Everyone Had Their Own Theories About This Murder. They Were All Wrong.

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In the early-morning hours of April 4, 2023, Bob Lee, the 43-year-old Cash App founder and beloved Silicon Valley fixture, was stabbed multiple times and left to bleed out on the streets of San Francisco as he desperately called for help. No one knew how to make sense of it. Lee wasn't living in San Francisco at the time, having decamped for Miami like so many other techies. He was an important figure in the industry, but hardly a name-brand celebrity. He was nicknamed “ Crazy Bob ,” but had a low-key profile and was a devoted family man. Pretty much everyone who knew Lee seemed to have loved him deeply —so who could have done something like this?

The highest-profile commentators of Silicon Valley, well on their way to Trumpian radicalization , already had their pet narrative about out-of-control crime in liberal San Fran ready for the national press . “Can we please stand up and completely purge SF politics now and start over?” tweeted venture capitalist Bradford Cross. “Something isn't working in our gray city,” added the founder of MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency startup where Lee had been working until his death. Elon Musk jumped in , as did his investor friends on The All-In Podcast , where co-host David Sacks (now a White House advisor ) claimed he “ would bet dollars to dimes ” that Lee's death would be like a case from Los Angeles where “a young woman was basically stabbed for no reason by a psychotic homeless person.”

Then the facts emerged: It turned out that Lee had been stabbed during a late-night argument with fellow techie Nima Momeni, whose sister had been friendly with Lee and had hung out with him that fateful night. By the time the trial got going in earnest, however, the commentariat had moved on—outside of an early-2024 Law & Order: SVU episode loosely based on the case—while Lee's family and friends bore the fallout from this tragedy. Last December, Momeni was found guilty of second-degree murder after a jury trial in San Francisco's Hall of Justice; he plans to appeal the verdict, having hired new lawyers to back up his self-defense claim. Lee's family has also lodged a civil suit against Momeni and his relatives.

Another San Franciscan who's been following the Bob Lee story throughout: Scott Alan Lucas , a local journalist and former San Francisco magazine editor who reported from Momeni's trial and spoke with many of the people in Lee's life for a new book, Last Night in San Francisco: Tech's Lost Promise and the Murder of Bob Lee . It's an empathetic piece of reportage that offers a fuller portrait of Lee's life and death while providing a thoughtful examination of San Francisco, urban crime, and Silicon Valley ideals. Basically, the type of nuanced, contextual insight you wouldn't get from the people who weaponized Lee's death for their own grievances. I spoke with Lucas over the phone about the impetus for this book, the narratives around Lee's death, and what's changed in San Francisco in the two and a half years since. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nitish Pahwa: From your perspective as a San Franciscan who sees how often these narratives about crime get twisted, what was it about Bob Lee's murder, specifically, that you think needed to be corrected for the record here? And why do you think it became such a particular flashpoint for this discourse?

Scott Alan Lucas: I don't really view my job as correcting the record. I view my job as stepping back and saying, “Wow, a lot of things just happened. It clearly caught a lot of people's attention. Some people got some things wrong, some people got some things right. Let's tell that story.” I'm not primarily trying to clear up the misinformation about the case.

What I think captured people about it was the strangeness of the initial circumstances, in which Mr. Lee was found bleeding on the street, 2:30 in the morning, in a part of San Francisco that's not heavy in foot traffic—even though it's ironically called Main Street. [Lee] is not a household name in the broader world, but the people who are household names in the tech industry knew him. He was just one rung down from the Elon Musks and the Jack Dorseys of the industry, a well-respected, well-loved guy who had had a hand—in some cases, a major hand—in some pretty significant stuff. The identity of the victim and the circumstances are just very, very compelling.

Then you layer onto that San Francisco. From the 1840s forward, the city always had this identity in the popular imagination of being an exceptional place. Do I think that's a fair image of the city? Not really. There's the boring, normal side of it the way there is any place. But San Francisco, in the popular imagination, is constructed in a certain way, and Bob Lee's story, like other stories about San Francisco, hit that nail on the head.

Lee was well known as a down-to-earth, hardworking, friendly guy who also did all these drugs and delved into this weird nightlife scene . What do you make of these different sides of Lee's personality? What do you think they say about Silicon Valley culture?

The first thing to say is that his personality is not responsible for his death, right? I know you're not going that way, but I'm just grounding that this is not a story of someone who took drugs and was into nightlife, and therefore they courted killing. There was some later coverage that pushed into that territory, and I don't think that's fair. My sense of Bob was really best encapsulated by a lot of conversations I had with co-workers of his in the early days of Google. He worked on the Android operating system .

And I'm calling you from an Android phone.

There you go. He wrote some of the core functions of Android that, as far as I'm aware, are probably being used in your phone right now.

They had a small office with three people, and they would listen to this song with a lyric that captured the team's dynamic: “Work like you are living in the early days of a better nation.” That's a phrase associated with Scottish nationalism , but it became a mantra for Bob, for Google, for Silicon Valley more broadly. This was somebody who had a sense of being part of the early days of something really, really, really important, and he thrived in it. He was not only in it for the money or the prestige, although everyone likes those things. He was a real coder's coder.

If anything, I think he speaks to an aspect of Silicon Valley that maybe has been erased more recently—it's not our popular image of the industry today, where it's something much more malign. Bob was never part of that kind of thing. In many ways, he fit the tech-bro stereotype and also departed from it, and unsurprisingly so. People are much more complicated than we make them out to be.

It's hard when someone comes into the public consciousness like this. They get file-compressed. Who they are is sanded down, flattered, and made into a caricature. One of the things I wanted to do in the book was uncompress the file a little bit, about Bob and about everyone else surrounding him. I hope people get to know him, and I hope people get to better understand who he was.

Looking at the initial reaction to Bob's death versus the actual situation at hand, you point out the episode of The All-In Podcast that was recorded in the immediate aftermath (and you kindly quote from my 2023 analysis of the show ). The hosts went big on the This is a liberal regime of coddling crime gone awry talking point right away, along with so many of their peers in the industry . Then, when more details were gradually revealed, only one of the hosts, Dave Friedberg, bothered to take stock of what they got wrong.

These are guys who purport to be data-driven, quantitative, hard-numbers people. As investors, that's their bread and butter. And it's very easy to figure out the data on criminology in the United States and San Francisco. It took me a couple days' work, and most of that was cross-checking references and waiting for people to call me back, frankly. It's a quick amount of work you have to do to realize that, despite the hosts raising the possibility of this being a random crime, the overwhelming preponderance of the criminology evidence told you that this was very likely not to have been a random crime. I was really taken by how poorly they were carrying out their statistical reasoning, and that's by their own merits. When they came back to it after the arrest, the bellicosity with which three out of four of them treated this was disappointing. There's nothing wrong with making a bad bet, although these are guys who tell me that they're so good at poker, at investments, at making bets.

It's in the name of their podcast.

That's their deal. Here, they made a terrible bet and they lost, as everyone who knows what they're talking about could have predicted. And when they lost, they didn't just say, We took a strong position that was counter to the weight of the evidence and we missed . They doubled down. They got very angry and defensive about it. I think it just speaks very poorly. What bugs me a little bit is that it takes me two and a half years to come by, push my glasses up my nose like a nerd, and say, “Well, actually, guys.” These are people who are now White House advisers . They're powerful and influential. One of them was on Celebrity Jeopardy! not long ago .

What do you think should be the lesson for people who just jumped on so soon to declare Lee's killing as a sign of something it was not?

There is a lesson of looking before you leap here, which is pretty obvious. I think it does point to a strange sort of misapplication of people's intelligence. A lot of people who jumped onto saying that not even the straightest, whitest, richest among us are safe to walk San Francisco streets, and this is a failure of liberalism.

Look, I think the All-In hosts are very smart in lots of other areas of their life. I'm not taking anything away from their accomplishments. They've done very well for themselves. That does not mean that they have somehow become criminologists or urban scholars or politicians. This is just an old-fashioned plea for basic expertise in your subject area, and they didn't have it.

Do you think that this sort of thing has been especially amplified and inflamed in San Francisco thanks to general media trends now? There are obviously a lot of folks who tune into chat podcasts instead of a legit news source, or scroll their TikTok feeds for first impressions.

Actually, I don't think so. There has always been a strain of conservatism going back, certainly past the United States, that views cities as very scary places. San Francisco has always had this reputation, and in some ways justified, whether it's the Preparedness Day bombings , the Dirty Harry films , the Zodiac killings , the Zebra killings , Jonestown . There's a long list of spectacular crimes or breakdowns in governance. These things are not made up from nowhere.

Does it matter that people are getting that information on TikTok or in a podcast versus from a Dirty Harry film or some novel? No. This is where I'm a bad tech journalist because I don't think that changing forms of the information has changed anything in terms of the content.

I think it makes some sense, because many of these tech platforms act as sped-up messengers for, in many cases, already existing sentiments.

I think it speaks to the larger arc of Bob's career, too, which is that this optimism that he started with 20 years ago dissipated into a sense that this was not the early days of a better nation. This was the middle days of the same nation we've always lived in. Not that much has changed over the past 25 years, even though some amazing pieces of technology have been invented, and a lot of people have gotten very rich. I mean, people still do drugs. People still get into interpersonal arguments. People still die on the streets. The promise was that the core of human life was somehow going to be different, and I don't see it.

I'm curious whether you've seen any other news events that have broken out of San Francisco or other cities where the initial crime fear mongering was comparable to that of what happened with Bob Lee?