Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Previously on We don't know exactly what happened yet, but I think we suspect and I would bet dollars to dimes that the story is very similar to a case we had in La recently where a young woman was basically stabbed for no reason by a psychotic homeless person.
San Francisco police arrested thirty eight year old Nima Monmeni.
Suspect is another tech executive who knew lye.
While we're not going to release any additional facts at this time, I must point out that reckless and irresponsible statements like those contained in mister Musk's tweet that assumed incorrect circumstances about mister Lee's death served to mislead the world in their perceptions of San Francisco and also negatively impact the pursuit of justice for victims of crime.
A jury has just found Nimo Momenti guilty of second degree murder in killing a cash app founder Bob Lee. Didn't turn out to be a first degree murder guilty.
It is second degree murder.
When you spend a year reporting out a murder story, you accidentally learn a thing or two about how to commit crimes. For example, if.
You commit a serious crime in San Francisco, do not cross a bridge. My god, there's bridge tolls, there's surveillance cameras, there's plate readers. If you commit a crime and you cross a bridge in any direction, you're getting picked up.
This is my source from the police department. He has deep knowledge of the Bob Lee murder case, and he wants to remain anonymous. We're having a voice actor read what he told us, and he said something surprising that the police figured out that the main suspect was Nima mong Many almost immediately.
I believe that his vehicle was picked up on a building surveillance camera first, and at that point, okay, we have a vehicle near a homicide scene.
Let's see where a vehicle is traveling.
Once police had a photo of the car, they pulled a DMV record, and then they had just about everything else.
We have a suspect, we run their criminal histories, we run their driving history, we run their vehicles that are linked to them, and any firearms as well.
The department had put together a full profile sheet on Nimo MOMENTI just over forty eight hours after Bobley was stabbed, complete with pictures of Nima smiling into the camera pulled from his social media profiles. The information was kept tightly under wraps. Only a few specialized units within San Francisco Police knew his identity. Even many cops themselves weren't sure what to believe.
When there's a lack of information put out through official channels, Cops, like anybody else, liked to gossip and try to come up with their own answers.
There was all kinds of speculation.
There are plenty of cops here who jumped on the bandwagon of it was a homeless guy that stabbed him, because that's what was tweeted out by somebody I know. I heard somebody else bring up it was probably a B girl thing. That's from the California penal code six forty seven B, which is prostitution.
We call them b girls. Rich guy, super late at night.
It's not like it could have been a robbery. But why was he down there in the first place.
During this time, misinformation was running wild, and city officials were getting it from all directions.
It was a tough time.
It was a tough time for all of us.
That's Brooke Jenkins, the District Attorney of San Francisco.
There was a lot of pressure on the police who not only saw that case, but to investigate it in a way that made it fool proof. Multiple of us were up for reelection very soon.
The next year, the mayor d A. Jenkins, and many other city leaders would all be up for reelection. So they wanted to squash this narrative that San Francisco was a failed city led by buffoons who were so useless and the neft that they allowed this great tech guy to get killed. But also, this was not the kind of case you could lose. You needed a conviction, so they needed to be thorough.
You're trying to collect evidence before it's disposed of, before somebody knows that you're on their heels.
What she told me was that some city officials wanted to announce, hey, we know who the killer is much more quickly, and this became an argument.
Those were tough conversations, right when you're getting calls from city hall that want to counter what we believe is
the right thing to do for the case. It's hard because we all, you know, as public officials, have the same interest in wanting San Francisco's reputation to be what it should be right to correct this false narrative, and we all knew that during that timeframe, however long it took, which ended up being a few days, that this story and this narrative was going to continue and we were going to be under fire. And so that was a tough time.
When I finally had some distance from Bob Lee's death and all the media and arguing surrounding it, it felt like I was waking up after a wild night out. I kept wondering, Wait, how did things get so out of control? Why did Bob's death receive so much scrutiny. He was beloved and respected among people who knew him, sure, but not exactly a household name. So why did this blow up the way it did. The two things I
kept coming back to were time and place. The same way that people would say that Bob had been in the wrong place at the wrong time at the end of his life, it seemed possible this whole story took off at the worst possible time, in the most explosive place it could have happened. I'm talking twenty twenty three of the tail end of COVID in San Francisco, a place people like to think of as the most liberal city in America. It seemed tailor made to touch on
America's most sensitive nerves. So that's what we're going to look at today. In the final episode of this series, We're going to take a step backwards, rub our eyes clear, and try to make sense of the time and place surrounding Bobley's murder, not thinking about it as an isolated event, but as part of a continuum, one moment in a long string of developments that led us to where we are today. I'm sean when this is foundering the killing
of Bobley. When Bobley died, there was one name that kept coming up, a name I hadn't thought about much the previous year, Boudin.
I started getting threats, including death threats, related to his death.
Boudin was the San Franciscodier from January twenty twenty until July twenty twenty two. He was ousted nine months before Bob's murder in a contentious citywide recall vote. He had been elected on a very progressive platform of police reform, decarceration, and eliminating cash bail. He came into power during a moment when Black Lives Matter was gaining momentum. The phrase defund the police was a common rallying cry, and Boudin
wasn't alone. He was part of a wave of progressive prosecutors elected across the country, but he did sort of become the representative of the movement. His parents were in the weather underground and incarcerated for decades for murder. He was raised by other notable leftists, and then he became a Yale law graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a judicial clerk. His background was so intriguing and his credentials were so fancy. He was perfect for idolization or villainization.
I was used to being blamed for everything during my time in office. Walgreens clothes, my fault, a coyote kill someone's dog in Golden Gate Park, my fault. Jokes on Twitter abounded. I mean, I think there were signs literally put up around San Francisco saying that I had Overdoe Library books. On Twitter, I think they suggested renaming the San Andreas Fault Line chase of Boudin's.
Fault, something that hadn't occurred to me in the moment, but seems clearer now after time was how clearly Chase A. Boudin's eventual recall fed directly into the response to Bob Lee's murder. Let me explain. Boudin took office in January twenty twenty, which I think is fair to say was a strange time to take over law enforcement in the major American city.
I was sworn in just too much before COVID hit, and people started to associate me and my administration with a lot of the changes that were driven by COVID.
Like we mentioned earlier in the series, in the first couple years of the pandemic, crime in San Francisco was trending down overall according to SFPD data, but the exceptions that stand out included Carthuff's burglaries and homicides, all of which increased a little.
SFPA protesters gathered in San Francisco's Chinatown hoping District Attorney Chase A.
Boudin himself would show up to it.
And while you can argue over the scope and amount of coverage and whether it was appropriate, the reality is that this small uptick in crime did get a lot of attention.
I think that the most important one is his catch and release policies is soft on crime that allows the criminals to come out and coverment more and more crime.
Around that time, Like a lot of people I knew in Silicon Valley were like buying gun.
This is Max Chafkin, my colleague and a reporter here at Bloomberg. He covers the intersection of tech and politics.
We're so worried about violent crime and so worried about their own safety, rightly or wrongly, that they were like arming themselves.
The pandemic was a time when there was just a lot of fear, obviously fear of disease, but then there was also fear for personal safety and a broader fear among some tech leaders of a meddling left leaning government.
A lot of the folks in the tech industry had come to the conclusion that like the government was out to get them, that the government was going to not on in the context of like violent crime, but the government was trying to like either put them in jail, or put them out of business or bankrupt them.
Which in the case of San Francisco wasn't a totally wild conclusion. Chase A. Boudin and the d'ae's office did go after tech companies. Six months into office, he sued door Dash for misclassifying workers.
When you prosecute tech companies for stealing wages from their employees, when you prosecute politicians for corruption, we prospect police or tested force, all of which we did. You make our lettomies.
So a progressive da a city on lockdown with a small uptick in some forms of crime. There was almost this vinegar and baking soda effect. Things felt combustible on edge. And there's one more factor at this particular time that I do think contributed to how Boble's death would play out in the media. When the pandemic started, many tech workers were locked away at home on their computers all the time, and some of these people started new podcasts.
All right, everybody, welcome to another edition of the All In Podcasts. We'll call this episode one.
This is a clip from the first episode of the All Limb podcast, launched on March nineteenth, twenty twenty. It's hosted by four tech executives, the most prominent of which is David Sachs, a co founder of PayPal.
So hold on, So, for example, okay, let's take the Let's take the drug addict who commits a petty theft. We all agree that person should go to treatment, not to jail or prison, right a nonviolent, of course offender. Okay, but how are you going to get that person to go to treatment?
The podcast covers all sorts of things, AI, trade policy, tech news, and very quickly it became massively popular, particularly in wealthy tech circles. In its first few days, more than one hundred thousand people had downloaded it, which by podcast standards is genuinely pretty great. The politics on the show leaned right. There's constant frustration with the progressive policies in any number of spheres.
Like these guys were really mad about stuff that had nothing to do with San Francisco, but San Francisco is just sitting there as this symbol of everything wrong with the United States. The forces of cultural progressivism, like black Lives Matter or views on diversity, equity and inclusion become
kind of coded to them as very anti tech. And so when you talk about like Chasa or these other San Francisco liberals, they could be talking about something that sounds like it has absolutely nothing to do with tech, but like it's processed as part of this whole society is trying to slow us down. They're going to make rules, They're not gonna let us build, and it becomes part of this cultural battle.
Within the first six months, the hosts had turned their attention to what would become an ongoing target for them, Chase a Boudin and crime in San Francisco.
His agenda is decarceration. It's like a fire chief who doesn't believe in using water, yes, and.
He is part of the burn it all down party.
Within the year, they were challenging him to debates and raising money for his recall. One of the hosts, Jason Calacanis, even started to gofund me in twenty twenty one. It raised more than fifty thousand dollars to pay for an investigative journalist to write about victims of crime in San Francisco. Here's David Sachs speaking to conservative commentator Megan Kelly on her podcast, which also launched in twenty twenty.
During COVID, he released forty percent of the jail population. And the crazy thing is he wrote an op ed in the La Time saying I'm making San Francisco safer by emptying out the jails. That was literally the headline of the piece that he wrote in the La Times.
So he has this warp view that somehow he's going to make all.
Us safer by emptying out the jails and not prosecuting anybody.
The campaign to recall Chase A. Boudin started in twenty twenty one, when he had only been in office for a year. Many of Boudin's sharp his critics were rich tech moguls, including venture capitalists David Sachs, Gary Tan and Ron Conway. The recall campaign raised more than double what Boudin's supporters were able to raise. Now, I want to take a moment to say that the people criticizing Boudin
were not all venture capitalists and keyboard warriors. He also faced criticism from victims of crime, and in cases where the victims were dead, often their surviving family members cast blame on him. There are many examples, including cases where the perpetrators were repeat offenders, and so Boudin's detractors could say, see, he wanted to let these criminals out of jail, and now this happened. Also, San Francisco's large Chinese population rallied
against Boudin. During this time, there was a string of attacks on Asian Americans all over the country actually, but also in San Francisco, and this is something I feel really sensitive about because I'm Asian American. The stories were really gruesome and especially upsetting because many of the victims
were elderly. An eighty four year old man who was pushed to the ground and died, another eighty four year old man who was kicked out of his walker at a bus stop, two women sixty three and eighty five stabbed at a bus stop. There are many more examples. Victim data released by the San Francisco Police showed that crime against Asian Americans in the city increased five hundred percent in Boudin's first year in office. This was all
a few years ago. I think that now that the fervor of the recall has passed, we can all acknowledge that Chase A. Boudin didn't shove and kill an eighty four year old man, no more than Brook Jenkins killed Bob Lee. But at the time, these were fierce arguments that people were having, including very rich, very powerful people. Boudin lost the recall, and he left office in July of twenty twenty two, nine months before Bobble was killed.
I mean this was especially that recall was a really important example of these right wing tech guys setting a target and then achieving it, you know, like using their power for like a political purpose.
From my colleague Max Chafkin, the Boudin recall opened up a new sphere of influence for tech leaders, one that would become key in how the story of Bobbley would play out.
You could get really involved in San Francisco politics. You could decide that, you know, the San Francisco school board was the thing that had to be changed, or like San Francisco housing policy or San Francisco crime or whatever. I think that the recall and then and then the murder of Bobb Lee came a gateway for a lot of these guys who maybe had started to like express some of these feelings but hadn't considered the role that they could play and maybe even the power that they had.
And the fervor around crime in San Francisco was still so strong. The anti Boudin sentiment was still recent enough that almost a year after he had been out of office, the former DA still had people tweeting at him things like Chase A Boudin and the criminal loving city council that enabled him and the lawless SF for years have Bob's literal blood on their hands. Do you see a connection between Sacks and Musk both targeting you and spreading misinformation about Bob Lee?
Of course, it's obvious. I mean, I'm not sure what the question is.
I wonder if you could draw a line between those two for a listener.
Well, Sax and Musk both spread this information about public safety in San Francisco in general, about criminal justice performed in general, and pushed a far right narrative about more police and longer incarceration being an effective way to promote safety. They also share an unshakable belief that they're right even when they've been proved wrong, and an unwillingness to admit
error or apologize when they spread misinformation. So all of that is entirely consistent, both with the way the recall targeted me and my policies and my supporters, and with the way that they handled the messaging around the Bobbly murder.
This is quintessential cherry picking of facts or of anecdotes, not even facts, because in this case, all we knew was that he'd been killed, and seizing a situation or development, and out of whole cloth, inventing facts around it to fit a narrative, and once the whole cloth starts to unravel because it's not based in any reality, they just move on and find something else that fits their narrative and don't make any effort to apologize or to grapple
with the reality of what happened. And in many ways, my recall was sort of a Canarian the coal mine for the direction that the tech elite were moving politically on a wide range of issues, not just criminal justice, but racial justice and gender equality, and party politics, taxes, foreign aid, I mean, higher education. The list goes on and on.
Musk didn't respond to our interview request. After Bobley's death, and after the truth of what happened surfaced, very few of the folks who spread misinformation recanted publicly. In fact, all in host David Sachs became even more involved in conservative politics. He became a major supporter and fundraiser for Donald Trump and later became the White House AI At cryptos Are. He's still on the podcast. He continues to talk about crime in cities with Democratic leaders and calls
for expanded police and military presence in those cities. He and the other all In hosts declined to speak to us for this podcast. After the break, we end where this all began in San Francisco. Why the city itself and its long history with the tech elite primed it for the powder kead moment of Bob Lee's murder. When Bob Lee moved to San Francisco in two thousand and four, both he and the city were in the midst of
massive changes. On the one hand, you have Bob coming from Saint Louis, from being a small time programmer, he helps develop Google's ad platform, having a direct hand in turning it into one of the richest companies in the world. On the other hand, you have San Francisco itself. It was at the epicenter of the era's most pressing tech and cultural issues. That year, San Francisco issued the first marriage licenses to same sex couples. In the course of
a month, more than four thousand couples were married. This was during the time when then President George W. Bush was calling for a federal amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Then, in two thousand and seven, when Bob was a young dad
and expecting his second child. The iPhone debuted that, along with the Android operating system which Bob was helping to build, ushered in an entire category of companies that would hire many thousands of workers in San Francis, young excited engineers working at the likes of Uber, Instagram, and Airbnb. I bring all of this up to say, in order to understand why the story of Bob Lee exploded the way it did, we need to reflect on the ways that Bob and the city itself were mirrors for each other.
Keep in mind that Silicon Valley in San Francisco are not the same thing.
Max Chafkin, again, my colleague at Bloomberg.
Silicon Valley originally are these peninsula suburbs south of the Bay Area, basically halfway between San Francisco and San Jose.
About an hour south of San Francisco by car. It really came into its own as a tech hub in the seventies and eighties.
And the politics of Silicon Valley were kind of the politics of conservative, suburban, upper middle class you're kind of like typical, like Ronald Reagan voters and so on. San Francisco was not as big a part of the tech industry know un till more recently.
Right around the time Bob Lee moved to San Francisco, America was living through a wave of urban revival. People wanted to live in cities again where there were more restaurants, clubs, and museums.
Suddenly you had all these engineers who wanted to live in San Francisco, companies wanting to recruit there, and San Francisco itself wanting to accommodate these companies and giving them tax breaks, trying to find ways to lure them north.
But San Francisco is not Sunny Vail. The politics are different. It's a storied, progressive city, home to New Age thinking, the Black Panthers and Harvey Milk. This influx of wealthy tech entrepreneurs made for strange bedfellows.
San Francisco itself has kind of complicated feelings about growth and industry, and there always is local opposition to development as well as like local opposition to change of any kind.
Rents went up, local businesses shut down. In twenty thirteen, the same year that Bob Lee helped launch his legacy project, cash App, there were large protests stopping Google workers from commuting outside the city on company buses.
I'm talking about like protests against tech companies or politicians making comments about tech workers or tech executives as they saw the villainization of what, in their minds was an industry that was like fundamentally valuable, like creating jobs, bringing in revenue, and also good.
And for me. There's one incident that really seemed to sum up this tense dynamic. In twenty fourteen, a woman was at a bar wearing an early prototype of smart glasses called Google Glass.
It's some video now.
She was recording bar patrons, which they didn't like, and so they snatched them off her face, and people started using the phrase glass fire.
Think about that from the from the point of view of the tech industry. We have this like quirky cool product, Google Glass, Like it's so great, right, and you know you're gonna be able to check your email.
It's so awesome.
People aren't even probably gonna use it, but maybe they will, and if they do, it'll be exciting. And like a person, a normal person in San Francisco is just like, why is there a camera pointed at me? And also why is my rent gone up by like forty or fifty percent or more, and so you can understand why there's a confrontation. But from the tech people, it's just this like completely unwarranted aggression, like they expected to be celebrated and instead, you know, they were greeted with the kind
of usual skepticism or even hostility. And basically the tech industry didn't like that, and the tech industry found it offensive.
I moved here in twenty fourteen during a moment when San Francisco was rocked by gentrification and the perception that the city's artists and weirdos were being pushed out by a wave of tech workers. At the time, I had never heard of uber or lyft. I caught up with an old friend and he told me to download these apps on my phone, and I remember how totally novel it felt, this idea that you could press a button on your phone and then the person shows up to
do something for you at an absolute bargain price. It was a genuine clash of cultures. Newly wealthy tech entrepreneurs and their well compensated workers who believed they were building the future versus a city that did not like that vision for the future.
Can you tell me about how that turns into this idea that the wealthy white tech guy becomes the most disenfranchised in San Francisco.
I mean, there's so many things going on that leads to this kind of like victim narrative where tech guys feel like they are being persecuted by politicians.
Black Lives Matter and Me Too were powerful movements that shook things up in San Francisco, even on the government level. The Mayor's office released a plan for police reforms, the city created a dedicated office to handle sexual harassment, and this is where you start to see a split between powerful tech companies and the people who work for them. Many tech workers engaged meaningfully with these social justice movements.
In some cases, they organized against their own employers. At Google, in twenty eighteen, employees staged a walkout over sexual harassment. Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout in the wake of George Floyd's death. Coinbase employees pushed their management to make a statement supporting Black Lives Matter, and when management pushed back, many workers left to the company in protest. I think sometimes there's a tendency to conflate white collar tech employees
with the companies that they work for. As if they're happy to cash their large paychecks and turn a blind eye to their employer's actions. But there are many examples of employees risking their livelihoods to push these companies to do better. To me, it feels like the city's radical history was having an effect on tech workers, even if
it didn't reach the executives. This was also around the time of the so called TEXADUS, when the number of companies left San Francisco and shut down their offices in the city, including Coinbase, Stripe, PayPal, and Twitter, which had been rebranded as.
X COVID lockdowns. A lot of these are, of course, white collar type workplaces, but there are some factories sworled in there, and you know, factory owners were no fan of government shutdowns. It's a whole bunch of things.
I can't help but think of Bob Lee in this context, in this particular time and place. By the time he died, he no longer lived in San Francisco. He had moved to Miami. A lot of his friends were there. It had lacks or COVID restrictions, and it was also becoming a center for cryptocurrency startups, which he was involved in.
That said, he was still flying back to San Francisco all the time for work, to see his kids, to party, and sure San Francisco was not the same place he had moved to in his twenties, defined by that explosion of new startups. But Bob, forever a curious person, was still attracted to the things that made the city strange Edgy a good place to have a good time. I asked my colleague Max about this, about why Bob's peers may have spread false rumors about the city that Bob,
by all accounts, still loved. For his part, Max was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to some of the people who pushed false narratives about Bob's death, who connected it to crumbling liberal cities and progressive Das.
I hear a political thing, I also hear an honest reaction to a very upsetting thing. This kind of thing repeats itself all across the country, where like something unspeakable happens, and in making sense of it, we end up swirling in our politics or whatever we think is wrong. I've had people in my own life react almost the exact same way to violent crime, like where I live in New York or whatever and like blame poor city governance or bad national policy, or some combination of those two things.
It seems to me that people wanted to hold up Boble's murder as revealing something about the city and decline or the country and decline due to homelessness and crime. What do you think that this death ultimately exposed?
You know, I'm just like really resistant to, like, especially after hearing these guys spout off and like turn this man's death into like a symbol of something. I'm like really resistant to the idea that it meant something except that it was horrible. It's just staggering to think about how strong that political narrative was and how wrong it was on a pure, like factual basis in this one case.
And how quickly it evaporated as soon as there was a suspect arrested. Yeah, for Nina's part, as of this recording, he's incarcerated and awaiting sentencing. He's hired new attorneys who are going to make a motion for a new trial. He's also filed civil suits against several media outlets. Bob's family has filed a civil suit against multiple parties, including Nima's family, alleging they knew about Nima's actions before he
was arrested and helped him hide and destroy evidence. If the story of Bob Lee is anything I think it's a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions. Nima jumped to conclusions about what happened to his sister, people on Twitter jumped to conclusions about what happened to Bob Lee and what it said about San Francisco. The media jumped to conclusions about Bob's social life, and at every step it
only led to bad outcomes. A couple months ago, I called up Bob's former wife, Krista, and I asked her if she harbored any resentment for those who used Bob's death to further a political narrative, and her answer was no, not really.
Anger should be reserved for those that actually deserve it. And it sucks, especially when you get hurt by the people around you, But there's no reason to stay angry at them. Obviously, the people involved in the murder of Bob I will forever be angry with. But you know, there is a lot of people that in the beginning, it was a mystery, it was misguided, it was everyone was kind of throwing theories out there, and there's still people. There's still a lot of people throwing theories out there,
So yeah, you can't get mad at that. They were just trying to help. They just wanted to talk, So it's okay.
In death, Bob a symbol drifting further and further away from the actual person. First he was a symbol for the San Francisco doom loop. Then he became a symbol for the excesses of the tech elite. In the midst of all this, his friends kept telling me that they didn't recognize Bob in any of the coverage. I think this trend is bigger than Bob Lee. We have this impulse to turn individual tragedies into collective I told you
sos to turn people into martyrs. Sometimes their death comes to represent something that they maybe would have wanted nothing to do with, and so I thought I would end on a few concrete memories of him. One thing that came up often was how much Bob loved facetiming people at twelve that night while they're in bed. At six in the morning, when they've just woken up, people would hear their phone ring, think who the hell is facetiming
me right now and then see it was Bob. Another friend mentioned to me that Bob kept on his phone a list of people who were close to him so that he could be reminded to check in on them from time to time. One of Bob's friends from his college fraternity hosted on an online memorial thanking Bob for quote programming a website for me that was due the next day. It was an utter mess. Bob finished the website program in fifteen minutes, just so we could go
out and get a beer. He always did things like that. In the last year of his life, Bob moved to Miami with his elderly father as his roommate. It was a long search for an apartment because Bob was bent on finding a place that had two master bedrooms, one for him and one for his dad. His dad didn't know about this until after Bob had died. The real estate agent mentioned it to him as he was moving out. Bob and his dad only got to live in that
department for six months. Foundering is reported hosted and executive produced by me Sean Wen Eric Mesiti's mental produced our show. Bart Warshaw is our audio engineer Our story editors are Joshua Brustein, Tom Giles, Anne Vander May, and Nicole Beamster Bower. Voice acting by Mark Laydwarf. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most important, tell your friends told to blend to fl