Business & Tech Appeals Court Upholds Prop. 22 Gig Worker Law, But It’s Still Likely Headed To State Supreme Court A big win for Uber and Lyft to not treat their drivers as employees, as a state appeals court has upheld the Prop. 22 law exempting rideshare companies from minimum wage and overtime rules, but this thing’s expected to go to the state Supreme Court.
Business & Tech Meta Laying Off Another 10,000 Employees, Or 13% Of Workforce It’s another 10,000 layoffs at Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, on top of the 11,000 layoffs from November, as their pandemic growth hangover collides with bad bets on Web3 and metaverse boondoggles.
Business & Tech SF-Based First Republic Bank In Huge Trouble As Shares Collapse By More Than 70%, Trading Halted The feared “contagion” from the Silicon Valley Bank collapse has now spread to banks whose branches and ATMs you see around San Francisco, as the SF-based First Republic Bank tanked in the markets over bank-run fears.
Business & Tech Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Reverberates Through Bay Area Wine Industry, Tech Startups In addition to the many local tech companies large and small that are likely to be impacted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), we're learning that they were a major lender and banking partner for the wine industry, accounting for about 2% of the bank's total business.
Business & Tech Silicon Valley Bank Shut Down By Regulators In Biggest Bank Failure In 15 Years In what may be a harbinger of more hard days ahead for the tech world in the Bay Area, a prominent lender to startups and one of the 20 largest banks in the country, SVB Financial Group or Silicon Valley Bank, has failed.
Business & Tech Tesla Faces New Federal Probe Over Possible Autopilot Crash In Walnut Creek; Also, Musk Seems to Have 'Disbanded' Their PR Department A Tesla that may have been operating in "Full Self-Driving" mode crashed into a firetruck at high speed on I-680 last month, and this has triggered a new investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Business & Tech High-Profile Tech Layoffs Continue With Thousands More Expected at Meta This Week Facebook parent entity Meta is reportedly planning to lay off thousands more employees in a second round of cuts, possibly happening as soon as this week.
Business & Tech Elizabeth Holmes Now Looking to Get Out of Possible $878 Million Restitution Bill Yeah, so, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't really think she should have to pay back the bilked investors who lost money because of Theranos's collapse, and her lawyers' latest gambit is to try to get out of her having to pay any restitution at all.
Business & Tech Another Glitchy Day at Elon Musk's Twitter, Snafu Breaks Several Features Across the Platform Twitter had a roughly 90-minute meltdown for thousands of users Monday morning, and while the platform is back up and running, these things seem to be happening more frequently in the wake of Musk's mass layoffs.
Business & Tech Well, Well, Well, Twitter Has Reinstated Its Longstanding Policy Against Violent Speech Twitter announced Wednesday that it has "made a few changes to our policies around violent content and similar language," though it is basically just a rephrasing of what Twitter's longstanding police was, pre-Elon.
Business & Tech John Oliver Goes After SF-Based OpenAI and Its ChatGPT Product: ‘The George Santos of Technology’ John Oliver’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ went on a fiery rant against AI products, pointing out how artificial intelligence is a lot more ‘artificial’ than it is ‘intelligent.’
Business & Tech Elon Musk Lays Off 200 More ‘Hardcore’ Twitter Employees; Also He Was Weirdly Quick To Defend ‘Dilbert’ Cartoonist Even sleeping on the office floor won’t buy you Elon Musk’s love at Twitter, as another 200 staffers who met his ‘hardcore’ requirements were pink-slipped Saturday night, but the “Dilbert” cartoonist did win Elon’s love over his racist diatribe.
SF News Elizabeth Holmes Had Her Second Baby and Her Lawyers Are Still Trying to Get Prison Entry Delayed New court documents reveal that convicted Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes now has two young children, and also, maybe she and Billy Evans aren't legally married after all?
Business & Tech Supreme Court Showdown: Big Tech vs the Law, with the Fate of the Internet at Stake After decades of protecting Big Tech from lawsuits, the Supreme Court is finally ready to take a look at Section 230, the 'lifeblood of the internet.' Time will tell how companies like Google and Facebook fight back.
Arts & Entertainment Elon Musk's Twitter Debacle Mocked on Mardi Gras Parade Float Complete with a sink by his side — let that sink in! — an effigy of Elon Musk appeared on a float in a Thursday night Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, showing us again that the mockery over his Twitter takeover and subsequent behavior is coming from all corners, online and off.
Business & Tech Tesla Is Now Recalling 360K Cars With 'Full Self Driving' Software Over Reported Flaws Elon Musk's other company now has another software-based recall to deal with, and it relates to some reported dangerous behaviors by the robot cars when in "Full Self-Driving" mode.
Business & Tech Report: Angry Elon Musk Alters Twitter Algorithm To Force More People To See His Tweets Furious that President Biden’s Super Bowl tweets got better engagement than his, Elon Musk reportedly forced Twitter engineers to rejigger the algorithm so more people would see his tweets.
SF News Humpday Headlines: Elon Musk Says New Twitter CEO Will Be Chosen By Year-End The wife of the man who allegedly drove his family off a Pacifica cliff doesn't want him prosecuted; norovirus is newly surging across the country; and Elon Musk now says he'll pick a new CEO for Twitter "toward the end of the year."
Business & Tech Mayor London Breed Announces Tax Breaks, Other Incentives Aimed at Reviving SF's Downtown In her State of the City address Thursday, SF Mayor London Breed announced a multipart plan aimed at revitalizing the city's beleaguered, seemingly half-empty downtown, and it involves some Twitter tax-break-style tax breaks.
Business & Tech Uber Razzed Over SF Ads That Say ‘See You In Marina District’ With Photo of Sausalito A new advertising-fail from Uber tries to localize to SF, but the campaign uses an image from the wrong city, showing Sausalito in a shot that purports to be the Marina District.
SF News Humpday Headlines: Former Twitter Execs Hauled Before Congress A House committee is grilling three former Twitter execs over the Hunter Biden laptop business, the SFMTA says Muni's "financial cliff" is coming in 2025, and Pelosi attacker David DePape is appearing in federal court today.
Business & Tech Google, Facebook, and Twitter to Be In the Crosshairs In Biden's State of the Union Address In his likely-to-be fruitless quest to boost bipartisanship in Congress, President Joe Biden is expected to launch some rhetoric in the direction of Big Tech during this evening's State of the Union address.
Business & Tech Report: Child Exploitation Content Proliferating on Twitter, Despite Musk’s Claims He’s Stamping It Out Elon Musk purports to have run a crusade against child sexual abuse material on Twitter, but researchers say it’s still spreading like wildfire on the platform, likely because so many content moderators have been laid off.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Prevails, Cleared of Wrongdoing By Jury Over His 2018 Tesla Tweets The last thing anyone should be doing is encouraging him, but Elon Musk has just won in the case of a class-action suit over his 2018 tweets about trying to take Tesla private, which turned out to be a false alarm that briefly impacted the stock price.
Business & Tech SF DBI Just Might Let Twitter Keep Its Unpermitted Bedrooms, If They Get Some Paperwork In Order The permitting dustup over unsanctioned beds and bedrooms at Twitter’s SF headquarters just might end peacefully, as the SF Department of Building Inspection is giving them a path to keep the beds, though the larger problem remains that Twitter is simply not paying rent.
