Bob Lee, the 43-year-old founder of Cash App and a former Square (now Block) executive, was stabbed to death early Tuesday morning in downtown San Francisco.
Officers responded at 2:35 a.m. to a call reporting the stabbing and found Lee, who was visiting town after recently moving to Miami. according to NBC Bay Area. He was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to the hospital, according to a San Francisco police statement.
No arrests have been made and police have not released any details about a possible suspect.
After Lee's death was reported, an avalanche of grief and memories for the tech executive, who was also the chief product officer at crypto company MobileCoin, flooded social media. And along with the pain came an outpouring of anger for the state of San Francisco, which tech leaders have previously called the “worst managed city in the United States.”
“As a lifelong resident of the Bay Area, tonight I have more questions than answers. I don't know how to fix what's wrong, but I know something's wrong in our gray city,” MobileCoin founder Joshua Goldbard wrote in a post. Twitter thread. "Bob left this world too soon."
Michael Arrington, founder of news outlet TechCrunch and venture capital database CrunchBase, also joined the growing chorus: “[Bob Lee] He was one of the best humans I have ever met. I'm so glad we got to spend time together recently. RIP. I hate what San Francisco has become."
And even Elon Musk, the embattled CEO of Twitter and teslagot into the fray.
Lee's death adds fuel to the fire. about the state of san franciscothe tech hub of Northern California that oozes wealth and is riddled with inequality.
For years, tech executives have complained about the city's rates of Homelessnessis increasingly scandalous real estate marketand what they see as a unacceptable level of crime in the reliably liberal stronghold.
And now, as the pandemic has accelerated the shift to remote work, and tech giants like Facebook and Sales force Thousands have been laid off, once bustling corporate campuses and skyscrapers have become remarkably empty. add a Funding gap of $728 million resulting from the weakest office occupations in the nationjust like him The consequences of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bankand the fate of the California tech hub seems uncertain.
Even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and a trusted city booster, has lamented its current makeup. “We need more residential center. We need more museums in the center. We need more clubs downtown. We need more universities in the center, ”he said in an interview with Bloomberg.
Perhaps the stabbing of the well-known tech exec will move the city and its host of tech execs beyond words into action.
This story originally appeared on fortune.com
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