Trump. My first takeaway is that donald trump is not the man sending off a lot of the tweets he fires off. Maybe the ones in the middle of the night, but not all the time. Ellen not all the time. Brad, who runs the data operations for the organization, for the trump company, i mean organization, campaign. He is doing some of the tweeting. Mr. Trump does some himself. But while he is on stage, if you have been wondering who mans the twitter buttons, it is brad. We introduce you to him in this story. Carol he is a big deal in the Trump Campaign, how did he get there . It is not the usual route. This is not a political strategist type. Ellen no, he is not a career politician. That is one of the interesting things about the story, it takes you behind the scenes. He works in san antonio, and somehow he was hired to do websites for the Trump Organization david on the street. On the cheap. For the trumprelated parities. Ellen on the cheap. And for some of the trump related charities. When it came to mount the campaign, he was hired to do the Campaign Website for 1500. Carol unbelievable. Ellen it was not expensive. You cannot do that in new york or washington, lets put it that way. Over time, hes worked with Jared Kircher in Stephen Bannon for a data operation. David talk about that operations. Yes, it exists within the Donald Trump Campaign and that the work with the Republican National committee. How well is the working out . What does the apparatus look like . What does the donald trump digital apparatus look like . Ellen it is principally sort of the commander, Jared Kushner his soninlaw, he is married to ivanka. And he comes from a real estate family and owns the new york observer, that everybody reads. The new york little newspaper. He was the one who decided we have to build this up. Once the primaries were over. And so they used some of the rnc data that Reince Priebus built up and worked on after the romney defeat. So they used some of that data. They hired outside providers, and they kind of combined it with their own analytics that they were developing on their own to really be able to target their likely voters. Hence, it is called the alamo project. Carol you said it is not like they were trying to get a lot of broad information out, they really did target their viewers not viewers but supporters, if you will. He built up a really big base that he ultimately owns, donald trump. Ellen he will own this data. It is a huge number of names, it is millions and millions of names. It could be used for any number of things. It could be used if he decided to try to run in 2020, if he wanted to become the maker of a new party or a new movement, or a new network. I know in sums each he said he was not interested in a tv network, but theres so much talk about it. And look, he is doing his own independent media. The campaign has been broadcasting on facebook. Carol it is not like he likes tv or anything. [laughter] ellen no, it is not like he doesnt know anything about it. This data could be used for commercial purposes. It could be a media empire or breitbart empire. It is a little unclear. It has huge commercial potential and huge political potential. David your reporters talk to Stephen Bannon, which is a rare thing because he is not talking. What is your biggest take away . From what he had to say about the way this is structured in the Trump Campaign . Ellen i think there are two. One obvious take away, most people think the campaign is his public thing. Trumps speeches and his tweets, but they are more sophisticated then they lead on an much more professional than they let on. I do not think they are doing anything super cuttingedge, but they are on it. While they know it is unlikely they will win, they still have not completely given up. So that is one thing. The other is they could commercialize it. The other thing they talked about was voter suppression. A and that they are doing research and figuring out what the votes they want to stop. Who did they want to keep from coming to the polls . It is shown women, it is africanamericans among others. And so they are putting out ads and putting out messages like the bill clintonwomen issue to try and suppress those votes. That you do not often see, and that is not maybe the major point of our story, but it jumped out at me. Carol great story. A lot more strategy dan we realized. We talked with creative director rob vargas about how he created the cover. Robert we had a pretty good shoot of the command center and the way people who work for the campaign describes it, a very sophisticated, technologically advanced. We will sort of leave it up to the readers what they see the photos, it is like, guys sitting around laptops, a couple of tv screens david cold coffee. Robert yeah. So maybe we thought it would not necessarily be the way to go on the cover. But we kind of wanted to reference the fact it is, trump is this huge personality but it feels like a bit of a scrappy operation. We went with the conceptual idea, which was an old looking usb drive and post it note and just labeling it trumps plan b. David how hard was it find . A thumb drive that that that image of weight you wanted to do . Robert some some drives are really hard thumb drives are really cool these days. It was harder to get. I had to send an email throughout the whole office. David trumps plan b, how did you come up with the phrase, first of all, and how did it come to be on the cover . Robert we wanted to get the fact that all of this information and data they have is for what they are planning to do, whether or not he wins or loses. It is not clear what it is, but they have a plan. Plan b references in the data is in the usb drive and will implement after the election. David there is an international edition. The cover story is a piece on twitter. How did you decide to illustrate that the way in which you did . A giant firehose on the cover. Robert we took it directly from the story. Twitter refers to all of the information gathered by their users as a firehose. We went literally. It is like the first picture of a firehose we found and just sort of formatted it as a tweet. David you have a firehose, you want to have a firehose. How do you decide to feature it so it is not taking over the whole cover . Say it is there in the middle and there is text that is small. Robert we wanted to make it look like a tweet. David within the character limits . Robert yeah. We kept it very simple. We made sure the photograph was not too professionally shot, it feels like a found photograph. David rob, thank you. Carol massar spoke with a reporter who reported that these, ben elgin. Carol when i think about twitter, i love it. Most people in the media love it it. I feel like it is the place you can have free speech. That has kind of been the nation of it. Fair to say . Ben absolutely. Part of the Mission Statement and we of seeing it play out. Places like the middle east, arab springs where the traditional media was regulated. Twitter allows people to discuss themselves freely, organize, and it has given people more of a voice than they otherwise would have had. Carol we talk about arab springs and probably would not have happened without social media. Twitter, they put out a lot of information and that information, those tweets can be monitored, and they are. Ben absolutely. There is a sort of a Cottage Industry that has sprung up to monitor and tap into social media data. Twitter is the biggest source of this. These companies that do the monitoring, they gather it up, and they sort of slice it and dice it and put on their own technology. Anybody willing to pay for it can tap into this vast knowledge about people. Carol twitter is doing this. Tell us what it is called. The firehose . Ben that is what they call their huge data stream. Every day, you have got 500 million tweets. It is just an immense amount of data from all over the world. Twitter is making a business out of selling that data. It is a fastgrowing part of their business. You have the firehose, which is the full stream of data. And then they sell various levels of it. Ok, some people only want what they call the decahose, which is only one out of 10. End if you dont want to pay, you can still get about one out of every 100 week. Every 100 tweets. There are various levels. Carol it is interesting. You think of twitter as a place you can put things out there and be very transparent. It is a business going on at where they are selling too, if you will. From what ive read, it is a growing business. A profitable business. Ben yeah. It is hard to say profitable, but it is growing. It is growing at twice the pace of the rest of twitters business. Obviously, twitter right now is struggling a bit. They have layoffs coming up. They have not reached profitability. Any glimpse of hope is important. One of those things is this data sales business and analysts and investors are very keen on this. Might this be a way for them to clear hurdles and become a profitable business . David macau steals pages from las vegas playbooks. And how china has calmed global fears of chinese takeovers. David welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am david gura. Macau takes some inspiration from las vegas. Carol massar spoke with our Bloomberg Business bureau chief, chris palmeri. Chris you remember las vegas in the 1990s, knocking get out of the park with these projects. We are seeing a similar thing in macau. We have a ferris wheel built into the side of a casino. Or a replica of the eiffel tower. Or even a lake with synchronized fountains of a celine dion song. Las vegas is being replicated in macau. David you had a lot of wealthy chinese going to play back play baccarat. Then a corruption breakdown, what happened in macau after that . Chris huge. It was a place for these high rollers to spend incredible amounts of money on baccarat. And as the Chinese Government cracked down, those people disappeared. The last thing they wanted was more conspicuous consumption. The whole city had to adjust to a new type of customer. They are sure to attract a middle crowd. Still a welltodo person. Maybe even bring their family. Instead of the gucci and prada, they have h m. They are planning events for the kids and doing historical tours. It is a different kind of customer. Carol is it working . That is a big change from what it was. Is it drumming up revenue . Is it bringing more families to macau . More gamblers . More tourists . Chris we have to wait and see. In the last two months, gambling has been up after a more than twoyear slump. There seems to be more visitors coming, but it is not a huge, huge increase. And so this may be a slow build. David you mentioned steve wynn. Sheldon adelson is involved in macau as well. They are not new to the place. They have been there before. Are they kind of pioneering this transition . Is this something they thought about doing before the crackdown . Chris i can remember in 2002 when Sheldon Adelson first started talking about macau. And he said, you know, were going to build this strip on land that was reclaimed from the ocean. They had to fill it all in. I thought, this is crazy. He spent 12 billion building these properties. But he has been way ahead of the curve. He has a Sheraton Hotel and a holiday in. He is trying to appeal to the massmarket customer they think will come from all over asia, not just china. Carol talk about the Chinese Government. Not just their approval, help, or assistance. Chinese growth still enviable by probably most of the world but it is slowing down. I am just curious what role the Chinese Government is playing in all of this. Chris a big role. If you look at what happened to las vegas, it happened over 40 years. It was organic growth because casinos were spreading over the u. S. , and las vegas had to think of a new strategy. In macau, it is opposite. The government said, we want nongambling tourists. You need to create more nongambling of amenities and they have 10 limiting the number of gambling tables quite a bit. The new casinos have 100 baccarat tables. When you asked them how much they wanted, 400 or 500 when they started building these places, so it is a real government mandate. David sticking with china, how some chinese firms are calming fears about the countrys global buying spree. Carol massar and i spoke with matt campbell. Matt we see a big swell in m a. Really all over the the place. China is a obviously it is a very large transaction, which tends to distort agriculture. But we are seeing chinese activity across entertainment, transportation, hospitality, finance, and insurance. This really a broadbased wave, and it is washing up in the u. S. And europe and everywhere else in the world. Carol lets talk about why it is happening. I am thinking, this lowyear old environment and everybody trying to find opportunity. Tell me why we are seeing this slow chinese money into european companies. Matt i think there is a hunt for yields, and that is true across all investors and all countries. In the chinese case, were seeing a very concerted push by companies, large and small, encouraged by the government to go abroad in order to acquire technology, ideas, intellectual property, new markets. This is a really industrial strategy, as much as it is financial, to make Chinese Companies global competitors. There is a financial motivation, it is about building big global businesses as well. David what has the reaction been from shareholders, executives, the governments of the countries which the takeovers are based to the m a activity we are seeing . Matt it is a mix. We are seeing some Chinese Companies, alibabas of the world have a relatively straightforward time of it when they try to make larger deals abroad. They are not encountering large amounts of opposition. Though, of course, there is some. On the other hand, we have situations like in germany with extron where governments are upset about the prospect as they see as Strategic Technology falling into foreign read chinese hands. It is not anywhere near a level Playing Field for Chinese Companies. They will face suspicion in a lot of countries. But there are still a Critical Mass of deals getting done and that is a big change from a couple of years ago. David when a union isnt a union, at least when it comes to uber. One company is emerging as a clear winner. David welcome back to Bloomberg Businessweek. I am david gura. You can listen to us on sirius xm. In new york, boston, washington, d. C. , and the bay area. In the technology section, uber is trying to convince new york regulators the drivers have a union already. Sort of. There is a catch, as reporter Josh Eidelson told carol massar. Josh there is no union in the sense we understand it on the National Labor relations act that wins recognition from the government or from uber to represent is drivers. Uber maintains its drivers are independent contractors who do not have the union right. That the new deal gives to employees. There are however a number of groups around the country that have been trying to organize and mobilize uber drivers. As of the past several months, there is a group that uber and the Machinist Union of claim represents all of the uber drivers in new york despite not having formal collect them collective bargaining or some of the rings we associate with a union traditionally. Carol youre talking about idg, the independent Drivers Guild . Josh right. It is funded in part by uber that does not have collective bargaining. It was not selected in some formal way by uber drivers, but it has a seat at the table where they meet with uber and provide various perks to drivers. They have some opportunity at least for input to persuade or pressure uber to make policy changes. They have a partnership with the company to lobby for changes like more favorable tax treatment for uber rides, which they say will go into a benefits fund for uber drivers. To get this, the idg has made concessions. They agree that will not try for Traditional Union though they could pull out if the legal status of uber drivers was determined to allow that. They have agreed to not to go on strike or challenge ubers practice of treating drivers as contractors rather than employees. Him the so of course, there is still some controversy. David also in the technology section, the space race rivalry between Jeff Bezos Blue Origin and Richard BransonsVirgin Galactic is heating up. Carol massars spoke with editor jeff muskus. Carol bezos has so many things like getting people into space. Talk to us about his blue origin and what they are doing will stop and what they are doing. Jeff they had a successful rocket launch. From west texas and the airfield, they blasted off this rocket to other flight accessible places. And this time they added a new twist, the peak of the aerodynamic stress, the rocket successfully tested its midflight emergency escape system which will be of comfort to the crew next year when they are aboard and hopefully paying passengers a year after that. Carol what is his timeline . Jeff the timeline right now is to man the test craft sometime next year and a year or so after that, they will put paying customers aboard. Carol i grew up with my dad as an aeronautical engineer, involved in the first space race. If you will, in terms of doing guided assistance. I feel like we are going into a second space race with wellknown billionaires. You have the jeff bezos. You have elon musk. And you also have richard branson. Jeff they are operating two parallel trails. Musks spacex is capable of orbital space flights. The rocket has made about nine flights right now to the International Space station. He carol he is the one was gone really far. Jeff thats right. He is able to go twic