Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend: September 4th, 2026

0:00Bloomberg Businessweek Daily is brought to you by HPE, bringing you the self-driving network, a network that's self-optimizing, self-healing, and self-protecting, and only continues to get smarter. Learn more at hpe.com slash networking. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version.

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1:56and tech news as it happens. Bloomberg Business Week Daily with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week. Carol is off this week in her place, a great rotating crew of co-anchors featuring Norma Linda, Lisa Mateo, and Christine Aquino. A big week for U.S. economic data, reads on the labor market, the Fed Beige Book, and a few earnings continuing to just trickle out. Also renewed skirmishes in the U.S.-Iran conflict after both sides escalated fighting around the Strait of Hormuz. Any sustained return to fighting risks driving up energy costs and inflation, unnerving global investors and complicating Republicans' efforts to retain control of the U.S.

2:40Congress in November's midterm elections. For all the latest developments and breaking coverage, head on over to the Bloomberg Terminal or to Bloomberg.com. With that sense of uncertainty, this hour we talk about the unpredictability of human behavior and how the rise of prediction markets has raised concerns about their potential to contribute to gambling addiction. Plus, retail investing is undergoing a major structural shift. We caught up with Stephen Wong, founder and CEO of Dubb, to talk about how a new generation of traders are navigating the market and what they want out of their trading platforms.

3:12And the Mormon Church is expanding its real estate empire by spending billions of dollars. All that to come, but first. I've been eager to get to this story by Arab Boudouet. He's a global business reporter for Bloomberg News. This is one of those stories in Bloomberg Businessweek that you start reading and you just can't put down because it's engaging and it's about something that I think everybody is thinking about right now. And that's about prediction markets and the connection to gambling, specifically when it comes to sports. Arab Boudouet joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio.

3:45Your story focuses on a man named Chad, does not go into his last name, but tell us a little bit about him and what happened to him once he discovered this prediction markets platform. Yeah, he's a college student enrolled a few years ago in Texas and fell into a gambling addiction there, not through prediction markets, initially through dorm room bookies, daily fantasy sites, all the kind of social gaming, every, all the different ways. Cause gambling is not legal. Well, sports betting is not legal in Texas, but he found ways. And by his junior year, it had gotten so bad, he bottomed out. He basically lied to his parents, burned through about$100 ,000, fessed up, went home to Utah, and was sort of cleaning up, getting away from gambling, and discovers Kalshi.

4:36And in his mind, so it's legal in Utah, sports betting is not. and he thinks, oh, this is a way to win back the money that I owe my parents to get everything back and quickly starts betting there and over a six-month or so period lost about$12 ,000 and then his father discovered bank statements where he was depositing money to Kalshi, including money that he'd borrowed in personal loans. And they intervened. He eventually went to rehab, into a treatment facility. But it was interesting to me because this was a case of sort of expanding access for people who are vulnerable. And this was something that his parents, certainly his mother, had never heard of, didn't know what it was, didn't know to look out for it.

5:23And other people I spoke with said, yeah, this is a problem. We're seeing clinicians and support groups saying, yeah, there's young people, especially men, falling vulnerable to prediction market betting and not necessarily knowing that they should think of this as you might think of DraftKings or any other sports book as an addiction risk. So in your story, we also got the perspective from Kalshi, right? And very importantly, they say that Chad's story, it's a cherry-pick case, and they maintain that they do have a list of users who have self-excluded, and they have, just in general, really made a distinction that prediction markets are not gambling.

6:01But for consumers like Chad, is there really much of a difference effectively? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think when you just talk about the basics of it, a few clicks, you're getting to put money down on an outcome. You might win, you might lose. That is the essential experience. And that is the same addiction kind of dopamine rush, the same chasing losses, all the same problems that you see with sports betting. Clinicians told me they come up in the context of prediction markets. There's no real important difference there. Kalshi says, look, you're not betting against the house. We don't lose when you win.

6:37So we don't have the same incentives to prey on you as a prediction market does. And they also say, hey, we use a lot of the same tools to protect our users, exclusion lists, and so on. So it's interesting because on the one hand, they're saying we're not a sportsbook. On the other hand, we're saying we do all these things that sportsbooks do to try to protect our customers. What do you think of that? Well, I should note, Kalshi says, quote, this is a cherry-picked case. As you mentioned, the company says that we've prioritized making Kalshi the safest venue for people to trade on. This is according to a Kalshi spokesperson.

7:11Ira, I'm glad you brought up this idea of what the prediction markets say when you say, isn't this just sports gambling? Tariq Mansour has told me the same thing. Brian Quintens, who we had on yesterday, former CFTC commissioner who's now on Kalshi X's board, Kalshi Exchange's board, says the same thing. it's not gambling because the house is not involved. You're not betting against the house. You wrote this story about Chad. There are a lot of folks who say, wait a second, but you're still doing the same thing on the platform that you could do on a sports book, so it is gambling. What do you make of that distinction?

7:43Yeah, I mean, who the counterparty is from an addiction perspective doesn't especially matter. But also, I think this idea that it's John Q. Public, Mr. Retail User versus Mr. Retail User, when you go on a prediction market is a bit misleading because so often the market makers who are in essence the house playing the role of the house are wall street institutional firms or very sophisticated professional so it's like david versus goliath yeah you're still going up against uh users who are you're still likely to lose in the long run in fact there's been some data that has shown that prediction market users actually fare a little worse and really what it is is is then than traditional sports betters and what you're seeing is a dynamic that has played out in online poker daily fantasy where you have a small group of users who are extremely sophisticated and win consistently and you call them sharks right and everybody else is the fish and actually in terms of the experience for the typical user the retail user the fish of the world you're actually potentially being preyed upon even more for you know sort of quickly by these other users now it's not necessarily call she that's doing it but it's other users on the platform but if you're that retail user it doesn't really matter right who who's on the other side if you're consistently losing and consistently encountering an addiction risk then it's fundamentally the same thing how long have you been covering game uh we start i started covering gaming seriously around the time of the supreme court decision in 2018 that allowed it to spread through more states.

9:17So it's been close to a decade for you at this point. I asked that question because I feel like for as long as I've been here doing this show, we've had story, you've come on and talked about what essentially is the toothpaste being out of the tube when it comes to the Supreme Court. Is there an argument in your view to be made that there's a net benefit to society as a result of that Supreme Court decision? I'm not asking you to make a judgment here and whether the Supreme Court was right to do that, but it has been about eight years at this point and and a lot of money has been spent they're now i mean look at what these leagues are doing the usta yesterday coming out and saying cal she's the official prediction market of the u.s open and that was that upset a lot of people is there in your view a net benefit it's a really hard question to answer because i think what we have started to see just in the last few years is some of the damage.

10:12There's been some really good studies by academics looking at when states introduce sports betting and in particular online sports betting. And this is separate from prediction markets. Second from prediction markets, what happens? And you see declining credit scores, higher delinquency on debt and all kinds of damage and risky behavior that is concentrated among typically a fairly small group of users, but it's ruinous for that group. And so that's partly why I did this story on prediction markets. And just to speak to the idea that this one case that I encountered was cherry picked, it's true.

10:47That's the only person who would speak with me about it. But every clinician I talked to said, look, we're starting to see it, but we don't want to have you talk to people who are really fragile in their recovery. Basically, it takes a little while to bottom out, and then it takes a little while to start getting better and to be sturdy enough in a recovery that you could maybe talk to a reporter like me. so it's not like there aren't other cases out there it's just that we haven't been able to see it yet on the scale that we did with sports betting because we've had more time well sorry christine i'm just like no i'm jumping in again just because every time you mention something i'm thinking about this like if we think people have been betting for generations but maybe one distinction now is there's so much less friction and you saw that play out in chad's case right he lived in this state where because of the way that the sports betting industry is regulated state by state you're not allowed to access sports books in that state but because you have this federally regulated entity regulated by the cftc he could just open up his smartphone and do it maybe a generation ago he would have had to go to an off-track betting physically go there actually get the money and bring the cash it's not the same the friction's not there yeah i mean i think we've seen the smartphone shifted everything and and to be fair black market bookies operate through smartphones now too uh everyone makes it really easy but i think you've also seen a normalization right it's advertised sports leagues are in partnership with them you're told that it's legal in the case of kalshi you're told that it's a it's fine it's a financial product you're trading and so there's this notion that yeah why wouldn't you do this right and i think that is where we might see some pushback over time and the experience in the uk is maybe illustrative like they at least in the sporting context have pulled back on some of the advertising and tried to increase the limits and the and make access a little harder to basically put some of that friction back into the process because they were seeing a pretty serious fallout and societal damage from the spread of sports betting and they were a decade or two ahead of us in terms of the widespread legally sanctioned sports betting.

12:58Yeah. Well, based on that experience in IRA, how do you see this playing out from a regulatory perspective? Do you foresee states and maybe federally more measures to reintroduce the friction that Tim has alluded to is missing now? Yeah. I mean, the biggest question we got to solve first is can prediction markets do federally regulated sports betting or not, right? We've seen split decisions in the circuit courts that it looks like are going to have to get the supreme court to answer that but i think if prediction markets are allowed to continue doing sports then you will basically see a lot of pressure to recreate the regulations that exist in a state-by-state framework for sports betting and maybe even just to bring a federal bill to say hey you can't do this to under 18 you have to have a national helpline or you know whatever to you know to under 21 i should say to basically bring all the things that states have slowly been building into their laws, those protections may be into the prediction market framework.

14:00Right now, it seems like the prediction markets are just sort of voluntarily adding this stuff in and self-regulating because the CFTC is mostly absent when it comes to this kind of thing. That was Ira Boudwe, Bloomberg News global business reporter. Christina Kino, managing editor for the Bloomberg Markets Live blog, joining me there too. Coming up, how the next generation is navigating the markets and why copy trading professional traders, financial influencers, and public figures is for some a strategy these days. You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek. This is Bloomberg. Bloomberg Businessweek Daily is brought to you by HPE, bringing you the self-driving network, a network that's self-optimizing, self-healing, and self-protecting and only continues to get smarter.

14:44Learn more at hpe.com slash networking. Some people treat ChatGPT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. ChatGPT Work is a new way of working in ChatGPT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

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16:33This is the Bloomberg Business of Entertainment Report. The premiere of gameplay footage from the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 topped Netflix's viewing charts last week, reaching more than 31 million views and outperforming a new film from Robert De Niro. The near 27-minute video shows off the open-world crime game ahead of its planned November 19th release. It was exclusive to Netflix for six hours before it was released on YouTube and other video platforms. That window helped the footage surpass the new movie The Whisper Man and the fifth season of Outer Banks to debut as number one on the charts in 87 of the 93 countries that Netflix tracks globally.

17:12What have you gotten yourselves into? I want to know everything. It was a first for Netflix to feature marketing for an upcoming video game like this. The last edition of the game sold more than 230 million copies, and the new one is expected to be one of the most lucrative entertainment products of all time. Karen Moskow, Bloomberg Radio. This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Well, if you want to follow the trades of people such as Bill Ackman, Nancy Pelosi, Warren Buffett, and more, there's actually a platform for it. It's called Dubb. It's raised close to$50 billion.

17:53We've got with us the founder and CEO of the firm, Stephen Wong, joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Welcome, welcome. You've got a fascinating story. We're going to get to it in just a second. But I want you to explain, Dub, because even for somebody who talks about markets each and every day, I didn't know what it was before our producer, Anna, sent us all these notes about it. What are you offering and who are you offering it to? Yeah. So I'd really think of Dub as a social investing platform where instead of picking stocks, you pick these investment managers and you follow their trades.

18:26And it's really based on this idea that I think the social narrative and social investing has really come to the younger generation where people are no longer making their decisions of what to invest in based by looking at the numbers. It's really following the narrative and ideas that they see in the markets. Didn't people like or platforms like Robinhood and Public try to do social investing? Yeah, Public tried to do social investing with a social feed to start. But I think the core of that like pop up dub is that you get all the trades sort of automatically. So if I decide to follow one of these investing managers like Nancy Pelosi, whenever her trade Well, not an investing manager, but Yep.

19:02Or she's great at, one could say that she's a lawmaker. Phenomenal returns on our platform. You get those trades automatically in your account. It's almost like you can pick your own financial advisor or fund manager to take care of your money. And the idea is like, hey, most investing is really difficult and most people never get good at it. So can we give a similar experience that the ultra wealthy have of putting their money with the manager with someone with$100? So where are you getting the data? Is it all from 13Fs and from regulatory filings? Yeah. So all these portfolios that are tracking the politicians in these major funds are from the public filings.

19:35But we've really crowdsourced these investment managers who are actually making those trades and doing that research themselves. But now we've got 200 or 300 of these managers that you can follow across the board. So it's not just politicians and hedge funds. They have AI trades, they have quant trading strategies. We've really spanned the whole gamut of things that you'd want to invest in. But if you're following the traits of Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett, or Warren Buffett, where are you getting that information from? Those are coming from the 13 Fs. Okay. Yeah. So talk to me a bit more about the business model.

20:04How are you all actually monetizing? If I were to use this platform, would I then pay a specific fee to get access, or how does this work? Yeah. Today, it's a subscription-based model. So you pay$10 a month or sort of$80 a year to access the platform. And we felt like that was the best way to sort of go about it, where we aren't more like traditional brokerages that are monetizing sort of every single trade, sort of that you make in charging you sort of commissions. And then for the best portfolios, the other side of the platform is we do pay other managers. So if you're a great trader, we view Dubb really as a talent marketplace where if you're good at investing, you can make a name for yourself.

20:39And really the end vision for Dubb is to eventually create the platform where the new star fund managers get surfaced and they find a place to sort of build their career. And they don't need to go the traditional sort of boys club, the Wall Street path to really become the next superstar. So where'd the name come from, the three-letter name? Yeah, Dub. And music, Dub means to sort of translate and sort of copy music over. So we thought that would be a nice name. And it's nice, short, snappy, and memorable. You mentioned building a career. You built a career in an unconventional way. I think maybe it's known as like, you know, people like Mark Zuckerberg that did what you have done, drop out of Harvard.

21:15Talk a little bit about your own career path, because I mentioned you have a really interesting story of growing up in Detroit and then going to Harvard only to leave a few months later. Yeah. So born and raised in Detroit, my parents were immigrants. We didn't have a lot of money growing up. So a big part of my childhood was thinking about just making money. So I started out, I was that kid that was selling all the Pokemon cards. And that's also how I got into investing. I wanted to make some extra cash on the side. So I started investing second grade. My parents opened me a custodial account with a hundred dollar loan.

21:44And since then, I've really seen the wave of how this new generation investor sort of come online. And I've always wanted to build a business. So I actually left high school to my first company. I sold that. That was in VR and it decided going back to college and going to Harvard. And that was when the meme stock craziness was happening. And I saw the perfect opportunity to like build a product that serviced everything that was happening, which is following social trends to invest. How did your family react when you told them you were dropping out of Harvard? I didn't even tell them. Yeah, I really like it.

22:14How did they react? You know, my mom was sort of a little iffy. I'm not as close to my dad. But I think ultimately they're proud. But, you know, as with immigrant parents, they don't really share that. But, you know, deep down there, I think they really see what we're doing. And I think it's a really exciting time where we're about to cross sort of 2 million downloads. And most of the customers on Dubb are actually sort of making money. And that's a key metric that we track. Unlike all these other platforms that are really just trying to monetize the volume, We really care about how do we build wealth and generational wealth.

22:45And to me, the only free lunch but patience required is really investing in the markets. And we've seen that over the last century. And I think that's really core to my mission, where I came from as an immigrant. And I think it's more important than ever in a world where there's financial nihilism, there's doomerism, especially within Gen Z. I see that with my friends. It's because AI is coming to take jobs, less people are going to college. It's a fearful world out there. And I think the one thing that I can do to contribute back was the thing that changed my life was investing. And if we can help the next generation invest better, invest well, and be excited to invest and bring the social components together, I think that is where the world is going to go.

23:23And it'll do some good for people. So you talk about the next generation. You yourself are Gen Z, right? Yeah. Okay. And is the product mainly targeted toward folks that are in the Gen Z, you know, in Gen Z? Or what do you tend to see when it comes to stats and users? Yeah. So our average age is actually 35. When we first started, we had a lot of older folks in the Midwest, in the South, not in sort of your coast, really gravitate towards the product because of how we really simplify the vesting process. You don't got to be an expert. You can just choose someone's investments to follow and they sort of do everything for you.

23:54So that was a great value prop. But over the last year, we've seen Gen Z growth 3X on the platform. So now, as of sort of this month, we've got our new customers, like 42 % of them are Gen Z. I think this is part of the trend that you see with prediction markets, sports betting, the social investing and tying the sort of the way that you'd pull your capital with social trends has really come to head. And we see that growing in our platform. We're really excited about that because I think Gen Z probably need the most help in terms of understanding how to invest better for the future. So was part of it also accessibility?

24:26I'm curious because you said that the price point is about$10 per month for the subscription. Was that a thought or how did you come to that number? Yeah, absolutely. We did a lot of testing as product people do. But what we realized that is like, hey, if you're going to spend like 10 bucks and basically a cup of coffee in sort of New York City at this point, how do we make it still accessible and price it similarly to sort of what you'd spend on a day-to-day basis or on a Netflix subscription? So that was really part of it. I think we could price it sort of more, but access is really important to me.

24:57So we're really trying to find the optimal point of getting as many people onto the platform as possible. And I think one day we could explore even going completely free, which would be really exciting. But I think we're on a path towards that potentially. Talk to us a little bit about the numbers that you're seeing right now on the platform. How many users? Are you profitable? You've raised close to$50 million at this point. Do you have more funding rounds planned? Yeah, so we've got a lot planned. I can't say something yet, but I think the growth has been really exciting in the core platform.

25:25We've got about 2 million people who have downloaded the product. We've got hundreds of thousands of active sort of brokerage accounts now. Now, we did sort of a billion dollars plus in sort of trading volume. That's scaling up sort of over the next couple months. I think it's a really exciting time in markets where participation, the IPOs, we see that sort of interest really skyrocketing across the general population. Is interest around acquiring your company there? We've definitely gotten a lot of M &A interest because they see social investing as such an important growing trend. What would stop Robinhood from building this themselves?

25:59I think they're trying. Robinhood did publicly announce that they're trying to build a social version of Robinhood. I think every platform has already started copying us from Webull to MooMoo to Public. They see the demand that we've been able to create and are skyrocketing growth through the two years that we've launched. So I'm not afraid, though. I think ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg was in a simpler place when he's competing against MySpace. I do believe the most agile team where we're living the experience is going to win. So do you think that you would sell to one of those companies or you'd stay independent?

26:27I will absolutely love to stay independent. I think we have a chance at building one of the biggest companies in human history. If we can rewrite the way that people deploy their capital, from picking stocks to picking individuals, I think we can build the greatest financial company there is. So would you be competing with Charles Schwab, for example? I think we already are. Yeah. And if you look at Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, where do they get most of their growth? They launch index funds, mutual funds, right? And in many ways, Dubb is replacing that traditional mutual fund index fund model by all those set fund managers who are either passively or sort of actively managing that.