Business & Tech Flock of GM Cruise Self-Driving Cars Just Plain Stop Working, Block Gough Street ‘For a Couple of Hours’ The latest self-driving car mishap comes courtesy of a cluster of GM Cruise driverless taxis that simply stopped in their tracks “for a couple of hours” Wednesday night and had to be manually pushed off the street by GM employees.
Business & Tech Top FCC Commissioner Demands Apple and Google Yank TikTok From Their App Stores A leading FCC commissioner calls Chinese-owed TikTok an “unacceptable national security risk” and is ordering both Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores, and the clock is ticking on his July 8 deadline.
Business & Tech SF-Based Pokémon GO Creator Niantic is Laying Off Nearly 100, Canceling Games Not Named Pokémon GO Just six months after being handed $300 million, but a full six years since their last real hit, the game company behind Pokémon GO is letting “85 to 90 jobs” go.
Business & Tech Facebook and Instagram are Deleting Posts About Abortion Pills, Sometimes ‘Within Seconds’ Big Brother is declaring it’s a thoughtcrime to mention the availability of abortion pills on Meta’s Facebook or Instagram platforms. But the exact same posts are staying up if they substitute the words “guns” or “weed” for “abortion pills.”
SF Politics Unable to Rage on Twitter, Trump Unleashes 'Truth' Storm on Truth Social About Bombshell Jan. 6 Witness Trump is clearly upset by the implications — and actual truth? — behind testimony on Tuesday by a bombshell witness to the inside dealings on January 6th, because why else would he go full Twitter rant on his barely relevant alt-right app?
Business & Tech 40-Story Tower at the Foot of Van Ness Goes Before Planning for Reapproval as Rental Apartments Days before its entitlements are set to expire, a very tall proposed residential tower at Van Ness and Market is headed before the Planning Commission this week, now as a significantly larger, all-rental property.
Business & Tech Chevron Selling Off Headquarters In San Ramon, But Richmond Refinery Staying Put Oil and gas giant Chevron is downsizing its Bay Area footprint and moving a bunch of employees from San Ramon to Houston, but sorry Richmond residents, that often-flaring refinery is not going anywhere.
Business & Tech Dreamforce Coming Back With ’Tens of Thousands’ Attending In September, Because What Could Go Wrong Apparently Salesforce is confident enough that COVID-19 will be a non-factor three months from now that they’re bringing back a large-scale Dreamforce, but they’re being a little vague on whether they’ll allow 170,000 people again.
Business & Tech More Layoffs Come to Netflix, With 300 People Losing Jobs Today After a rough start to the year and a severe drop-off in subscribers after pandemic binge-watching ended — and after pulling out of Russia — Netflix is doing more belt-tightening, with layoffs hitting 3% of its staff on Thursday.
Business & Tech Feds Order Juul to Pull All Products Off the U.S. Market The formerly SF-based Juul has been ordered by the FDA to pull all of its products off U.S. shelves, as regulatory scrutiny of the vaping industry starts to kick in.
SF News GLIDE’s ‘Lunch With Warren Buffett’ Auction Fetches Record $19 Million The annual Glide auction of a lunch with legendary investor Warren Buffett just finished its last-ever bidding, and it goes out on a high note of raising $19 million for poverty and hunger programs.
SF News Early June RSA Conference at Moscone Reportedly a ‘Hotbed for COVID-19,’ Attendees Call It ‘Super Spreader Event’ The “risk professionals” at a recent SF security conference may not have factored in the risk of a largely maskless event at the height of an Omicron surge, as hundreds of attendees say they caught the virus while networking to battle computer viruses.
Business & Tech SpaceX Employees Say Elon Musk's Twitter Persona Is an 'Embarrassment' as Musk Addresses Twitter Employees The same day that Elon Musk was addressing the employees of Twitter — which could become the fifth company Musk currently lords over if a deal to buy it goes through — employees at SpaceX posted an open letter urging the rest of SpaceX's leadership to acknowledge and account for Musk's behavior.
Business & Tech Jack Dorsey-Founded Payments Platform Block Is Bolting From Its Mid-Market Office Space Another big tech firm is eliminating its mid-Market presence in San Francisco, with digital payment firm Block saying it will not renew its giant lease at 1455 Market.
Business & Tech CEO of Once-SF-Based Crypto Exchange Kraken Wants Employees to Know That If They Want to Debate Pronouns They're Welcome to Quit Jesse Powell, the CEO of Kraken, which is second only to Coinbase in the world of crypto exchanges, may be exhibiting some of the stress of the moment as crypto prices plummet.
Business & Tech Bill Gates Disses Crypto, NFTs as 'Greater Fool' Follies at UC Berkeley Event Billionaire Bill Gates, serving as a counterpoint to fellow billionaire and noted crypto enthusiast Elon Musk, had some choice words Tuesday for the currently tanking cryptocurrency and NFT universe.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Will Answer Twitter Employee Questions at All-Hands Meeting — What Could Go Wrong? Would-be new owner of a newly privatized Twitter, Elon Musk, is set to address the company's employees directly on Thursday for the first time since making his buyout offer in April, and he'll be taking questions.
Business & Tech Google Engineer Claims AI Chatbot Has a ‘Soul,’ Gets Put On Leave, Predictably Becomes Techie Hero and Martyr Brogrammers nationwide are hailing the “findings” of a Google engineer who says the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot has “consciousness and a soul,” but his jeremiad has gotten him placed on administrative leave.
SF News Monday Morning Headlines: Google to Settle Wage-Disparity Suit for $118M Google is settling a five-year-old class-action suit brought by female employees over wages, the Muni bond appears to have failed by 1.5% of the vote, and Newsom says the Boudin recall was very "predictable."
Business & Tech Persistent Remote-Work Rules Could Well Kill SF's Downtown Hospitality Scene Economists don't expect that metropolitan areas will see more than half their workers return in-person in the coming years, and that could mean disaster for many small businesses around SF's Financial District and SoMa.
Business & Tech High Times on the Hook For $5 Million In Unpaid Rent at Failed Union Square Dispensary Space High Times magazine’s foray into cannabis dispensaries has been fraught with troubles, and a judge just ruled they have to pay up the $5 million in back rent they’ve racked up on the former John Varvatos space in Union Square.
Business & Tech Russian Dissident Alexei Navalny Says Google and Meta Are Enabling Putin's War Machine By Banning Ads Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny gave an address to an international democracy summit suggesting that tech platforms like Google and Facebook have given a "gift" to Putin by shutting down all advertising.
Business & Tech You're Finally Going to Be Able to Unsend and Edit Sent Texts on the iPhone Apple announced some software updates Monday as part of its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, which include the *gamechanging* new ability to edit and unsend texts in Messages after you've sent them.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Tells Tesla Employees to Stop Working From Home, Or They Can ‘Pretend to Work Somewhere Else’ A leaked email shows that Musk declared to Tesla employees Tuesday that “Remote work is no longer acceptble” [sic] and the work-from-home ride is over for Tesla engineers and execs.
Business & Tech Sheryl Sandberg Steps Down As Facebook/Meta COO, Ending an Era Longtime Facebook/Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg announced Wednesday afternoon that she is leaving her role as COO of the company after 14 years, which is probably an indicator that she's no longer interested in defending the company against storms of its own creation.
