Marketplace Tech

Elon Musk must resign from Tesla's board of directors after a settlement on Saturday with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his tweets about taking the company private. He will stay on as CEO. It's tough to separate the conversation about Tesla from the conversation about Elon Musk. But let's talk about cars for a minute. Because it feels like electric car announcements are fast and furious lately. Ford is promising an electric crossover that's the size of a Tesla Model X but inspired by the Mustang. There are rumors of a $30,000 electric Volkswagen. Is Tesla's biggest problem actually competition? Molly talks with Maryann Keller, an auto industry analyst, about the new entries into the electric car market. (10/01/18)

TV is still the big dog when it comes to advertising. But it's slipping. Advertisers are moving their dollars online, fast. The money is mostly flowing to Facebook and Google because those platforms can use personal information to target ads specifically based on your interests. But the next frontier in TV ads is coming our way. AT&T just completed its purchase of Time Warner and has launched an ambitious new ad-tech strategy. The plan is to take all that data it has from wireless subscribers and its internet services and deliver way more targeted ads on television. Today on Marketplace Tech, we dig into how this would work in Quality Assurance, the segment where we take a closer look at a big tech story. Molly talks with Ad Age media reporter Jeanine Poggi. (09/28/18)

Much of the physical makeup of the internet lies on the ocean floor in the form of fiber optic cables that snake between continents. They’re what allow you to send email or Facebook messages to friends around the world. But just like roads get clogged with traffic, these information highways are starting to get clogged, too. An ambitious initiative out of Finland is underway to solve the problem by laying a new route through the one body of water still largely untouched by sea cables: the Arctic Ocean. (09/26/18)

Searching the web is one of the most revealing things you can do. It shows what you're looking to buy, where you want to go and if you're worried about a weird rash. When you search Google, those searches help power its huge digital advertising networks, which is why you might see skin cream ads for that rash days later, on a totally different website. But do people know how much information they're giving up? And do they care? Molly Wood looks at search engine DuckDuckGo - the “anti-Google” - and growing investment in it. (09/24/18)

It used to be that stories of tech companies breaking all the rules and fighting city hall were considered sexy. But right now we’re having conversations with more suspicion about things like unproven driverless technology, online advertising, unstoppable data collection and automation. Yet, here with a defense of tech’s disruptive mentality is Bradley Tusk. He's a political operative turned tech consultant who has a new book called “The Fixer.” It’s full of pirate stories of him helping heroic startups like Uber work around innovation-killing politicians and their rules. Molly Wood talks with Tusk about the politics of tech. (09/24/18)

This week, we've been covering how technology has changed investing and will continue to change it. That conversation leads us to artificial intelligence. A Wall Street industry poll earlier this year said a majority of hedge funds are now using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help them make trades. Huge quant funds are even fighting Google and Facebook for engineers to crunch tons of data and build algorithms to predict the next great stock buy. This has all made markets faster, more efficient and more accessible to online investors. On the other hand, there are some worrying aspects. We dig into that in Quality Assurance, our Friday segment where we take a deeper look at a big tech story. Host Molly Wood talks with Simone Foxman of Bloomberg. (09/21/18)

A few decades ago, a company had to go public in order to attract enough investment to grow significantly. But times have changed. According to The Wall Street Journal, last year $2.4 trillion in private money was raised in the United States compared to $2.1 trillion in public markets. What’s that mean for ordinary investors? Molly Wood puts that question to Nizar Tarhuni, head analyst at research firm PitchBook, and Howard Marks, CEO of StartEngine, a company that allows everyday investors to put money into private companies. (09/20/18)

Marketplace Tech is exploring investment technology as part of the Divided Decade project on the financial crisis of 2008. This is the second half of host Molly Wood’s conversation with Brad Katsuyama, whose IEX stock exchange aims to address some of the negative impacts of high-frequency trading by slowing down the system — by a whole 350 millionths of a second. This speed bump caused what Katsuyama calls “one of the biggest controversies” in the stock market’s recent history as IEX sought approval. (09/19/18)

Marketplace Tech is spending all week looking at the risks technology can introduce to investing. Today, part one of a look at high-frequency trading. Critics of too much high-frequency trading say it makes markets vulnerable to manipulation, and the algorithms that fuel it can cause abrupt dips and rises in stock prices. Brad Katsuyama is a former big bank trader who's the subject of the 2014 Michael Lewis book "Flash Boys." He started studying high-frequency trading before the 2008 financial crash and eventually decided to start his own stock exchange to remove the influence of trading technologies that he says rig the market. Molly Wood talks with Katsuyama and Jonathan Macey, professor of corporate law at Yale, about the implications of high-frequency trading. (09/18/18)