Anonymous Police Source (2:21)

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.

Sean Wen (2:32)

Once police had a photo of the car, they pulled a DMV record and then they had just about everything else.

Anonymous Police Source (2:39)

We have a suspect, we run their criminal histories, we run their driving histories, we run their vehicles that are linked to them and any firearms as well,

Sean Wen (2:49)

the department had put together a full profile sheet on Neema momeni Just over 48 hours after Bob Lee 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

Anonymous Police Source (3:14)

to believe when there's a lack of information put out through official channels. Cops, like anybody else, like to gossip and try to come up with their own answers. But 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 Bee Girl thing. That's from the California penal code 647B, 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?

Sean Wen (3:56)

During this time, misinformation was running wild and city officials were getting it from all directions.

Brooke Jenkins (4:03)

It was a tough time. It was a tough time for all of us.

Sean Wen (4:06)

That's Brooke Jenkins, the district Attorney of San Francisco.

Brooke Jenkins (4:10)

There was a lot of pressure on the police to not only solve that case, but to investigate it in a way that made it foolproof. Multiple of us were up for reelection very soon.

Sean Wen (4:24)

The next year, the mayor, DA Jenkins, and many other city leaders would all be up for re election. So they wanted to squash this narrative that San Francisco was a failed city led by buffoons who were so useless and inept 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.

Brooke Jenkins (4:49)

They're trying to collect evidence before it's disposed of, before somebody knows that you're on their heels.

Sean Wen (4:57)

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.

Brooke Jenkins (5:05)

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. That was a tough time.

Sean Wen (5:42)

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 2023, sort 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 gonna look at today. In the final episode of this series. We're gonna take a step backwards, rub our eyes clear and try to make sense of the time and place surrounding Bob Lee'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. This is foundering the killing of Bob Lee.

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Sean Wen (7:52)

When Bob Lee died, there was one name that kept coming up. A name I hadn't thought about much the previous year. Chesa Boudin.

Chesa Boudin (8:01)

I started getting threats, including death threats related to his death.

Sean Wen (8:05)

Boudin was the San Francisco DA from January 2020 until July 2022. 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.

Chesa Boudin (9:07)

I was used to being blamed for everything during my time in office. Walgreens closed. My fault. A coyote kills 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 overdue library books on Twitter. I think they suggested renaming the San Andreas Fault line Chesa Boudin's fault.

Sean Wen (9:37)

Something that hadn't occurred to me in the moment, but seems clearer now after time, was how clearly Chesa Boudin's eventual recall fed directly into the response to Bob Lee's murder. Let me explain. Boudin took office in January 2020, which I think is fair to say was a strange time to take over law enforcement in the major American city.

Chesa Boudin (10:00)

I was sworn in just two months before COVID hit, and people started to associate me and my administration with a lot of the changes that were driven by Covid.

Sean Wen (10:09)

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 car thefts, burglaries, and homicides, all of which increased a little.

San Francisco District Attorney's Office Spokesperson (10:28)

Sfda, do your job.

Max Chavkin (10:30)

Protestors gathered in San Francisco's Chinatown, hoping District Attorney Chesa Boudin himself would show up to.

Sean Wen (10:36)

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.

Recall Campaign Critic (10:46)

I think that the most important one is his catch and release policies. It is soft on crime. It allows the criminals to come out and commit more and more crime.

Max Chavkin (10:55)

Around that time, like a lot of people I knew in Silicon Valley were, like, buying guns.

Sean Wen (11:00)

This is Max Chavkin, my colleague and a reporter here at Bloomberg. He covers the intersection of tech and politics.

Max Chavkin (11:08)

We're so worried about violent crime and so worried about their own safety, rightly or wrongly, that they were, like, arming themselves.

Sean Wen (11:17)

The pandemic was a time when there was just a lot of fear, obviously fear of disease, but. But then there was also fear for personal safety and a broader Fear among some tech leaders of a meddling, left leaning government.

Max Chavkin (11:32)

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 in the context of, like, violent crime, but that the government was trying to, like, either put them in jail or put them out of business or bankrupt them.

Sean Wen (11:48)

Which in the case of San Francisco, wasn't a totally wild conclusion. Chesa Boudin and the DA's office did go after tech companies. Six months into office, he sued DoorDash for misclassifying workers.

Chesa Boudin (12:03)

When you prosecute tech companies for stealing wages from their employees, when you prosecute politicians for corruption, when you prosecute police or excessive force, all of which we did, you make powerful enemies.

Sean Wen (12:16)

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 Bob Lee'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.

Max Chavkin (12:51)

All right, everybody, welcome to another edition of the All In Podcast. We'll call this episode one.

Sean Wen (12:58)

This is a clip from the first episode of the all in podcast, launched on March 19, 2020. It's hosted by four tech executives, the most prominent of which is David Sacks, a co founder of PayPal.

David Sacks (13:11)

So, 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, reason. But how are you, how are you going to get that person to go to treatment?

Sean Wen (13:26)

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 100,000 people had downloaded it, which by podcast standards is genuinely pretty great. The politics on the show lean, right? There's constant frustration with progressive policies in any number of spheres.

David Sacks (13:54)

I want to start with your take.

Sean Wen (13:55)

Why didn't you tell me Biden was

Bloomberg Daybreak Host (Nathan Hager) (13:56)

going to do this?

Sean Wen (13:57)

I would have voted for Trump.

Max Chavkin (13:59)

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, Chesa 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 going to let us build, and it becomes part of this cultural battle.

Sean Wen (14:41)

Within the first six months, the hosts had turned their attention to what would become an ongoing target for them, Chase of Boudin and crime in San Francisco.

David Sacks (14:50)

His agenda is decarceration. It's like a fire chief who doesn't believe in using water.

Max Chavkin (14:55)

Yes, he is part of the Burn It all down party.

Sean Wen (15:00)

Within a year, they were challenging him to debates and raising money for his recall. One of the hosts, Jason Calacanis, even started a GoFundMe in 2021. It raised more than $50,000 to pay for an investigative journalist to write about victims of crime in San Francisco. Here's David Sachs speaking to conservative commentator Megyn Kelly on her podcast, which also launched in 2020.

David Sacks (15:26)

During COVID he released 40% of the jail population. And the crazy thing is he wrote an op ed in the LA Times 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 warped view that somehow he's going to make all of us safer by emptying out the jails and not prosecuting anybody.

Sean Wen (15:51)

The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin started in 2021, when he had only been in office for a year. Many of Boudin's sharpest 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 84 year old man who was pushed to the ground and died. Another 84 year old man who was kicked out of his walker at a bus stop. Two women, 63 and 85, 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 500% 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 Chesa Boudin didn't shove and kill an 84 year old man, no more than Brooke 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 2022, nine months before Bob Lee was killed.

Max Chavkin (18:18)

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, like using their power for like a political purpose.

Sean Wen (18:31)

For my colleague Max Chavkin, the Boudin recall opened up a new sphere of influence for tech leaders. One that would become key in how the story of Bob Lee would play out.

Max Chavkin (18:41)

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, San Francisco crime or whatever. I think that the recall and then the murder of Bob Lee became 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.

Sean Wen (19:13)

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 Chesa Boudin and the criminal loving city council that enabled him and a lawless SF for years have Bob's literal blood on their hands. Do you see a connection between Sachs and Musk both targeting you and spreading misinformation about Bob Lee?

Chesa Boudin (19:46)

Of course it's obvious. I mean, I'm not sure what the question is.

Sean Wen (19:49)

I wonder if you could draw a line between those two for a listener.

Chesa Boudin (19:53)

Well, Sachs and Musk both spread misinformation about public safety in San Francisco in general about criminal justice reform in general, and pushed a far right narrative about more police and longer incarceration being an effective way to promote safety. They also share a 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 Bob Lee 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 canary in 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.

Sean Wen (21:28)

Musk didn't respond to our interview request. After Bob Lee'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 and crypto czar. 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 keg moment of Bob Lee's murder.

Krista Lee (Bob Lee's former wife) (22:44)

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

Sean Wen (22:47)

There's going to be two types of companies, those who are great at AI

Anonymous Police Source (22:50)

and those that went out of business because they weren't.

Sean Wen (22:52)

How do we build a future that is human centered?

Bloomberg Audio Announcer (22:57)

I'm Rana El Kalyubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

Sean Wen (23:30)

When Bob Lee moved to San Francisco in 2012, both he and the city were in the midst of massive changes. On the one hand, you have BOB Coming from St. 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 4,000 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 2007, 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 Francisco. 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.

Max Chavkin (25:05)

Keep in mind that Silicon Valley and San Francisco are not the same thing.

Sean Wen (25:09)

Max Chafton, again, my colleague at Bloomberg.

Max Chavkin (25:12)

Silicon Valley originally are these peninsula suburbs south of the Bay Area, basically halfway between San Francisco and San Jose, about

Sean Wen (25:20)

an hour south of San Francisco by car. It really came into its own as a tech hub in the 70s and 80s.

Max Chavkin (25:27)

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, you know, until more recently.

Sean Wen (25:46)

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.

Max Chavkin (25:58)

Suddenly you had all these engineers who, like, 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.

Sean Wen (26:15)

But San Francisco is not Sunnyvale. 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.

Max Chavkin (26:32)

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.

Sean Wen (26:48)

Rents went up. Local businesses shut down. In 2013, 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.

Max Chavkin (27:04)

I'm talking about like protests against tech companies or politicians making comments about tech workers or tech executives as they saw it, the villainization of what in their minds was an industry that was like, fundamentally valuable, like creating jobs, bringing in revenue, and also good.

Sean Wen (27:30)

And for me, there's one incident that really seemed to sum up this tense dynamic. In 2014, a woman was at a bar wearing an early prototype of smart glasses called Google Glass.

San Francisco District Attorney's Office Spokesperson (27:44)

Okay, it's on video now.

Sean Wen (27:47)

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 flash.

Recall Campaign Critic (27:55)

Get out of here, babe.

Max Chavkin (27:58)

Think about that from the point of view of the tech industry. We have this like quirky, cool product, Google Glass, like it's, it's so great, right? And you're, 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 has my rent gone up by like 40 or 50% or more? And so you can understand why there's a confrontation. But from the tech people, it's just this like complet, 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.

Sean Wen (28:56)

I moved here in 2014 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 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?

Max Chavkin (29:57)

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.

Sean Wen (30:13)

Black lives matter and MeToo 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 2018, 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 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 employers 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 Texas when a 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.

Max Chavkin (31:57)

A lot of these are of course white collar type workplaces, but there are some factories swirled in there and you know, factory owners were no fan of government shutdowns. It's a whole bunch of things.

Sean Wen (32:08)

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 laxer 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 20s 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 a 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.

Max Chavkin (33:18)

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.

Sean Wen (33:50)

It seems to me that people wanted to hold up Bob Lee's murder as revealing something about the city in decline or the country in decline due to homelessness and crime. What do you think that this death ultimately exposed?

Max Chavkin (34:05)

You know, I'm just, like, really resistant to, like, especially after hearing the. These guys spout off and, like, turn this man's death into, like, a symbol of something. I'm. 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

Sean Wen (34:34)

how quickly it evaporated as soon as there was a suspect arrested.

Chesa Boudin (34:39)

Yeah.

Sean Wen (34:43)

For Nima'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. To further a political narrative. And her answer was no, not really.

Krista Lee (Bob Lee's former wife) (35:55)

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 there is a lot of people that. But 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, you know, you can't get mad at that. They, they were just trying to help. They just wanted to talk, so it's ok.

Sean Wen (36:41)

In death, Bob Lee became 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 12 at night, while they're in bed, at 6 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 posted on an online memorial thanking Bob for programming a website for me that was due the next day. It was an utter mess. Bob finished the website program in 15 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. 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 apartment for six months. Foundering is reported, hosted and executive produced by me, Sean Wen. Eric Nasizzi's Menel produced our show. Bart Warshaw is our audio engineer. Our story editors are Joshua Brustein, Tom Giles, Ann Vandermee and Nicole Beemster. Boer voice acting by Marc Laidorff. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends.

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