Business & Tech Judge Asked Whether Elon Musk Wanted to 'Cozy Up' to Trump By Refusing Order In January 6th Case We just learned this week that Special Counsel Jack Smith definitely got Donald Trump's DMs from his defunct Twitter account, but now we're getting court transcripts showing how it went down.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Brands Suspend Ads on X Over Pro-Nazi Content At least two big brands, Adobe and Gilead, have suspended their ads on Twitter/X over Nazi content; Twitter apparently did give up some of Donald Trump's DMs; and another Cruise car drove into a construction site in SF.
SF Politics Friday’s North Beach Self-Driving Car Clusterf*** Has SF Officials Begging the State to Walk Back Approval Barely 24 hours after getting state approval to run their self-driving cars at all hours in SF, Cruise robotaxis froze up en masse in North Beach Friday night. Now SF City Hall is urging a state commission to go into reverse on that approval.
Business & Tech State Commission Votes to Approve Autonomous Taxi Expansion In San Francisco In Historic Vote The California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 on Thursday night, after over seven hours of public comment, to approve the expansion of robotaxi service in San Francisco to 24 hours — and approved both Cruise and Waymo to take paid fares at all hours.
Business & Tech Over 200 Members of the Public Set to Give Comment at PUC Hearing on Robotaxis The hearing on expanding autonomous-vehicle taxi service in San Francisco has gotten underway at the California Public Utilities Commission — and a long line of attendees and possible speakers during the public-comment portion was visible at Van Ness and McAllister on Thursday morning.
Business & Tech One Autonomous Vehicle Appeared to Chase a Fire Truck; Another Blocked a Fire Truck From Getting Out of Its Station On the eve of a key vote by a state commission on whether to allow Cruise and Waymo to further expand their autonomous vehicle testing and begin taking paid passengers all over SF, we're getting to see some of the 55 incident reports filed by the SF Fire Department involving AVs.
SF News City Buys Former Zendesk HQ On Market Street, Will Make It ‘Mental Health Service Center’ A full reversal from an Ed Lee-era “Twitter tax break” deal, as after Zendesk bailed from 2019 Market Street during the pandemic, the City of San Francisco is buying the property with plans to transform it into a “mental health service center.”
SF Politics Special Counsel Got Search Warrant For Trump's Twitter Account, and Twitter Fought It There might be something in Donald Trump's DMs that's relevant to Special Counsel Jack Smith's January 6th case, and we're just now learning that Smith got a search warrant for Trump's dormant Twitter account back in January.
SF News Cops, Firefighters, and of Course Taxi Drivers Tee Off on Self-Driving Robotaxis Before Key Regulatory Vote Firefighters complain “it is not our job to babysit their vehicles” as Cruise and Waymo road glitches are on the uptick ahead of Thursday’s CPUC vote on whether to allow more robotaxis in SF. Oh, and Willie Brown is now a lobbyist for Cruise.
Business & Tech As Quickly As It Went Up, the 'X' On Top of the Twitter Building Is Gone The defiance of Elon Musk seems to have some limits, as the X on top of what I guess we're now supposed to refer to as the X Building was removed on Monday morning, after a weekend of neighbor complaints.
Business & Tech Turning 'Tweets' Into 'Xs' Not Likely Happening In the General Lexicon Anytime Soon While Elon Musk can order all the graphics and signs swapped out that he likes, he actually doesn't have the power to erase a verb and a noun from our contemporary vocabulary.
Business & Tech Musk Is Sacrificing Billions In Brand Value and Recognition By Killing Off Twitter Name, Analysts Say What do we even call a tweet now?
Business & Tech Renegade Group Disabling Self-Driving Cars With Orange Cones Speaks Out A local TV station spent a night with the monkey-wrench gang that’s been stopping self-driving cars with mere orange cones, and yes, it seems this incredibly simple hack does indeed work.
SF News Anchor Brewing Co. Employees Now Trying to Buy the Brewery, Make It A Worker-Owned Co-Op There’s yet another bid for the bankrupt, 127-year-old Anchor Brewing Co., and the call is coming from inside the house, as brewery employees are launching a seemingly longshot bid to buy the company.
Business & Tech SF Says Driverless Car Problems ‘Skyrocketing,’ Techies Fume at Our Lack of Enthusiasm for the Glitches The SFMTA says that dangerous incidents with self-driving robotaxis have increased exponentially in recent months, while Cruise, Waymo, and their associated venture capitalist types excoriate SF for not adequately loving the buggy self-driving cars.
SF News City Report Says Remote Work Cost SF $484 Million In Tax Revenue In 2021 A new report from top SF City Hall economists says that it’s troublesome how the city’s five largest taxpayers pay 25% of all the city’s business taxes, and that remote work changes by top taxpayers companies lowered SF tax revenue by $484 million in 2021.
Business & Tech As Promised, Elon Musk Has Launched an AI Company, xAI Restless billionaire Elon Musk has just launched a sixth company that he'll be overseeing, this one hoping to get into the artificial intelligence space and, ahem, "understand the true nature of the universe."
Business & Tech Threads Beats ChatGPT to 100 Million User Milestone; Twitter Traffic Allegedly 'Tanking' Meta's Threads app, which just went live last Wednesday evening, already reached 100 million users on Sunday, handily beating ChatGPT's recently set record for achieving that many users in a brief span of time.
SF News Tuesday Morning Topline: Judge Declines to Block Microsoft-Activision Deal A federal judge in SF has declined to block Microsoft's $69 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard; Elizabeth Holmes has already seen her sentence reduced by two years, and a man was shot and injured in West Oakland Tuesday morning.
Bay Area Sports New York Times Completely Guts Its Sports Section, Sources It to SF-Based The Athletic The NY Times will now source its sports coverage from SF’s The Athletic, which has poached a ton of prestigious sportswriters, pulled $140 million in VC money, was bought up by the NYT, though has never shown a profit.
Business & Tech Four More East Bay Chain Hotels Being Surrendered to Lenders In Nationwide Loan Default This is not just a Bay Area “doom loop” story, as Dallas-based Ashford Hospitality Trust is handing back the keys to 19 U.S. hotels, four of which are in Oakland, Newark, and Walnut Creek.
Business & Tech Pranksters Claim They Can Stop Self-Driving Cars With Orange Cones, Waymo and Cruise Not Amused A viral video this week made the curious claim that self-driving robotaxis on SF streets can be brought to a halt with the placement of an orange cone on the vehicle’s hood. Cruise and Waymo have both responded that the jokers doing this need to knock it off.
Business & Tech Elon-Zuck Battle Heats Up With Musk Threatening Lawsuit Over Meta’s Copycat Product Threads Elon Musk’s lawyer sent Mark Zuckerberg a quasi-cease-and-desist letter complaining that Meta poached “dozens of Twitter employees” (whom Musk had fired!) to create the Twitter knock-off Threads, and even implies that Zuckerberg played a role in Twitter’s recent glitches.
Business & Tech SF-Based Pokémon Go Creator Niantic Labs Celebrates Game’s Seventh Anniversary After Layoff Of 25% of Staff To be fair, Niantic Labs is also doing a bunch of game promotions and specials for Pokémon Go’s seventh anniversary, but that’s probably little comfort to the 230 employees the company just laid off.
SF News Thursday Morning What's Up: Two More Conferences Cancel at Moscone for 2024 SFPD is searching for a female suspect in Monday's Bayview shoving homicide; a toddler was killed in Vallejo by a car backing out of a driveway; and two moderate-sized conferences have canceled at the Moscone Center for next year.
