Money Talks: Moonshooters
Money Talks from The Economist
The Economist
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Microsoft announced its biggest ever deal, spending $69bn on games publisher Activision Blizzard to advance its ambitions in gaming and the metaverse. The world’s most powerful tech companies are racing to splash their cash on frontier technologies. We crunch the numbers on where they are investing their billions and ask whether these new corporate moonshots will supercharge productivity or further entrench the giants’ dominance in the future.
Rachana Shanbhogue hosts, with Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft, and Margrethe Vestager, competition commissioner for the European Union.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | With so much uncertainty in the world, businesses need a solid plan that they can implement |
| 0:04.8 | quickly. |
| 0:05.8 | A plan that's ambitious enough to drive the scale of transformation with practical solutions |
| 0:10.4 | to provide real-world results. |
| 0:12.5 | With over 9,000 professionals in 120 countries, the EY Parthenon teams help businesses realise |
| 0:18.5 | their strategy with speed and certainty. |
| 0:21.2 | To learn more about EY Parthenon's individual approach to strategy and tech-enabled transformation, |
| 0:26.8 | research, EY Parthenon and real-world strategy now. |
| 0:39.1 | Big tech has money to burn. |
| 0:42.0 | From flying cars to quantum computers, gene editing to space travel, the world's most |
| 0:48.2 | powerful companies are on a record-breaking investment spree. |
| 0:53.8 | As they race to secure their places in the future, are the giants of today squeezing out |
| 0:59.3 | their potential challenges. |
| 1:03.6 | You're listening to Money Talks from The Economist, our weekly podcast on the markets, |
| 1:08.4 | the economy and the world of business. |
| 1:10.6 | I'm Ratchna Shadboke and this week we're exploring Big Tech's new frontiers. |
| 1:16.0 | It's almost existential for us that we're constantly thinking about what's coming next, |
| 1:22.4 | which is a notoriously hard problem. |
| 1:26.2 | We'll look at where the tech giants are placing their bets and the new technologies they believe |
| 1:31.5 | will shape the future. |
| 1:33.0 | If you go into biotech or if you go into robotics or if you go into climate tech, |
| 1:39.4 | whether they are going to be the ones with the competitive edge, I think is a much more open question. |
... |
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