Business & Tech Veritas Investments May Have Found a Buyer for Its Defaulted Loan Portfolio, and It’s an Ex-Westfield Mall Owner A new buyer has emerged for the nearly $1 billion in defaulted properties for the city’s biggest residential landlord Veritas Investments, and its Brookfield Properties, a partner that just walked away from the Westfield Centre shopping mall.
SF Politics Elon Musk Claims He’ll Spend $100,000 to Beat Dean Preston In 2024 Election Is it a blessing or a curse when perhaps the most widely loathed and cartoonish CEO in tech vows he’ll spend $100,000 to defeat you in an election? Supervisor Dean Preston will find out, as Elon Musk claimed in a tweet that he’ll pledge a hundred grand to beat the District 5 supervisor.
SF News Welp, at Least One Dreamforce Attendee Was Accosted By a Mentally Ill Person A week after Dreamforce ended, we thought, without a hitch and without any report of an unpleasant street incident, we now get a report of one such incident in which an attendee was assaulted and knocked to the ground by an unhinged suspect.
Business & Tech Cruise CEO Says SF ‘Should Be Rolling Out the Red Carpet’ for Robotaxis in TechCrunch Disrupt Interview In his first major public interview since the DMV cut their San Francisco fleet in half, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said “we cannot expect perfection” from the self-driving cars, and acknowledged a possibility they could leave town if regulators curtail them any further.
Business & Tech SF-Based Instacart Goes Public In First Big Tech IPO In Two Years Instacart had its initial public offering today, landing on the NASDAQ exchange under the stock symbol "CART." The IPO raised $660 million, with shares popping 43% in initial trading, temporarily giving the company a valuation of $14 billion.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Twitter (X) May Start Charging Everyone Elon Musk says X may have to start charging everyone to use it, to combat bots; the CEO of Square is stepping down after that huge outage; and SF's Turtle Tower restaurant has closed after 23 years.
Business & Tech Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu Has Friendly Live Chat With Elon Musk About AI, Antisemitism, and Judicial Power Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew overnight to San Francisco to have a public conversation with Elon Musk Monday morning about multiple subjects, including AI, antisemitism on Twitter/X, and the power of courts in a functioning democracy.
SF Politics Benioff Praises City Cleanup For Dreamforce, Asks Why It Can't Be Like This Every Day Apparently Dreamforce went well this week, and city efforts to clean up the area around the Moscone Center so that conventioneers didn't have to step over bodies or needles were a success.
Business & Tech Biden Administration Seeks Supreme Court Intervention In Case About Twitter 'Censorship' Brought By Republicans The Biden Administration has filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court Thursday regarding a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that pertains to government officials contacting social media platforms.
Business & Tech Tech Bigwigs Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman and Others Hold Private Meeting With Congress on Regulating AI In what seems like inviting the foxes to a forum on henhouse safety, the biggest names in AI held a secret meeting in Washington, D.C. yesterday to advise Senate leaders on how to regulate the fast-growing AI industry.
Business & Tech Feds’ Blockbuster Antitrust Suit Against Google Is Underway, Could (Maybe) Break Up Google As We Know It In what is likely the most significant tech trial of the modern internet era, the U.S. Department of Justice is arguing that Google has grown into an “illegal monopoly” for search and internet ad sales that ought to be broken up.
SF News American Eagle Sues Westfield Mall, Saying Ownership Let the Place ‘Deteriorate Into Disarray’ A new wrinkle in the Westfield Centre drama, as large tenant American Eagle Outfitters just filed a lawsuit saying Westfield management abandoned any attempt at security and allowed the place to go to hell in a handbasket.
Business & Tech Lyft Rolling Out Feature Allowing Women to Request Women Drivers The rideshare company that once put pink mustaches on cars is launching a new change intended to lure women and nonbinary riders and drivers, as those riders can now specifically request a woman driver in San Francisco and San Jose.
Business & Tech Dreamforce Arrives Tuesday, Bringing Celebrities, Street Closures, Traffic, and Breathless AI Hype Some 43,000 corporate types will converge on South of Market for SF’s biggest conference Dreamforce, which starts Tuesday, making a mess of traffic, but hopefully also a mess of money for the local hospitality biz.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Is Now Suing California Over Its New Content Moderation Law In what seems like another ill-advised move from a PR and advertiser-comfort perspective, Elon Musk's X Corp. is now suing the state of California over a new law that requires social media platforms to make their content moderation policies and methods public.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Admits to Preventing Ukrainian Drone Strike on Crimea These are extraordinary times when a billionaire capitalist is able to singlehandedly intervene in an international conflict on his own whims. But that appears to be at least partly what happened in an incident last year that's described in a new book about Elon Musk.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Square Outage Cost Bay Area Businesses Thousands; Company Says It Will Publish Full Report on the Cause Square and its parent company Block have apologized for a nationwide outage on Thursday that impacted businesses' ability to collect customer payments, but one can easily see how an outage like this is not the same as when Instagram goes down.
SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: Square Says Services Slowly Returning After Outage Square and CashApp are recovering from a Thursday outage; police in Hayward fatally shot a man holding a BB gun outside a Safeway; and a suspect in a San Jose murder trial violently attacked his own attorney in court.
Business & Tech SF-Based Square and Cash App Experience Widespread Outages, Leading to Widespread Headaches If you were trying to pay for something with Square or Cash App today and had a problem, you're not alone. Square, and its Cash App, both apps were experiencing major issues Thursday.
Business & Tech SF Loses Google Conference to Las Vegas, But Scores Big AI Conference From ChatGPT Company Google has reneged on its deal to hold the 2024 Google Cloud Next conference at Moscone Center, instead moving the event to Las Vegas, but SF did just score a big AI conference from ChatGPT producer OpenAI.
Business & Tech Marc Benioff Threatens to Move Dreamforce Conference Out of SF Over Homelessness, Drug Use The annual Dreamforce convention is still set to begin less than two weeks from now, but Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is threatening to move the whole shebang elsewhere if he thinks drug use and homelessness disrupt this year’s event.
Business & Tech OpenAI Rumored to Be Close to Signing Deal For One of Uber's Mission Bay Buildings In what would be one of the first big office-lease deals in San Francisco since the mad sublease sell-off wave began during the pandemic, AI pioneer OpenAI is said to be in "serious" talks to take one of Uber's four buildings next to the Chase Center in Mission Bay.
Business & Tech X Rolls Out Its First Non-Tweet-Related Feature, and It's a LinkedIn Competitor Saying over the weekend that he can't bring himself to look at resumes on LinkedIn because "the cringe level is so high," Elon Musk rolled out a beta version of X Hiring, which will charge verified organizations a fee to post jobs.
SF News Uber and Lyft Drivers Detail Five Most Common Screw-Ups Made by Self-Driving Cars There’s no love lost between human rideshare drivers and the self-driving car companies that hope to replace them, but the rideshare drivers are quick to point out that the robotaxis are nowhere near up to the task yet.
SF News Meet the First 17 Pop-Ups That the City Will Pay to Live Rent-Free Downtown In Revitalization Effort We learned in April that the city was offering to pay pop-ups as much as $8,000 to occupy vacant retail spaces downtown. We now know the first batch will include Devil’s Teeth Bakery, KALW, and a flea market called Sucka Flea.
