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This is Everybody's Business from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

I'm Max Chafkins and I'm Brad Stone.

This week, Brad, it's all about changes.

A new marriage for a very well known billionaire, a new.

Mayor probably for New York City, and a new approach as Hollywood looks to protect its intellectual property from AI.

Yeah, Lucas Shaw, our friend and entertainment correspondent, will be joining us for that.

Plus how a Wall Street tycoon accidentally funded an alleged coup plot in a small African country happens to the best of us.

Bratt, you are here for Stacy Vanixsmith, who's in China at the World Economic Forum.

You are straight back from Kahn and I wanted to start the show by talking about the event of the season, the wedding between Jeff Bezos and Laura in Sanchez.

It's in Venice.

It is starting today, I believe, or the events of the wedding are starting as we record this on Thursday.

The twenty six huge guest list also, lots of the locals are very unhappy about this wedding.

Their protests plan some very funny quotes from the locals.

They're like, we're not gonna let them get to the venue.

Brad, You've covered Jeff Bezos for many, many years.

You've written two books about Amazon.

You've been called the Edward Gibbon of this company, I believe, And I just got to ask you, like, what are your sources telling you?

What is this wedding going to be?

Like?

Are the protesters gonna stop it?

Well, first of all, my invite was somehow lost in the mail.

Okay, let's start there.

But you know, maybe it's because I've written two critical books about Bezos and feel like I've established my bona fides as a Bezos critic.

I don't feel the need to dunk on him.

Is it over the top?

Yes?

Is it, you know, a gratuitous misreading of the room at a time of gross inequality and injustice?

It is.

I don't think Bezos cares at all what people think, and we should say that unlike Elon Musk, he is not out there siring children with multiple women.

Unlike Malania Trump, Lauren Sanchez does appear to really like her fiance.

It is an age appropriate marriage.

They've been together since twenty eighteen, and whethered all sorts of scandal and withering public scrutiny, So I say, all power to him.

I have to just say.

My reaction to this story was like, is Jeff Bezos really the worst guy who's ever gotten married in Venice?

Like these protesters, like, there've got to be some really questionable weddings in Venice, and I just cannot imagine to your point that this even ranks in the top five of the most annoying Venice weddings.

And that raises the question, what do you get the man who sells everything?

And of course every week we go out in the streets and ask people questions, get them to weigh in on the news this week, what are you getting Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos for their wedding?

I don't think I would.

I think that's my answer.

A Prime membership, something to do from Amazon.

I don't know, Oh, a canoe because Venice floods.

Demotally a story night, because they know those dard nights worth like three million dollars.

Okay, I think I would make them a meme coin in their honor, and I would post about it on social media to maximize attention, so that on the morning of the wedding when it goes live, the value immediately, Skyrock.

I think I would probably give him a twenty five dollars Amazon gift card and a handwritten card that says, Bay, your love lasts longers than an Amazon warehouse workers bathroom break mine declined RSVP.

I do love the twenty five dollars Amazon gift card just because, like that is probably the most common gift given in the entire world and also the least personal.

I love the kids.

The Starry Night might be the best one of the bunch.

He probably is getting that, Like, we should make sure that that hasn't already been purchased and loaded up into the yacht that is parked outside of Venice to take them away after the honeymoon.

Brad, you've heard the big political news by now.

New York City financial capital of the world.

It's the home of financiers, advertising executives, media executives.

A lot of people who really, really really like capitalism just voted in a primary for mayor and there was a huge upset the socialist one.

This is Zoron Mamdani, who beat Andrew Cuomo.

The crazy thing about this, Brad, is that Cuomo was backed by this kind of very long list of very rich guys.

He raised a huge amount of money from a group that includes Mike Bloomberg, who owns a company that produces this show.

But right now many of those backers are very surprised and they are very unhappy.

And one of those backers, Dan Loeb from Third Point, he just called it officially hot commy Summer.

A Wall Street headhunter said, this will be the end of New York City as we know it.

What they're worried about is Mamdani has proposed a bunch of policies that are basically redistributive.

He's a democratic socialist, a sort of Bernie Sanders acolyte.

He's talked about raising the corporate tax.

He's talked about a new income tax for the one percent.

He's also talked about sort of things that I think are just kind of triggering for capitalists, including like state run grocery stores.

He's a big critic of Israel, and all this, you know, swirl together add up to kind of a sense of panic.

If you were listening or talking to anyone who's connected to like Wall Street or Money yesterday, here's a quick prediction that I heard on CNBC.

If you've seen what Batman is up against in Gotham and what is the guy running for mayor is up That's what it.

Reminds me of.

They're taking Wall streeters and make him walk out onto the ice in the East River as and hope and then they fall through Joe Kernan never change.

So obviously huge political story, but also a huge business story.

And we have the perfect person to guide us through this.

Laura Namias, Bloomberg reporter is here in the studio.

She's been covering the race.

Laura, thanks for coming.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, so just to like set this scene, can you help talk us through exactly how this happened.

Cuomo, the former governor of New York who resigned, I think it's fair to say in disgrace, raised, nonetheless a huge amount of money from all these rich people.

Mom, Donnie got a fraction of that.

How did he win?

So the former governor entered the race in March and all of the polls showed him winning.

He had the highest name ID in the race, and so we're on Mom Donnie back in March was pulling out like ero percent.

He is a thirty three year old assembly member who was first elected in twenty twenty.

He has passed three bills in Albany.

But he has this incredibly charismatic social media presence, and when his campaign really got going, he was able to amass thousands and thousands of individual donors and quickly became the first candidate to get the maximum amount of public matching funds under the city's very generous campaign finance system.

And so he just had this infrastructure in place to get all these donations from thousands and thousands of people who actually vote in the primary.

I think that might be the simplest explanation for what happened here.

I want to come back to that social media campaign because I think it says a lot about our current politics.

But first we should say the reason why Mom Donnie's campaign is so triggering to some on Wall Street.

It's because of his agenda, right, Yeah, it's quite radical.

He's a democratic socialist.

I'm just curious, if he does win, and of course he needs to win a general election, what is the practicality of this agenda?

How much power does the New York City mayor have and can he really institute what could be a fairly dramatic redistribution of wealth in New York City, so.

People often don't realize this.

The mayor of New York City has virtually no power to raise taxes except for the property tax levy, so the power to raise taxes or lower them resides within Albany.

Kathy Hokkel would have to sign off on any tax increases.

She's already said definitively in response to questions about this that she will not support any tax increases.

The cities and the states offers in revenue is dependent in a really big way on personal income tax revenue, and so the movement of even a handful of billionaires out of the state can have a significant effect on things like Medicaid funding and money for schools and stuff.

So the state tax department and the governor are very sensitive to anything that might lead to even a few very wealthy people.

You talked about the way he built support, and part of it were these kind of slogans that really remind me, honestly of Trump.

Right, he said, freeze the rent over and over again, and kind of in the same way, I think Donald Trump us build the wall both as a policy prescription but also as a way to signal, and I think this was super important, Like I care about affordability.

That was a part of the campaign.

I think voters really reacted to the affordability part.

What about that stuff like can he freeze the rent?

Is he going to build state owned grocery stores?

So what he's actually talking about when he says freeze the rent, which yes, is a very catchy and easy to understand slogan, and that helps explain some of his success and ability to catch fire with voters is the city stock of rent controlled and rent stabilized apartments.

I think there's more than a million rent stabilized apartments.

Those are the.

Ones over which the city has the authority to control how much the rent can increase.

And how that actually happens is the mayor gets to appoint members of the Rent Guidelines Board and every year they do this study with data submitted by landlords showing how much gas costs them, how much materials cost them, what inflation has been and the board votes on a percent increase or decides not to increase at all.

So that's what Mam Donnie can actually do is pick the members of the Rent Guidelines Board.

Market rate apartments which a lot of people live in.

He has no power over that.

So I feel like I should get Hazard PAYD for this, But I spent I don't know, ten minutes this morning reading a long message from Bill Ackman sort of describing his strategy for a write in campaign.

There is this frantic effort among some members of the base of support of Andrew Cuomol, though it doesn't seem like all of them to either, you know, coalesce behind some other non Mam Donnie candidate or draft a new one or a secret candidate.

That's what Acman's talking about.

And I have to say, Lauren, and I'm curious to get your take, Like part of me thinks the lesson here and the lesson we need to start learning, is that billionaire donations are not as important as they used to be, and that these billionaires they look pretty inept.

And you look at prediction markets, and prediction markets overwhelmingly believe that Mam Donnie is going to be the mayor.

Now, it's not going to be Adams, it's not going to be some secret candidate.

Do you think that these efforts could go anywhere that like Acman and so on, can get together and pull their money and put it in a different place and actually shake things up.

So I don't know what the exact track record is, but in the years since Citizens United, I think there have been multiple instances where it was shown that it was really hard to buy an election, especially when you're coming up against a candidate who has a genuine enthusiastic base, which is what Mam Donni has here.

If the candidate of the quote unquote left had more tepid support, then maybe the effort would have succeeded on a greater level.

But ultimately what happened here is that young people supporting Mom Donnie turned out, and the people motivated to whatever extent by the campaign for a CUOMO and funded by this independent expenditure and billionaire money didn't turn out, not at a level high enough to overtake Mom Donnie's enthusiastic support.

Also, you're talking numerically about the number of billionaires.

Their money is so big, but the total number of them is small.

It ultimately just comes down to turnout.

And Laura, let me just.

Ask you, Mam Donnie has had to answer a lot of questions about his support for Palestine, about his tweets, after the October seventh attacks blaming Netanyahu and the state of Israel.

He seems to me has been kind of dogged by those questions and has had a hard time winning support from the Jewish community in New York City.

Do you feel like he's beyond those questions or have they really only started now that we're into the general election.

I think that those questions have only just started, certainly, as our focus in larger matters is still on the Middle East and or with Iran, his stances on that are are going to be looked to.

He's would be the mayor of the largest city in America.

What he says matters.

It also was for many, many years sort of this article of faith or the third rail of New York City politics that you supported Israel almost unquestioningly.

But the first thing that Cuomo advisor said to me Tuesday night after the results came in was that they think they may be looking at a fundamental realignment of the Democratic Party's position on Israel.

If someone who is not only a Muslim but has been outspokenly critical of Israel can win the Democratic primary in New York City, that says something about where Democratic voters are on the question of Israel.

He's been very critical of Israel, and the advisors were scratching their heads.

They have a lot of questions and they're wondering if this represents some sort of fundamental change in the party and its relationship with Israel.

Does this tell us anything about what's going to happen in twenty twenty eight, like who the Democrats might nominate, and also what the relationship I guess between money and the Democratic Party or money and whoever is the next president might look like.

Well, I think there's been after the twenty twenty four presidential election, there's all this soul searching within the Democratic Party.

Who is the next generation of leadership.

There's this question of the quote unquote gerontocracy see Alexandria Cossio Kurtez going around criticizing the party as like a bunch of very old people reluctant to relinquish their power, and the generational split in this race.

The youngest candidate who would be one of the youngest mayors in New York City history, the youngest mayor in a century, versus the oldest candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who if he'd been elected, would have been one of the oldest mayors on inauguration really sort of encapsulates this divide within the party.

And then also there's been this question since twenty twenty four the presidential election of whether or not the problem was that the party was too far left or not left enough, and whether or not they need to swing, especially on economic issues, toward a more populist and maybe an agenda that looks a little bit more like what oron Mom Donnie is espousing.

So all of those questions are roiling, and there's a lot of soul searching going on, but this could certainly be a bellweather for where the party is actually going.

Max, We've both covered this.

Hollywood has been absolutely abused over the last thirty years by technology at the internet, file sharing, streaming.

The major studios were late, they were unprepared, They played legal defense instead of inventing new things and lost ground to Silicon Valley giants like YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix.

Okay, yeah, Brad, And now you know, with artificial intelligence, you have companies like open ai Andthropic, Facebook others.

They're training chatbots and they're doing it in part by taking allegedly I guess content from old line media companies feeding it into these large language models and potentially producing competition.

So how does Hollywood avoid the mistakes of the past.

To break it down for us, of course, we have Lucashaw, friend of Everybody's Business, author of the screen Time newsletter, the cameo that the seth Rogan showed the studio desperately needs to book for season two.

Lucas, welcome, great to be back.

You wrote this week that everybody in Hollywood has learned they need to embrace the technology instead of fighting it, and yet we have Disney and comcasts suing mid Journey.

So what is going on here?

You're seeing Hollywood studios take sort of a two track approach.

On the one hand, they are experimenting with different types of artificial intelligence, whether they talk about it or not.

Right, we had a Indiana Jones movie where Harrison.

Ford was deaged.

We've got this Darth Vader Avatar or in Fortnite or using the voice I should say.

You have studios that have done partnerships with companies like Runway, and at the same time they are trying to defend sort of this notion that the large language models cannot just train on their video or their music right, And this is one of the big unsettled legal questions in it because you're starting to see open Ai has Sora, Google has Veo, Meta is working on video.

Everyone wants to have a kind of video generator.

And text was sort of the first frontier the fight, then audio, then video.

That's always the progression.

And so they are trying to establish this legal precedent that says you can't just train your LM on Marvel and Darth Vader.

Why is it this lawsuit?

Like why did Disney choose to go after mid Journey, which is not one of the best known of these companies, Like why is it?

Why is this the one that we're seeing right now.

I think part of it is that some of the bigger players have been a little more willing to play by the rules, right.

I think, you know, if you look at Google and Facebook, they want certain guardrails because restrictions on the industry help them protect their moat that they have.

And I think mid Journey is an example of a company that doesn't care that much about what the establishment thinks.

They are taking advantage of this idea of fair use and believe that they can do whatever they want.

We've seen similar with the music companies or the audio companies Udio and Suno, where their position has been we can train like sue us if you want, will win.

And so I think Disney saw this as an opportunity to go after also a somewhat smaller company that they may have an advantage on fighting, as opposed to a company like Googler Meta that has kind of inexhaustible resources.

And we should say mid Journey has not responded to this lawsuit, but I think we can expect that they're going to, you know, dispute the allegations.

They're probably going to fight it.

So Disney wants to set a favorable precedent here.

You're speaking in a week when both Anthropic and Meta seem to have won favorable rulings from California judges who found that their use of coperated books might qualify as fair You so, tell me, has the ARC started to favor the AI companies in these lawsuits.

I think it's too soon to know.

There have been lawsuits happening about this issue, and there have been wins on both sides, and that's something that everyone is aware of.

And why, Like, if you talk to Disney and Comcast about the mid journey suit.

Their suit can be the one that ultimately goes to the Supreme Court and established as precedent, and they plan, I think, to sign on as sort of friends of the court in suits that they believe are favorable.

You know that there are certain suits going through that they don't think are strong cases and don't we didn't.

They didn't want to go into specifics and malign sort of their peers or authors or celebrities.

But there are definitely some people who have brought suits against AI companies that the AI companies are in a position to win, and I think they feel like vice.

And there's probably gonna be two three, four years of this where you have cases that cut both ways, because if you remember, there have been cases in the past that were sort of strikes against AI companies.

We're not at a point where there's any settled law on how this works.

Lucas.

One thing I've struggled to understand a little bit is what exactly are they worried about, because, like, if you look at how these generative AI tools are being used today, they're mostly being used to like make memes and to do things that like I think in the past we would talk about as like fan art or whatever.

And so is it a concern about sort of degrading, like they're gonna like use Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader or one of their characters in a way that's like offensive or that somehow undermines Disney's credibility.

Are they worried about actual like competitive entertainment.

Is it a little bit of all those Like what are they actually like concerned about or most concerned about the entertainment companies?

I think it's all of the above.

It's they don't don't want to see Iron Man or Darth Vader or Mickey Mouse like suddenly smoking a joint or doing opium, all sorts of things that would tarnish the image of those characters.

Iron Man, Yes, I how would that work?

Behind the mask?

By the way, I think their desire is to be able to control the outputs, right, And one of the big debates in this is over inputs versus outputs right.

The training is the thing that I think a lot of these companies believe that they should just be able to do, while perhaps acknowledging that there should be some control over you know, how people show up and that's where this idea is it like transformative comes up in fair use?

Are you taking something and doing something very different or are you just copying?

They don't want to see Mickey Mouse doing horrible things, and they also don't want a bunch of amateurs to just be able to use their characters and make their own Marvel movie and declare it's fair use.

Lucas, I was, as you know, at ken Lyons last week, and I was speaking to Brady court Bay, the director of The Bruces, on stage, and you know, he got dinged for using AI to modify the Hungarian accents and the brutals, but his wholeheartedly embracing the technology in his next film.

It says, you know, Hollywood cannot be in denial about it.

And it just made me think and wonder whether the artists are a little bit farther ahead than the studios and the big companies here, and whether this is really going to empower small filmmakers with tiny budgets and small crews to really compete against.

The big guys.

I think it is certainly the case that the at least certain artists are ahead of the big companies.

Most great directors are at the forefront of technology in one way or another.

Right, you think about someone like James Cameron and all the different kind of interesting ways that he has come up with shooting movies, or the CGI, the use of three D and the first Avatar was sort of mind blowing at the time.

Right.

I know that there are directors like the Russo brothers or Ben Affleck who are very interested in and toying around with the ways of using artificial intelligence.

It is most likely that you will see filmmakers lead the way in which Hollyood uses this technology as opposed to the studios, and to your point, you'll certainly see amateurs.

I mean, that's to me, the real chance for revolution is if you can use AI to make a movie that looks like a cost one hundred million dollars, but it only cost five or ten.

All right, Brad.

At the end of every show, we talk about an underrated story, and I've got one for both you and Lucas.

Are you ready for it?

I can't wait.

Okay, this is a This is one of those relatable, I think we've all been there kind of stories.

Here's the headline from Bloomberg News.

Jane street Boss says he was duped into funding AK forty seven's for coup.

Now, this is who among us hasn't done that, Who among us hasn't accidentally written a seven million dollar check that went a core or was a tend to go According to the story, to AK forty seven's Stinger missiles and grenades as part of a coup attempt in South Sudan.

The guy who did this the co founder of Jane Street, Robert Grenieri.

He basically says he was defrauded.

He did not know his money was going to an attempted coup.

Weirdly, Gary Kasparov, the chess champion, is involved in this as well.

It kind of seems like they thought they were funding, as I suppose sometimes happens in these cases, some sort of humanitarian effort.

Now, what's funny about this, guys, is that Jane Street is like one of the most respected, like the smartest guy firms on Wall Street.

It is like it's like one of these places where they ask you, like, you know, how many quarters can you fit on the table, and if you don't answer in the right way, then they throw you out.

They did employ Sam Makminfried prior to his going to prison, for orchestrating a massive fraud.

So I don't know, kind of another point against Jane Street.

Well here that's my question.

Can you write that off?

You know, can you write off a coup donation?

Do coup on your taxes?

Wow?

I admit I didn't see that story, so I'm glad that you brought it to my attention.

I mean, I think, you know, do some research, Robert in your donations.

Maybe maybe dig a little bit under the surface.

Yeah, who transfers seven million dollars without knowing where it's going?

It does raise a lot of questions, and interestingly, we're probably going too deep in here.

But the defense of these guys who are being charged with orchestrating the coup is they were under the impression that the US government was telling them to do this.

So we're quickly getting into kind of weird spy territory.

I definitely think, yeah, movie, this is gonna be good as a as a film.

This is a Coen Brothers movie.

Who are we casting in each role?

That's the Lucas, that's your department.

I think Brad Pitt might have aged out a little bit.

We can use AI to age him down, No problem.

It's true.

That is true, and we could stick Darth Vader in us.

Thanks for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

Thanks guys, Brad.

Before we go, Stacy and I have been writing haikus for the people who are kind enough to leave reviews in the Apple podcast app or in Spotify, and we've got a new one here.

It's from a user called Mario Kart twenty two.

Mario Kart, thank you so much five stars.

We really appreciate Mario Kart twenty two writes good stuff.

All the different people are cool.

Nice to hear from real people.

I guess he appreciates or she appreciates the voices that they're hearing in the show.

Brad, let's give Mario Kart twenty two something nice in exchange for this wonderful review.

Thank you Max.

First of all, who are we without our listeners?

So this haiku is devoted to one of them.

Here we go.

Good stuff is high praise from Mario Kart twenty two.

Our sinceres, Thanks.

Wow, Mario Kart twenty two.

Those are the poetic stylings of Bradstone.

Keep writing review use everyone.

They help us figure out what we should be doing.

They also help people find the show and send us an email.

Everybody's at Bloomberg dot net.

Let us know if you have ever funded, accidentally funded a coup or accidentally bought something that you should not have bought, and we will talk about it and maybe even write a poem.

And for the purposes of haiku writing, if you could choose a user name with fewer syllables than Mario Kart twenty two, that.

Would be preferable, although that is a fun user name.

Shout out to Warrio.

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If you have a minute, please rate and review the show.

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