Business & Tech One Year Into the Musk Era, Twitter/X Has Fewer Users, Fewer Advertisers, Less Clout Whatever Elon Musk's ultimate vision for the platform he and almost no one else calls X may be, it is still slow to take shape, and one year into his tenure at the company, the results of his leadership aren't great.
Business & Tech Downtown Tech Office Shuts Down Its Free Cocktail Bar For Employees, CEO Says 'The Office Is Dead' An experiment in 2020s incentivizing the workplace as a dot-com-era adult playground where work also occurs has ended with a whimper in downtown SF. Tech company Expensify is shutting down its bar, which it opened earlier this year, after six months.
SF News Cruise Suspends All Driverless Operations In Multiple Cities Following CA DMV Suspension GM-owned Cruise is hitting the pause button on all of its driverless taxi operations in order to "rebuild public trust," the company says, a move that comes two days after the California DMV ordered the company to cease operating its vehicles in San Francisco without a driver present.
Business & Tech Two of SF's Largest Hotels Head Toward Receivership, Will Have a Year to Find Buyer Two enormous hotels in downtown SF, the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the Parc 55, will likely be bought up by a new owner or owners within a year, and they are now set to go into receivership shortly.
Business & Tech California DMV Suspends Cruise Robotaxis From Operating In SF, Indefinitely One of the two companies operating driverless taxis in San Francisco will no longer be able to do so, after the DMV has suspended their permit allowing them to take passengers without a test driver present.
Business & Tech Microsoft Trying to Dump Office Space at SF’s ‘Trump Tower,’ 555 California Not even a month after Microsoft announced they opened an “AI Co-Innovation Lab” at 555 California, the tech giant is now trying to lease off the space at the building that is, infamously, partially owned by Donald Trump.
SF News SF Woman Details Airbnb Nightmare of $300,000 In Water Damage by Guests In Viral Social Media Post That $3 million in damage protection that Airbnb offers hosts isn’t all it's cracked up to be, according to a viral Twitter thread of an SF Airbnb host, who says the short-term rental company is leaving her on the hook for hundreds of thousands in damages.
Business & Tech San Ramon-Based Chevron Buys Up Smaller Rival Hess for $53 Billion A big merger in Big Oil has Bay Area connections, as San Ramon’s Chevron just announced they’re acquiring a smaller rival called Hess Corp., reaping the gains of record profits generated by high gas prices.
Business & Tech Jon Stewart Is Leaving His AppleTV+ Show, May Be Butting Heads With Apple Over China Coverage There’s a problem with ‘The Problem With Jon Stewart,’ which won’t be returning for a third season because of its handling of controversial topics, and there's industry speculation that Apple doesn’t want Stewart angering the Chinese market.
Business & Tech SF-Based AI Company Anthropic Sued by Music Publishers for Using Pop Stars’ Copyrighted Work Universal Music and a ton of other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against the up-and-coming SF AI company Anthropic, alleging that its chatbot is spitting out copyrighted lyrics to their top artists’ work.
SF News Mid-Market Luxury Apartment Tower NEMA, a Symbol of Last Tech Boom, Faces Foreclosure A decade ago we were cringing in horror over the douchey marketing video for a luxury apartment tower that went up next door to the building we used to call the Twitter Building. Now, it's facing foreclosure.
Business & Tech United Airlines to Start Boarding People With Window Seats First, Aisle Seats Last Hallelujah! United Airlines is soon going to implement a new boarding procedure that it previously tested at a handful of airports, boarding economy passengers with window seats first in order to cut down on boarding time.
Business & Tech Feds Now Investigating Cruise Self-Driving Robotaxis Over Their Behavior Around Pedestrians The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a probe into an unknown number of incidents where Cruise robotaxis allegedly encroached on pedestrians, in the wake of one SF Cruise car running over a hit-and-run victim.
Business & Tech LinkedIn Lets Go of Hundreds More Employees In New Round of Layoffs Following two earlier layoff rounds that occurred this year, Bay Area-based LinkedIn announced Monday that it is slashing 668 more jobs, or 3% of its workforce.
Business & Tech Cruise Announces Software Updates to Its AVs In Response to Emergency Situations After a number of concerning incidents involving its autonomous vehicles getting in the way of fire engines and ambulances, Cruise announced a set of software improvements Thursday aimed at "minimizing operational impact" for emergency responders.
Business & Tech As Misinformation About Israel-Hamas War Proliferates, EU Threatens X/Twitter With Fines The European Union's digital enforcer has sent an urgent letter to Elon Musk about the proliferation of misinformation on X regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, "reminding" Musk of the company's obligations under the EU's Digital Services Act, and CEO Linda Yaccarino has replied.
Business & Tech Google Is Opening a Visitors' Center at Its New Campus In Mountain View for Tech Tourists Fans of the Google brand and mythology, as well as the architecturally curious, will be able to check out a new visitors' center at the company's "Gradient Canopy" office complex in Mountain View starting next week.
Business & Tech Starbucks Is Closing Seven Downtown San Francisco Locations on October 22 The 59 Starbucks locations in San Francisco will be trimmed down later this month, with Starbucks telling managers that they are permanently closing seven SF stores on October 22, adding to the city's vacancy woes.
Business & Tech Driver Strikes Pedestrian Near Fifth and Market; Cruise Car Subsequently Runs Her Over and Stops On Top Of Her A pedestrian collision Monday night is likely to provide more fodder for the debate over autonomous vehicles and how they react to certain uncommon situations — and it has Cruise once again in aggressive defense mode.
SF News Historic Warfield Building Moves Forward Toward Residential Conversion; Eight Other Downtown Buildings Could Follow While we still may be years out before we see lots of residential units hit the market in former downtown office buildings, at least eight landlords of downtown buildings are putting out feelers about converting — and the developer behind 100 Van Ness is eyeing a big building on Spear Street.
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.
