Marketplace Tech with Molly Wood

Host Molly Wood spoke with Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit — the parent company of TurboTax — about the company’s recent $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma, its biggest since 1983. The reason for this acquisition, Goodarzi says, is to advance its mission to help families with their savings, while also helping its customers about their financial literacy, like how to keep or improve a great credit score. Since many services on Credit Karma are free, and many on TurboTax are not, Molly asked how the acquisition might change things up for Credit Karma.

Jeff Bezos is putting $10 billion of his personal money into climate solutions. Will that go toward inventing new technologies to deal with the problem or scaling up what we already have? And what will make more of a difference? Host Molly Wood talks about it with Jay Koh, a managing director at the private equity firm The Lightsmith Group.

Host Molly Wood speaks with tech editor Patrick Tucker of Defense One, a news site that covers national security. They discuss Amazon’s recent court win that’s halted the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud project in partnership with Microsoft. Tucker says Amazon did this because it feels as though the contract was awarded to Microsoft simply because President Donald Trump has an iffy relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Host Molly Wood speaks with Marketplace’s workplace reporter Meghan McCarty Carino about Kickstarter’s union, which is considered a big win for Silicon Valley activists and for other tech workers. McCarty Carino says that the union looks at traditional complaints, including pay inequality and work culture, as well as newer issues involving gig workers, diversity in hiring and more.

Host Molly Wood spoke with Mark Scott, chief technology correspondent at Politico, about the potential rules that Europe wants to put in place that might, Scott says, shape the way the digital ecosystem will be for the next decade. Specifically, they spoke about what this means for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an era when his company has been subject to lots of antitrust investigation.