tayibe
Speaker 2: and Glenn green Wall. They are featured prominently in the book.
Speaker 2: Remind folks who they are and why they are front
Speaker 2: and center. And I remember Matt Tayibe certainly a lot
Speaker 2: of reporting here in New York City many many years ago.
Speaker 2: But why are they front and center for you?
Speaker 4: Well, Glenn and Matt are kind of the way that
Speaker 4: the book explores this phenomenon primarily, And the reason that
Speaker 4: they are select why I've selected them is because these
Speaker 4: guys were nominally on the left or at least allied
Speaker 4: with the left for a long time, and they have
Speaker 4: moved to the right in in kind of tandem with
Speaker 4: them working with these alternative media companies that have been
Speaker 4: invested in and supported by the Silicon Valley billionaire. So
Speaker 4: I thought that would be a good way to explore
Speaker 4: that shift, to pick these two guys. But of course
Speaker 4: I didn't just pick two random left wing or left
Speaker 4: aligned journalists. These are pretty prominent individuals Glenn Greenwald was
Speaker 4: the journalist who Edward Stone contacted when he first wanted
Speaker 4: to reveal what the NSA spine scandal. And Matt tayebe
Speaker 4: is A was has long been a prominent writer specifically
Speaker 4: really really, I think that the peak was when he
Speaker 4: wrote about the financial christ for Rolling Stone. So these
Speaker 4: these are kind of not nobody's there. They are pretty
Speaker 4: well known. And you know, if if if you're familiar with,
Speaker 4: you know, the kind of the last twenty years, I
Speaker 4: suppose of kind of alternative media or or at least,
Speaker 4: you know, like left wing aligned media, I think that
Speaker 4: these would be too to names be pretty familiar with.
Speaker 1: So enter substack because that's something that has emerged in
Speaker 1: recent years interestingly enough, So the origins of substack or
Speaker 1: interesting because you know, you got a guy who years
Speaker 1: ago worked at Tesla many years ago and then left
Speaker 1: Tesla and goes on to be one of the guys
Speaker 1: who launches substack a few years later. Talk about substack
Speaker 1: a little bit and how substack is featured in here,
Speaker 1: because there are a lot of journalists on the left
Speaker 1: also who used substack as a way to get out
Speaker 1: to their audience.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I mean I used Substack. Many of my peers
Speaker 4: use substack. I think it's substach kind of came about
Speaker 4: as a newsletter service with a really good user interface,
Speaker 4: I think is the way that I would describe it.
Speaker 4: They filled a gap that was there. There were other
Speaker 4: blogging sites. I don't want to bory rottings too much,
Speaker 4: but one of them was called Medium. That's kind of
Speaker 4: the one whose user interface I can kind of compared
Speaker 4: to substack the most very easy, very easy to use,
Speaker 4: looked really nice on the page, not very complicated. Substack
Speaker 4: took this kind of model and exported it to the
Speaker 4: newsletter service, where they gave you this easy user interface,
Speaker 4: and if you were a writer, all you kind of
Speaker 4: had to do was fill out a couple of you
Speaker 4: know forms, so to speak on the website, and that
Speaker 4: they would pretty much do everything else for you. So
Speaker 4: and they would take a fee obviously from your newsletter subscriptions,
Speaker 4: but if you didn't want to charge subscriptions, you could
Speaker 4: just host it on there for free. Substack came to
Speaker 4: prominence I think after Mark Andresen, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 4: invested in it, and I believe twenty nineteen he led
Speaker 4: a funding ground in Reson Horowitz his his company, and
Speaker 4: after that, Substack had capital to burn, They had capital
Speaker 4: to spend on other writers. They had capital to spend
Speaker 4: on trying to get people to come over to Substack
Speaker 4: from these sing institutional media. And if you kind of
Speaker 4: think back to what I was saying before, right, like
Speaker 4: they wanted to kind of damage institutional media and to
Speaker 4: kind of shake the foundations I think of the mainstream
Speaker 4: and a critical independent media. Well, I mean one thing
Speaker 4: one way you can do that is to invest in
Speaker 4: this company and to kind of see if they can
Speaker 4: take some of the more prominent writers from those organizations
Speaker 4: and bring them over to a place where they're independent. Sure,
Speaker 4: and they do a lot of good work, sure for
Speaker 4: a lot of them, but they're also kind of it's
Speaker 4: a little decentralized. And I think that that was kind
Speaker 4: of the point of it. Now Subsak kind of started
Speaker 4: to tilt right, or at least there's a perception that
Speaker 4: it was tilting right with who it was courting, and
Speaker 4: it did it for both Matt Tyde and Glenn Greenwaald, again,
Speaker 4: the two journalists who I use as the primary kind
Speaker 4: of way to explain these phenomenons they allowed both of
Speaker 4: them to leave, Matt to leave Rolling Stone and Glenn
Speaker 4: to leave the Intercept and to come on to subseconds
Speaker 4: and strike it up by themselves.
Speaker 2: We're talking with Owen Higgins, journalist, author, and history and
Speaker 2: his book owned How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought
Speaker 2: the latticed Voices on the Left? Owen, why are you
Speaker 2: writing this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I was. I've written some things that
Speaker 4: have been over the years. I've written things that were
Speaker 4: critical of Greenwald and Tybee's shifts to the right. So
Speaker 4: both type books reached out to me to ask me
Speaker 4: to kind of write about how they shifted to the right,
Speaker 4: and I said, you know, I want to do that,
Speaker 4: but I would want to kind of merge it with
Speaker 4: this discussion of how media and how tech billionaires, specifically
Speaker 4: like these Silicon Valley conservatives, have exerted their influence over
Speaker 4: the media, because I find that to be a really
Speaker 4: interesting story. I've written about it multiple times for years,
Speaker 4: and so I think that I was eager to explore
Speaker 4: that the Silicon Valley angle, and I just as I
Speaker 4: started to write it, you know, I wrote it between
Speaker 4: primarily between i'd say September twenty twenty three and February
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four, and then went through the editing process.
Speaker 4: And obviously through the editing process, as you know, Trump rose,
Speaker 4: his his political fortunes rose again, and you saw people
Speaker 4: like Elon Musk and Peter Teel kind of align themselves
Speaker 4: with him. It only became more relevant, and I think
Speaker 4: that the you know, the tech side of it really
Speaker 4: started to take over the narrative a lot more than
Speaker 4: the kind of the media I don't want to say gossip,
Speaker 4: but the kind of like the media minutia of the story.
Speaker 4: And it kind of became more about tech. And I think,
Speaker 4: you know, I write about tech for my day job.
Speaker 4: I write about it. I don't write about so much
Speaker 4: the business of tech, but I write about it. So
Speaker 4: you know, I'm very interested in this world. And I
Speaker 4: think that the politics of Silicon Valley tech titans, these
Speaker 4: billionaires are you know, I think that's very important. You know,
Speaker 4: we saw the Pallenteer earnings that came out that note
Speaker 4: from Alex Karp saying a lot of these kind of
Speaker 4: similar things to to what his fellow tech leaders in
Speaker 4: Silicon Valley are saying. This this kind of sense of
Speaker 4: ideology is kind of taking over a little bit how
Speaker 4: they are presenting their earnings, how they're presenting their company
Speaker 4: to the public. So I think for the Bloomberg audience,
Speaker 4: I think that that kind of is a way of
Speaker 4: examining the people behind these companies that that that you follow,
Speaker 4: and looking at how they both kind of exist in
Speaker 4: this world together and this like buying this kind of
Speaker 4: media influence and pushing for how they get their message
Speaker 4: across and also like what that message is now as
Speaker 4: they kind of go further to the right.
Speaker 1: We're speaking. We're speaking with Owen Higgins. He's the author
Speaker 1: of the new book Owned How Tech Billionaires on the
Speaker 1: Right about the Loudest Voices on the Left of the
Speaker 1: book is out today. Owen Money certainly features prominently in
Speaker 1: the book. You talked about the billionaire backers. There's obviously,
Speaker 1: and what Elon Musk has done at the company formerly
Speaker 1: known as Twitter. Back to though Matt Tayebe and Glenn Greenwald,
Speaker 1: I'm curious about money motivating money as a motivation here.
Speaker 1: One thing that substack has allowed is for essentially the
Speaker 1: ceiling on being paid for work to be limitless. Did
Speaker 1: you in your investigation in your reporting get any idea
Speaker 1: of how much money folks, individuals like those are able
Speaker 1: to make with their substacks.
Speaker 4: You know, I've seen, I've seen numbers thrown around. I mean,
Speaker 4: all of this stuff is private, but you can kind
Speaker 4: of get a sense probably somewhere between like half a
Speaker 4: million and a million a year through substack I think
Speaker 4: for Taybe. And now Glenn has moved off of substack,
Speaker 4: he has moved to Rumble. So just to get a
Speaker 4: little background on how that happened, so Teal and jd
Speaker 4: Vance led a funding round for Rumble in May twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one. This was about six months after Glenn LEFTI
Speaker 4: owners up and then in August twenty twenty one, Rumble
Speaker 4: began to give paid deals out to people. So I
Speaker 4: think in August some of the first people were I
Speaker 4: think in the same day were announced Glenn Greenwald and
Speaker 4: Tulsa Gabbard, right, So these were kind of the two
Speaker 4: most prominent names. So Glenn now has moved all of
Speaker 4: his writing from substack over to locals, which is substack,
Speaker 4: which is sorry, which is Rumble's blogging platform. So I
Speaker 4: don't know how much he makes from that. I don't
Speaker 4: know the structure of right deal. I don't know. I
Speaker 4: would assume though it seems to be a multi year deal,
Speaker 4: so it's probably pretty good. I would assume that he
Speaker 4: was making even if we assume he was making equal
Speaker 4: to what Matt was making from Susy, like he would
Speaker 4: happen that they would pay him about that or more so. Oh,
Speaker 4: I would say, that's about what.
Speaker 1: I want to make sure. We only have a few
Speaker 1: more minutes, so I want to make sure we get
Speaker 1: in as much as we can. What would you say
Speaker 1: to someone who's listening or watching right now who says,
Speaker 1: wait a second, we need this on the right as
Speaker 1: an antidote to what's happened on the left with the
Speaker 1: rise of the media being associated with the left. You know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people out there who would
Speaker 1: say the media is liberal, so there needs to be
Speaker 1: sort of an antidote there.
Speaker 4: How would you respond, Yeah, I mean, assuming that I
Speaker 4: would agree with that, or at least like not contest
Speaker 4: it that the media is liberal or on the left,
Speaker 4: I would say that I don't have a problem with
Speaker 4: conservative media existing. I think that's fine. I think that
Speaker 4: there's a place for any kind of discourse. I think
Speaker 4: there's a place where right and left discourse in democracy. Certainly,
Speaker 4: what I'm trying to bring attention to here is the
Speaker 4: kind of decentralization of media and what that means for
Speaker 4: professional ethics and how newsrooms are run or not run
Speaker 4: in the case of people who strike off on their own. Again,
Speaker 4: this is fine. Most of my career, I've been a freelancer.
Speaker 4: I've been.
Speaker 2: I think, oh, and I want to jump in on that,
Speaker 2: because we've only got a couple of minutes left here.
Speaker 2: I think that is an interesting point. I think a
Speaker 2: bunch of us have grown up in a world of
Speaker 2: journalism with there were layers over us, and we wrote
Speaker 2: something and there were editors, and I mean, I can't
Speaker 2: tell you how many times I would have like a
Speaker 2: two minute piece that went on TV and how many
Speaker 2: people looked at it and rewrote it and like, you know,
Speaker 2: you were questioned. And I do wonder about the layers
Speaker 2: and so the idea of something being news and factually
Speaker 2: checked multiple times versus just someone putting something out. There
Speaker 2: are distinctions to be had in an environment when news
Speaker 2: was very clear what news was, and now news is
Speaker 2: used to denote a wide range of different things, whether
Speaker 2: it's on social media, or in kind of traditional linear
Speaker 2: broadcast or even in print.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree with you, And I think that the
Speaker 4: industry right now is kind of going through growing pains,
Speaker 4: if that's the propriate way to put it, where you
Speaker 4: have a lot of independent people kind of doing their
Speaker 4: own thing, and and some yeah, some are not doing
Speaker 4: with all of those layers. And they're not and and
Speaker 4: and they're they're not succeeding, right, But some people are succeeding.
Speaker 4: They are managing to do good reporting. Uh, they are
Speaker 4: managed to do good you know, opinion, punditry, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So I I but I think that the decentralization of media,
Speaker 4: which again I don't think is necessarily like a bad
Speaker 4: thing on the face of it. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 4: that all that is kind of leading all of it,
Speaker 4: all of it's kind of moving together to uh change
Speaker 4: the way that media has worked now personally having both
Speaker 4: like I prefer having the layers of control I like,
Speaker 4: I like having like hard fact check, hard copy of it.
Speaker 4: Absolutely got So I think I think that there's just
Speaker 4: a I think media is changing, and I think that
Speaker 4: a lot of times when it especially when it comes
Speaker 4: to print, right or to know, like where we're going
Speaker 4: with it?
Speaker 2: Ohen we got to run.
Speaker 3: We get to run.
Speaker 2: Owen Higgins, his new book owned how tech billionaires on
Speaker 2: the right bop the loudest voices on the left.