TikTok Deal Nearer Finish Line After Trump, Xi Call

23:18but that was replicated in London, wasn't it? It was over in Asia as well.

23:22Caroline Hyde:Yeah, it was. And it's interesting because you follow the clock around the world. Let's bring in Bloomberg's consumer tech editor, Dana Wallman. And let's start on that piece. We have the information from Asia into Europe, now the United States. What's the reaction to iPhone 17 launch day? So definitely some long lines in all the major markets where reporters have visited stores. And relatively few of the customers who we interviewed mentioned the iPhone Air, which is the skinny iPhone that got so much media attention ahead of the launch. It turned out that most of the customers who we interviewed were looking for the iPhone 17 Pro or the Pro Max, which makes sense given that these phones are for pro users, power users, and early adopters and tech enthusiasts are precisely the sort of people who might feel motivated to line up in front of a store around dawn the day of a launch.

24:10It's interesting that in the eye of the storm is, of course, a supply chain that Apple has, largely based in China. We are getting more breaking news of the readout coming from the Trump-Xi talks on the phone with President Trump putting on social that he's just completed a very productive call with President Xi. But I'm interested in more broadly how you're seeing the supply chain impact, Dana, what's happening on the ground with the sales of the iPhone Pro and how quickly or not we're able to get them in our hands and some of the issues, perhaps scratching of them over in China. So far, not many shocks in terms of delays or shipment times.

24:45Shipment times have slipped by a couple weeks in certain markets for very popular models, but nothing that seems too extraordinary. The iPhone Air has been delayed in China, seemingly over the eSIM, which is not a widely used technology in China. And the iPhone is the only of the iPhone models that exclusively uses that as opposed to a physical SIM being an option.

25:10Caroline Hyde:OK, Bloomberg's Dana Wallman, thank you very much. We have more breaking news from the call between President Trump and Xi Jinping. Posting on Truth Social, President Trump says that he has agreed to meet with Xi Jinping, and that meeting would take place at the APEX summit, Caroline. My understanding is the APEX summit is October 31st to November 1st. On TikTok, Trump says that they made progress on the approval of a TikTok deal. Trump adds that he appreciates the TikTok approval. We're continuing to get a lot of headlines, but not seeing any immediate market action or anything that contradicts some of the statements, Cara, if you want to jump in on what we had earlier.

25:46Caroline Hyde:Maybe we'll go back to break and we'll see what the markets are doing. Oracle still trading at about 1.4 % higher on the back of that, meant to be, of course, a part of that consortium buying TikTok. But the key news is that they have agreed to meet again next month, Ed.

26:05I read someplace that the networks were 97 % against me. I got 97 % negative. And yet I won easily. I won all seven states popular, but won everything. And then 97 % against. They give me wholly bad publicity or press. I mean, they're getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.

26:34Caroline Hyde:That was President Trump saying U.S. broadcast networks should face scrutiny over their licenses if they're too critical of him. His comments came not long after Jimmy Kimmel's show was put on indefinite hold by Disney following reactions to comments the comedian made, accusing Republicans of trying to gain political points from the killing of GOP activist Charlie Kirk. Bloomberg reporting that Kimmel met with Disney executives yesterday. According to sources, the soonest the show could return is September 22nd. I want to get out to Bloomberg's media reporter, Hannah Miller. Let's start on what we know in the news, which is that meeting between Kimmel and Disney.

27:14Caroline Hyde:What are the details we need? Yeah, so we know they're discussing the fate of his show and whether there will be an apology or not. You know, Kimmel might be made to go on air, apologize for his comments, And that might be something he doesn't want to do. Meanwhile, as we wait for the reaction of the host himself, Hannah, you've been putting out some really strongly herded reporting talking about basically the war that President Trump is having with the media. Set the context for us. Yeah, the Trump administration has a very contentious relationship with the media. We can see that in lawsuits, settlements, federal cuts to funding for public broadcasting.

27:52Caroline Hyde:You know, it's been battle after battle. And a lot of what's happening here is that many of the news organizations being targeted have business stakes at play. And that's sort of being weaponized against them here. Bloomberg's Hannah Miller. It's a really thoughtful piece. Please go and read it. But let's get you another viewpoint now. Anna Gomez is the sole Democratic commissioner at the FCC, one of three commissioners that are currently on the FCC. You've been there since 2023. You put out a very strongly worded statement following what seemed to be Jimmy Kimmel's show being put on ice indefinitely.

28:27And you really talk about it having been led to a shameful show of cowardly corporate capitulation by ABC that has put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger. So you think this is a corporate responsibility at this moment?

28:42Caroline Hyde:What we are seeing is this administration use whatever levers of power it has in order to bring broadcasters to heel. and the news media. As you mentioned, they have sued the New York Times, they have sued the Wall Street Journal, they have gone after ABC, NBC, CBS, and they are pressuring companies to change how they report the news and what their content is in direct violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees a freedom of speech. And what happens every time we see this cowardly corporate capitulation is a further fraying of a foundation of our democracy and that's freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

29:26Now what we understand to have occurred is that Disney moved after local stations had perhaps pushed back. This is all erupted after well the head of the commission FCC chair Brennan Carr joined a podcast and really articulated perhaps what could happen because of the words of Jimmy Kimmel on his broadcast, but also what he said, we can do this the easy way or the hard way on that Benny Johnson podcast. When it seemed to be talking about the Nextar-Tegna deal, is that how you interpret it? Is that how the market and the media should be interpreting what FCC Chair Brendan Carr is trying to make here?

30:07Caroline Hyde:I think it's really important to note that the FCC does not have the authority, the constitutional right, nor the ability to take action against broadcasters because of their content. We have very limited media regulation, usually designed to protect children programming and things like that. But we cannot retaliate against broadcasters for legal content. And this is all legal content. So what threats are meant to do is to get the companies to alter their practices in order to cover this administration in the way that they want. And that is what these corporations need to keep in mind. Every time they capitulate, they are harming our democracy.

30:54Caroline Hyde:Commissioner Gomez, I'm grateful for you coming on the program and what you just said about the remit and authority of the FCC. The basics that our audience want to understand is why is the FCC involved here? It is a panel or a committee, right, that debates issues usually proposed by the chair in the public forum or in written communications. And then you vote on the passing of measures or actions and stop me when I'm wrong on that. But you outlined what the authority of the FCC is not in this case. What is your role in this situation between Disney, Jimmy Kimmel, and the comments that he made?

31:36Caroline Hyde:So the FCC, as you know, does meet as a commission, and it votes to adopt rules or to issue licenses. But a lot of the actions that you're seeing from this commission right now, particularly when it comes to trying to bring media to heel, is being done at the staff level. And what's so dangerous about that is where we initiate investigations, until those investigations actually get to a final commission decision, there is no judicial review to ensure that the FCC doesn't overstep its bounds, which is exactly what we're doing right now. And you mentioned the Nextar transaction, which is actually not currently before the FCC but will be filed before the FCC.

32:19Caroline Hyde:The FCC has been using any time a party comes in to seek a transfer of a license or some type of permission from the FCC to pressure them to alter their practices directly affecting the First Amendment and getting them to voluntarily commit to making changes to how they report the news or whether they have diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, which themselves have a strong basis in the First Amendment. Commissioner, we've invited the chair, Mr. Carr, onto this program as well, And I want it to be to be to be known that that's the case. There is a an example or a case study that our audience wants us to ask you about.

33:01Caroline Hyde:And that is if Mr. Carr and the president wanted to initiate the revocation of a station's license based on that station airing of the Kimmel comments, for example, what needs to happen? Would there need to be an outside complaint filed to the FCC? Then you review it. Just explain that that scenario. please. Yes. So revocations of licenses are extremely rare. We do have rules about under what circumstances we might revoke a license. And it is a very high standard because it is such a serious thing to do. That is why the broadcasters fear so much any type of action by the FCC. Yes, we can initiate an investigation based on a complaint that is filed.

33:48Caroline Hyde:We can also initiate it ourselves. But let me be clear, there is no basis for revoking any licenses because of the Jimmy Kimmel content or because of normal editorial decisions from a broadcaster. The last time I can think of that we revoked a license was for failure to air a particular broadcaster for more than a year. Well, Commissioner and Caroline, I'm sorry to jump in here. You know, there are many Republicans and non-Republicans who feel that Kimmel's comments pushed, went past a line, they crossed a line and mischaracterized in the public domain the motivations of the shooter in the Charlie Kirk case.

34:32Caroline Hyde:And the FCC takes that into account or it does not? So we have to keep in mind that Jimmy Kimmel's show is satire. It is not news. It is not itself trying to inform the public about a particular newsworthy event. And what some of these people are claiming is that what Jimmy Kimmel said was news distortion. That really does not meet the standard for news distortion. So if a complaint were filed, the commission would have to look at it and make a decision about whether any rules were violated. I can tell you today there were no violations under the law or with these facts. Have any complaints been filed?

35:18Caroline Hyde:I believe a complaint was filed today. there is a partisan legal group that has been filing complaints against all the media companies, getting more and more outlandish in their complaints. Normally for news distortion, they're the same ones that filed the complaint against 60 Minutes for the Kamala Harris interview. They're the same ones that filed a complaint against NBC because of Saturday Night Live, the Saturday Night Live showing with Vice President Harris. So they're a partisan organization that just keep filing these complaints and the FCC has not acted on all of them. They are very numerous.

36:00Caroline Hyde:I would say we get at least once a week. I think it's right to put in the context that last year Disney indeed did pay$15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit for the president over comments that one of its hosts had already made. There have indeed been several settlements. and, as Hannah Miller, our reporter, put in their story, then often there are deals and M &A involved. Is that the interpretation that we should make at this moment, that deals in some way hinge upon settling of such cases and concerns? I think that the administration will use the deals to pressure companies one way or another, whether it's to settle lawsuits or to give up their rights as organizations.

36:40Caroline Hyde:When the FCC approved the Paramount SkyBand deal, for example, the parent company of CBS, Paramount agreed to install what I call a truth arbiter, an ombudsman reporting to the president of Paramount who will field complaints about media bias, for example. That is really chilling because that is exactly the type of interference and the freedom of the press that is not healthy for our democracy and for our discourse. So yes, I think this administration will weaponize any transaction. Any time you see a party coming before the FCC, you are going to see some kind of a demand to bring them to heel and to change how any broadcaster reports on this administration to make it favorable to the administration and not otherwise.

37:37Caroline Hyde:FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, we appreciate your time joining us on Bloomberg Tech. Thank you very much. Caroline, I just want to go to shares of Disney very quickly. In the course of that conversation, the stock actually hit a session low of 2 % and now down 1.9%. We did report just before the conversation with the commissioner about the meetings that are taking place between Disney executives and Jimmy Kimmel. One of the ideas or questions being an apology or not. We also have to go back to the breaking news because we got a full readout from the president on the conversation with Xi Jinping.

38:08Caroline Hyde:Productive call, he says. They made progress on issues including trade, fentanyl, the need to bring the war between Russia and Ukraine to an end. And for this program, Bloomberg Tech, the approval of the TikTok deal. He agreed with President Xi that they would meet at the APEC summit in South Korea. I believe that's October 31st through November 1st. And he would go to China. This is the bit we didn't get to yet, that he says in his true social post, the president, he will go to China early next year. The call, a very good one. They will be speaking by phone again. And the president says, in his words, we appreciate the TikTok approval and both look forward to meeting at APEC.

38:41Caroline Hyde:That's the one the market was waiting for this week. It is. A lot of people who are investors in semiconductor shares, for example, in video, will it be able to continue to sell into China? Coming up, we're talking exactly that about AI. Magnetar's senior managing partner, David Seneinman, is with us. He's going to talk about the investing build-out, the AI build-out, the scale of that. Magnitor, of course, a key investor in CoreWeave. Stick with us. This is Bloomberg Tech.

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40:45or anywhere you listen.

40:55Caroline Hyde:AI is hungry for power, and so is everything else, from computing and transportation to industry. Energy demand is reaching historic levels, and batteries are emerging as the backbone of modern infrastructure, enabling reliable, low-cost storage at scale. J.B. Straubel, CEO of Redwood Materials, which deploys these strategic resources spoke to Bloomberg's Judy Fine at Bloomberg NEF yesterday in Houston. Energy storage is evolving, and batteries in particular are evolving to play, I think, an incredibly central part of the story for the expansion of data center energy availability, but for the grid overall.

41:34And increasingly, I think people are beginning to sort of see that opportunity, where if you can have the flexibility that energy storage provides, that gives you the chance to have access to more energy from the grid. And it also gives you a chance to manage and adjust the transients from some of these new loads, especially AI training loads. Let's talk more about infrastructure now, but let's talk about the data center side of it. David Snyderman is here with us, senior managing partner at Magnetar, global head of alternative credit and fixed income. Look, Magnetar has a cool$20 billion in assets under management, key investor in AI compute provider CoreWeave.

42:12And you've just come off the heels of an investor day. It's your 20-year anniversary. And how much is the demand from your investors to get more into AI data center, to get more into compute and the way in which you finance it? You know, first, thank you again for having me. I always love to come on the show. You know, we, like you said, we had our 20-year investor day yesterday. And just to take you into the room, I think we had six different companies present on six different industries, everything from, you know, health care finance to restaurant finance. And then, like you said, AI infrastructure and our newest investments in energy.

42:50And, you know, for us, the the way we invest, the formula has always been the same. It's really by being value added to to our portfolio companies. And so how are you value added to a core weave? How are you thinking about financing the GPU, the compute they need to go out and buy to fill their data centers, for example? That's right. So for us, it's really about thinking about the asset first, right? Understanding the value of that asset, understanding the customer contracts, and then helping the companies unlock value from there. But, you know, I think what, you know, AI infrastructure, we talked about it a reasonable amount yesterday, and it really comes down to, you know, three things.

43:30It's skill, it's scale, and it's scarcity. So I'll start with scale. When we started investing in CoreWeave, we were talking about 100 GPU clusters, and we thought that was going to be difficult. Now they're putting in 100 ,000 GPU into clusters, and they're going to do a million GPU into clusters. And so the scale is just massive. Then you go to the skill, and what you compare it to is it's like an F1 car instead of your family sedan. This is really, really hard to do. So companies like CoreWeave, they're one of the few in the world that can actually do this. And then to your question is the scarcity.

44:11People say there's not enough GPUs and not enough power, but the issue is the demand. The demand is just off the charts today. Every company we talk to, our entire channel check just says everyone needs more GPUs.

44:27Caroline Hyde:David, can we talk about how magnetar muscles in on any project the headlines that cross the bloomberg on a weekly basis at the moment are about the great scale ai neocloud infrastructure projects but you have like legacy finance coming in hard strategic partners um because the size of the check to get the project off the ground is getting bigger and bigger and bigger that's right and it's a great question And, you know, a lot of the capital that's come into private credit has been this one size fits all. You know, let's make sure the mandate fits into insurance company type of money. That's just not what we do.

45:05What we do is we go in and we want to be value added to partners and help unlock value. So we want to sit with management teams and talk about how to lower their cost of capital over time. And that's why they bring in a magnetar.

45:19Caroline Hyde:David, where and what is the next call we for you? You know, for us, it's a diversified portfolio approach. So we're always thinking about downside first. So we're going to look at the assets and contracts. But then it's how do we help unlock value? And so even yesterday, a tourist energy, a tensor wave, these are the companies that are up and coming right now. And, you know, they spoke very eloquently about their businesses yesterday. David, is there an opportunity for you? And are you literally going to participate in what was announced from the United Kingdom this week? all the heavy infrastructure investment from America's biggest technology companies?

45:54For us, we're looking across all projects. And again, if we're not really value added and helping lower the cost of capital, that's not where our skill set lies best. And so for us, it's really getting involved with management and helping them make decisions given the data that we have inside of our firm. There's almost a core wave just launched in the UK, Nscale. I mean, again, a crypto miner that pivots into compute. Are they the sort of companies that are interesting? Sure. I remember having dinner with N-Scale College six months ago in Chicago at Morton's. That's right. Those are exactly the type of companies that are interesting.

46:32And for us, we have to really make sure that we're thinking about our capital and we're thinking about our investors and making the appropriate allocations. Just for our audience that is savvy on financing and is savvy on AI data centers, how do you lower the cost of financing? So it's really about the customer mix and the asset mix. And so we're really trying to think about how we take a customer mix. So if you have all non-investment grade customers, that's a much more difficult portfolio to finance. Now, you want to have non-investment grade customers because they grow very quickly. So now we have to think about the mix of customers underlying your portfolio and help you make those allocation decisions.

47:11I think that's how we can get involved with the companies themselves. We can be value added and really unlock value for them over time.

47:18Caroline Hyde:David Snyder, managing partner at Magnus Hall Capital. Great to have you back on the program. Thank you. Now, coming up, Google brings Gemini throughout the Chrome browser. We've got more on that story next. This is Bloomberg Tech.

47:37Time now for Talking Tech. First up, Google brings Gemini throughout the Chrome browser for users in the United States. Just two weeks after dodging an antitrust case that could have broken up the company. It will also be integrating Gemini with other Google apps like Calendar, YouTube and Maps. Meanwhile, Xiaomi will deploy an over-the-air software fix to rectify a problem in its advanced driver assistance technology, installed in almost 40 % of the Su7 electric sedans it has sold. Now, the recall comes nearly six months after a fatal crash involving a standard version Su7 sedan that in its autopilot function turned on.

48:10And SoftBank's Vision Fund is considering cutting as much as 20 % of its staff, according to a source, Now, the reduction extends years of cutbacks at the Vision Fund as the unit shrank in importance next to growing appetite for big AI bets from founder Masayoshi Sun. Ed.

48:27Caroline Hyde:That does it for this edition of Bloomberg Tech, Cara. And what an edition it has been. What a week it has been. We broke the headlines from the call between President Trump and China's Xi Jinping. That was what the market was waiting for. Don't forget, check out the podcast. This was an episode worth recapping. You know where to find it. on the Bloomberg platforms, Bloomberg.com, the terminal, and online at Apple, Spotify, and iHeart. From San Francisco and New York, this is Bloomberg Tech.

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