technology
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01/29/2024
These are Billboard’s top products across all categories from the latest Consumer Electronics Show.
01/29/2024
Utopia Music is facing another lawsuit over an aborted deal to buy a U.S. music technology company called SourceAudio, this time over allegations that the Swiss company violated a $400,000 settlement that aimed end the dispute.
The two companies have been battling since February, when SourceAudio filed a lawsuit claiming that Utopia – a buzzy music fintech firm – had bailed on 2022 deal to buy the smaller company for $26.5 million. The case claimed that after a year of delays, Utopia owed more than $37 million on the deal.
That case, filed in Delaware, quickly settled on confidential terms. But in a new lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles, SourceAudio says Utopia has now flaked on that agreement, too.
“Desperate to get the Delaware litigation out of the public eye, Utopia negotiated an agreement to pay SourceAudio $400,000 in exchange for a full release and dismissal of the lawsuit,” the company’s lawyers write. “But as with the underlying contract, Utopia has refused to pay what it owes.”
According to the new lawsuit, just days after signing the legal settlement, Utopia “failed to make the required settlement payment—with no explanation at all.”
“It now appears that the settlement was simply a ruse by Utopia to buy time and avoid paying its debts,” the smaller company’s lawyers write. “SourceAudio brings this action to collect what it is owed [or] to rescind the fraudulently procured settlement agreement. Utopia’s gameplaying must come to an end.”
A spokesman for Utopia did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
Utopia, a Swiss-based tech company that delivers financial services for labels, publishers and distributors, had been on a buying spree over 2021 and 2022. The company has acquired at least 15 companies, including music tech company Musimap, U.K. physical distributor Cinram Novum and Lyric Financial, a provider of royalty-backed cash advances.
But last fall, news broke that Utopia would restructure operations and lay off 20% of its workforce, representing about 230 jobs. In April, the company undertook a fresh round of job cuts, eliminating another 15% of its global workforce. Then in July, Utopia announced it was closing its research and development offices in the United Kingdom and Finland, resulting in the loss of another 5% of its global workforce.
SourceAudio — a tech platform for digital asset management and monetization — sued in February, claiming it had struck a deal in March 2022 to sell itself to Utopia for $26.5 million. Since almost immediately after the deal was reached, SourceAudio claimed, the bigger company had continually balked at actually completing the purchase.
“Despite repeated assurances that Utopia would be able to close…, Utopia engaged in a pattern of discontinuing discussions for an extended period of time, only to resurface immediately before the next intended closing date to indicate that it was unable to close by such date,” the complaint read.
In Wednesday’s new lawsuit, SourceAudio claims that Utopia quickly agreed to pay $400,000 to end the earlier case. Though Utopia made an initial $50,000 payment under the deal, the lawsuit claims, the remaining $350,000 – due this month – has not been paid.
“Defendants fraudulently represented through their attorney that they would perform the settlement agreement, while never intending to make any payment beyond the first installment of $50,000,” The company wrote. “Defendants’ objective with its false promise was to secure a release and dismissal of the Delaware action in exchange for a $50,000 payment and nothing further.”
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Bowers & Wilkins, a leading audio company that produces top-of-the-line products, offers an array of award-winning speakers, headphones, and other devices. The brand’s Px8 over-the-ear headphones are among those lauded devices, and Bowers & Wilkins rolled out a new color finish that reminds us of a certain suit-wearing genius superhero.
Founded in 1966, Bowers & Wilkins has emerged as a leader in providing studio speakers, home speakers, car audio devices, and more. Engineers, musicians, and true audiophiles are the target audience for B&W products but they provide their premiere technology at a fair entry price.
The latest color from B&W for the Px8 is the Royal Burgundy finish. This version of the Px8, as we noted before, is a noise-canceling over-the-ear wireless headphones set that sport a Nappa leather finish along with gold trimmings. The Royal Burgundy joins the existing and still popular Black and Tan Nappa leather finishes.
The B&W team has refined the bells and whistles of its flagship headphones. If one is familiar with the vast world of headphone drivers, the Px8 came equipped with 40mm Carbon Cone drive units, the same drivers that power its innovative loudspeaker units. Paired with the Bowers & Wilkins-developed DSP (Digital Signal Processing), fans who use music streaming services can expect 24-bit high-resolution sound.
Other features of the Px8 included its standard single cast-aluminum arm structure, and the earcups, memory foam cushions, and headband also feature the Nappa leather trim. The Px8 also comes with a handy carrying case for easy transport and storage.
B&W updated its acoustic tuning that promises faster response and low distortion across a wide range of frequencies, building upon the build quality of the bar set by the Px7 S2 earbuds and the Px7 S2e over-the-ear headphones. What listeners can expect is the best representation of sound from the music you enjoy, especially if you use a streaming service that offers high-fidelity options.
The Bowers & Wilkins Px8 model is priced at $699 in the Black, Tan, and new Royal burgundy finish.
Learn more here.
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Photo: B&W
As Sphere, the innovative new Las Vegas venue, opens its doors to the public with the debut of U2‘s 25-date residency on Friday (Sept. 29) and the premiere of the Darren Aronofsky film Postcard From Earth on Oct. 6, it’s doing so with an array of cutting-edge technology — much of which hadn’t been developed when the project broke ground in 2018.
“A lot of this stuff didn’t exist — it just didn’t,” says MSG Ventures CEO David Dibble, who oversees Sphere’s technology and content teams. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and by God, we had necessity.”
Plenty of Sphere’s advancements feel unique to the facility itself, including the geometry of its bowl-shaped theater and its 4D multisensory technology, which can generate effects like vibration, wind, scent and temperature fluctuations. But two key components — the venue’s audio and visual capabilities — could soon have a ripple effect across the concert business and broader live entertainment industry.
Sphere audiences will hear audio via Sphere Immersive Sound, a system created in tandem with the Berlin-based audio company Holoplot. “The problem that we tried to tackle from the beginning was not to build another sound system — because the world has enough sound systems,” says Holoplot CEO Roman Sick, who founded the company in 2011 with the goal of creating “a realistic, authentic audio experience that is not mainly determined by the room you’re having that audio experience in.”
Sphere executives discovered Holoplot after the company deployed its 3D Audio-Beamforming technology in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, Germany’s largest train station, in late 2016, allowing multiple audio messages at the same frequency to be sent simultaneously to different parts of the facility.
Holoplot’s X1 Matrix array.
HOLOPLOT
“If you boil it down, we have two core capabilities,” Sick explains. “The functional level, from our perspective, is you can determine where you want to have sound and where you don’t want to have sound. … And the creative bit is the ability to now move audio objects three-dimensionally across that whole volume [of space in a venue] — from left to right and up and down, but also into the audience back and forth.”
Holoplot dubbed the former aspect 3D Audio-Beamforming technology and the latter one Wave Field Synthesis. With Wave Field Synthesis, Sick explains, Holoplot can make the origins of audio imperceptible to create “a hologram of sound” — an accomplishment he calls “the holy grail of spatial audio.”
To implement these features, Sphere Immersive Sound utilizes advanced hardware and software. Behind Sphere’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen sit hundreds of Holoplot’s X1 Matrix arrays, which combine the functionalities of vertical and horizontal line arrays to allow greater control over the formation and shape of audio waves. Holoplot’s software then utilizes proprietary algorithms and machine learning to synthesize creative input and environmental data, collected by sensors throughout the venue, to further refine the system’s audio output.
Sphere Immersive Sound might sound complicated — and it is — but like many of the venue’s production capabilities, it’s designed to be plug-and-play for visiting artists and their teams.
“You don’t need to be a scientist,” Sick says knowingly. “You just say, ‘Hey, I want sound here and over there, for this configuration.’ And the system says, ‘OK, here it is.’” According to Sick, the system has “a large number of preset formats” — mono, stereo, 5.1, Atmos and so on — for artists to choose from. Once they do, “boom, then it’s the normal workflow,” says Sick, adding that an artist’s audio engineer can even use their normal desk: “From that end, nothing really changes.”
Of course, Sphere’s audio advancements didn’t take place in a vacuum. In implementing Holoplot’s technology, Sick and his team had to consider numerous other stakeholders, chief among them those conceptualizing Sphere’s visual capabilities. “You put something in front of a speaker, it’s going to have an effect — and it’s a negative effect, usually,” says Sick, summarizing the challenge of placing high-end audio equipment behind Sphere’s LED screen. Compared to point source or line array speakers, Holoplot’s matrix array had an advantage — it diffuses energy over a larger surface area, reducing the energy passing through an obstruction, in this case Sphere’s LED screen, at any given point. But Sick’s team still had to find “the best compromise between acoustic transparency and meeting the visual requirements.”
Big Sky, the camera developed by Sphere Studios.
Sphere Entertainment
“It’s such a unique and groundbreaking technology that, maybe for the first time ever in the audio-visual world, the images, as incredible as they are, are almost subordinate to the audio experience,” says Andrew Shulkind, senior vp of capture and innovation at Sphere Studios, the Burbank-based entity Sphere launched to develop technology and content tailored specifically for the venue.
That’s saying something: Shulkind became involved with Sphere several years ago to help it create visual content — like Aronofsky’s Postcard For Earth — suited to its massive, high-resolution screen. Initially, Shulkind and his colleagues shot tests using camera arrays, a common but cumbersome filmmaking technique that stitches together video captured from multiple cameras to generate a more detailed product.
“It became pretty obvious quickly that we really need a single-camera solution, for a variety of reasons, for weight and for mobility and ergonomics, and to be able to take all the difficulty of maneuvering something heavy out of the way,” says Shulkind, who enlisted a colleague, Deanan DaSilva, to help create a new camera fit for Sphere.
The resulting device, Big Sky, pushes the boundaries of modern filmmaking technology with a sensor 40 times the resolution of a 4K camera, lenses with high sharpness thresholds and even new data storage solutions to manage the large volume of information it produces. “This was something that [camera makers] weren’t expecting to do for another 10 years,” DaSilva says. “We had to figure out how to move that timeline up.”
Like Sick, ultimately Shulkind and DaSilva had to ensure that their advanced technology was accessible to the outside creators that Sphere wants to court. “We work with external creatives, they come in, they describe what they want to do, they have their support team and then we fill out the capture side,” Shulkind says. “We take the complications of any of these technologies out of the mix, and it becomes about, you know, what story are you trying to tell?”
Filmed by Aronofsky on every continent in conjunction with Sphere Studios, Postcard From Earth, Shulkind explains, was “really designed to take people to another place that they may not have been, or places that they may not have seen in that way before. Darren has been able to marshal all of the different aspects of the venue in service of that goal.”
Shulkind acknowledges Sphere Studios’ myriad technical accomplishments but has a broader view of their implications that transcends the wider implementation of any one of its technologies. For him, Sphere’s format could finally allow filmmakers to “break the rectangle,” or go beyond the rectangular framing of visual storytelling that emerged from rectangular film strips.
“Now that we have all the technology of the minute, whether it’s data storage, whether it’s the fidelity that we’re able to achieve with this high resolution, whether it’s the ability of creating glass that is able to be as sharp as it is, all the different aspects come together to create this greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts [product], radically rethinking how stories are told and how we experience content,” he says. “You’re looking at all these little composite technologies and all the growing currents of where technology has gone over the last 10 years. How do you apply that all for some creative purpose? I think that’s the real experiential success story.”
And that story isn’t over yet. While Sphere’s teams worked diligently to design and implement new technologies for the venue’s opening, Sick, DaSilva, and Shulkin all note that they’ll continue to iterate and improve their tools going forward.
As creatives “start to really discover how to tell stories in the venue … that’ll very clearly drive the technology evolution,” DaSilva says. “We’ve got a to-do list of all the things to try that we’ve not even scratched the surface on.”
“We constantly keep updating our technology,” Sick adds. “There’s new features that we will deploy over time, even after the venue has opened, that will give new capabilities to Sphere.”
It seems likely that at least some of these technologies will eventually move beyond the walls of Sphere’s Las Vegas facility to other venues — but what shape that proliferation will take remains unclear. After all, the Sphere team has already filed more than 60 patents. “One of the reasons we’ve been so aggressive on our patents is imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Dibble says. “But we’d just as soon not be imitated, because we own it.”
08/23/2023
Here are all the music stars who have spoken out about the growing technology.
08/23/2023
The music industry has progressed rapidly over the last decade. TikTok is launching music careers, sites like YouTube are creating new distribution channels and artists like Grimes are open-sourcing their vocals for generative AI creation. But for all of that progress, the opaque systems that control the industry are not in favor of artists driving culture. As listeners, we’ve seen the tip of the iceberg with Taylor Swift’s highly publicized re-recording of her masters and Megan Thee Stallion’s legal dispute with her record label over unpaid royalties.
Music is the most consumed category of art on the planet, and it’s time to evolve the system so that all artists — from top recording stars to indie creators to those who are just getting their careers started — are set up to succeed. But to really grasp what’s needed to shift the power dynamic in the direction of artists, it’s important to peel back the complexities of music revenue.
Changing the narrative on music revenue
There’s a false narrative that is pervasive in the media that says music doesn’t generate any money, driven in large part by the litany of really bad record deals that draw public attention (like the aforementioned Megan Thee Stallion example). But in reality, music makes money — it’s the artists who don’t get paid what they deserve.
The streaming revolution of the 21st century has transformed the way people consume music. But despite streams making up 80-90% of the industry’s revenue, artists see few of those dollars after industry players take their inevitable cuts. Though record labels serve a valuable role in the music ecosystem (from marketing and developing an artist to licensing and distribution), artists can be haunted for decades by bad deals signed early in their careers that unknowingly give away creative control and a significant portion of their future earnings. Artists who have signed contracts with unfavorable terms typically don’t earn negotiating power until they’ve amassed a large following and a fruitful career.
Why the bad deals?
Most artists simply don’t know what they’re signing — it’s not necessarily that they’re making a bad decision. As an artist myself, I experienced this firsthand early in my career. It would take years for me to get paid for my songs — and as someone who’s proficient in accounting from my time studying business in college, my inability to see how much I made from my music was mind-boggling.
The reason that deals are so opaque is that music revenue is growing and coming from more sources than ever before, which creates a complex web of intermediaries within the ecosystem. Every different distributor has a different deal with every different streaming service, and every label has a different deal with every streaming service. And the streaming services are not transparent about how their rates differ across these various deals. Beyond that, there are numerous types of royalties — from performance royalties to mechanical royalties to in-app streaming royalties. Therefore, when it comes to signing on the dotted line, artists must blindly place their trust in a network of counterparties, lacking any real visibility into their actual earnings once every entity has taken their cut. All of this is perpetuated because record labels are incentivized to control information so they can make more competitive deals with artists.
As a result, artists gravitate to what comes naturally — the music. They don’t want to worry about the business side of things because the system isn’t set up in a way that empowers them to ask questions or negotiate favorable deals, and it distracts them from doing what they love.
Finding the opportunity in technology
To rewrite the way music institutions approach music revenue and income, we need to make it as transparent as possible. It seems like a lofty goal for an industry that has long been set in its ways, but technology is making it possible. My company Royal recently launched a free tool that allows any artist to estimate the streaming revenue for their songs. The hope is that artists become more empowered to make deals that uplift their careers.
I’ve also been bullish on crypto since its earliest days, for a variety of reasons, including its ability to transform the music industry with transparency. Blockchain is inherently transparent — in fact, the one thing you can’t do on a blockchain is hide information. It’s all there, at all times. It’s also time-stamped which establishes a clear provenance (traceability of ownership over time). This is especially useful in the music business, where copyright infringement plagues artists and record labels alike. Perhaps most importantly, leveraging tokens that represent rights enables artists to see the value of their songs and create tangible benchmarks upon which to negotiate better deals. With more information always comes more power.
Artists don’t know how much money they’re missing out on, but they could. And it doesn’t have to be a public battle when they do find out. If we embrace technological progress to improve outdated systems, we can create an open data ecosystem that gives artists not only more transparency into their earnings and fan bases but more control over their artistic careers. Better deals alongside more creative freedoms is a winning combination that can define the next 30 years of music — we just have to be willing to change.
Why should artists even care?
As much as streaming has changed the music industry for the better, there are still unanswered questions about how value accrues in this system. Do we equate the value of passively listening to a sleep playlist in the background to actively listening to your favorite album with friends?
This talk of numbers and questions of value may seem like a distraction for artists who just want to spend their time making music — but ignoring this topic completely opens the door to predatory industry practices that threaten musicians’ longevity and entire legacies.
More industry transparency should improve all the variables that play into an artist’s career and result in musicians keeping more ownership of the art they create. Having the humility to acknowledge what music is actually worth is the first step in unlocking more value in this new era of the industry.
Justin Blau is CEO of Royal and a world-renowned musician and producer, known as 3LAU. An early crypto adopter, Justin has been advocating for building the investable layer of music on blockchains since 2017. In 2021, he founded Royal to empower artists to share their music with fans and give people the opportunity to invest in music.
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Officials with the city of San Francisco have stated that the new giant “X” sign of Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter was done without a permit.
On Friday (July 28th), the tech entrepreneur announced a rebrand of the social media messaging platform Twitter to X, removing the bird logo many have come to associate with the company from the company’s headquarters on Market Street, with the Twitter logo replaced with a huge “X” that lights up at high intensity as night falls. But a complaint by city officials charges that the billionaire didn’t have a permit for the change and barred entry to inspectors.
“NOV issued for work without permit. Site visited by MH and spoke with Twitter (sic) representatives and Building maintenance engineer representatives. I explained BID’s complaint investigation process and requested access to roof area. Twitter (sic) representative declined to provide access but did explain that the structure is a temporary lighted sign for an event. I explained to all representatives that the NOV requires the structure to be removed with a building permit or legalize,” the complaint read.
Another detail in the complaint revealed that officials were denied access to the roof in another attempt to review the new sign on Saturday (July 29th). Patrick Hannah, a spokesperson for San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection said in an interview that “to ensure consistency with the historic nature of the building and to ensure the new additions are safely attached to the sign,” the city requires a permit. A Notice of Violation could mean that the company could incur permit fees in addition to those incurred for an investigation into why the situation occurred.
Residents have complained about the new sign’s brightness at night being a nuisance. KQED journalist Christopher Beale captured the sign’s strobe-light effect in a video he posted on the platform. “I feel like if I was a person that was maybe epileptic or had a sensitivity to bright lights and strobes it would be a major problem to live here. For now, it’s just an irritant,” he said to reporters. He did note that the X did go dark on Sunday night (July 30th).
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In the wake of another chaotic situation caused by Elon Musk, Black Twitter users are making a move to the new Spill social media platform in droves.
On Saturday (July 1st), Twitter users were greeted with an error message that either said “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.” Musk stated in a tweet that users who were unverified would only be able to read 600 posts a day, but Twitter Blue subscribers would be able to view 6,000 a day. For Black Twitter, that was the last straw in what many felt was the Tesla and Space X CEO’s continual disrespect, prompting many to sign up for Spill.
Spill is a social media platform with the purpose of creating a safe space for diverse communities with a distinct focus on Black women and LGBTQ+ communities. The app had recently launched its beta version on June 19th. It was created by Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, former Black Twitter employees who were let go in the wake of Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform. “Our thesis was if we could build a platform from the ground up that caters to these groups, these culture drivers, and then solve the core problems that they’re facing, that our community is facing more specifically, that would make for a better experience for everyone,” Terrell said in a recent interview. The exodus of Black Twitter users, including numerous famous figures such as Keke Palmer and Desus Nice has propelled Spill to be number one in Apple’s App Store as of Monday (July 3).
Spill is styled as a microblogging app with a visual-first approach, with users being able to select from four colorways for their home page. Instead of Twitter’s 140 characters per tweet, each post or “spill” is set at 90 characters but users can get creative with images and GIFs, and even short videos in their posts. Spill is currently invite-only for new users, and is only available on iOS devices, which has spurred some complaints from those using Android devices. But many who’ve made their way to the app are praising it for its diversity and fun factor, as well as the dedication to keeping it a safe space for everyone. Hashtags such as #SpillMigration and #Spillionaires were in wide use on the app, with many more on Twitter making public requests for invite codes.
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“We are living in an electronic age and electronics is changing the world.” This bold-for-the-time declaration, from the June 24, 1967, issue of Billboard, came from an unlikely source: Limeliters banjo player Alex Hassilev. For an acoustic musician, he was savvy about electronics: Over the years since, we’ve gone from classical compositions played on synths to music created by artificial intelligence. What’s next? Just ask ChatGPT!
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Come On, Moog!
A year after the Summer of Love, Billboard hailed the age of computer love. The Oct. 12, 1968, issue predicted that “computers would someday allow operators to obtain overnight, or at least weekly, reports of record popularity on jukeboxes.” A month later, Billboard reported that “[a]n electronic Bach album is being issued by Columbia Masterworks this month,” which “employs a specially adapted Moog synthesizer as its musical instrument.” That recording, Wendy Carlos’ groundbreaking Switched-On Bach, became “only the second classical record in history to sell more than 1 million units,” according to the June 8, 1974, issue.
Speaking on the Moog in the Dec. 20, 1969, issue, jazz drummer Chico Hamilton opined, “it’s up to the listener to decide if it’s music or not,” but quipped, “some people turn electricity off.”
Synths In the Key of Life
While the Sept. 30, 1972, Billboard reported that skeptics saw synthesizers as merely a “cheaper alternative to a real string section,” the Sept. 9, 1973, issue proclaimed that keyboards were now the “hot instrument” thanks to synthesizers becoming an “integral part” of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. By the late ’70s, Giorgio Moroder taught the Moog to move, and the July 30, 1977, issue praised the “incessant, spacey, machine-like beat” on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”
One-Way Ticket
Synths were inescapable on the Billboard Hot 100 by the time of the March 24, 1984, issue, and Billboard ran a prescient headline with a phrase from Steve Jobs: “Computers Bound to Become ‘The Second Telephone.’ ” Another piece in the same issue covered the rise of “computerized [ticket-selling] outlets like Ticketron, Bass, Select-A-Seat, Ticketmaster and others,” noting that “the logistics of selling tickets becomes smoother; the service charge, however, is divvied up between more parties.”
Prog Rock and Prog-ROM
After Peter Gabriel released the musical computer game XPLORA1, the Jan. 8, 1994, Billboard hailed him as “the first major pop artist to actively participate in the creation of an interactive CD-ROM title integrating substantial amounts of music, video, still photos, text and ‘virtual touring.’ ” Not everyone was ready to get with the program, though. “We don’t see the point of participating in something if ‘the medium is the message,’ ” said The Cure’s Robert Smith about E-CDs in the Aug. 17, 1996, issue. “It’s an interesting idea, but is that art in itself?”
AI Think, Therefore AI Jam
A feature on digital recording in the Oct. 9, 1993, issue addressed fears of “sterile” mixes and “computer control supplanting the human touch.” “There is nothing spookier than facing something totally unfamiliar,” said producer John Hampton. “[But] you can let technology do so much of the work for you that you can sit back and look at the big picture.” A Berklee dean agreed: “What computers in general have done, is allowed us to take our minds off the mundane and concentrate on the creative.”
The same concern came back in a piece in the March 18, 2017, Billboard, which pointed out that “for songwriters, the subject of artificial intelligence is an especially fraught one.” The beat goes on, in other words — even if technology helps create it.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
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The founder of the popular mobile app Cash App, Bob Lee, was murdered in a fatal stabbing on a street in San Francisco.
According to reports, law enforcement responded to an incident in the downtown Rincon Hill neighborhood at 2:35 a.m. early Wednesday morning (April 5). The victim, later identified as Bob Lee, was taken to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The cryptocurrency startup, MobileCoin, where Lee served as the chief product officer, announced his death in a tweet later that day.
His father, Rick Lee, later posted an emotional tribute through his Facebook account. “Life has been an adventure with two bachelors living together, and I’m so happy that we were able to become so close these last years. Bob would give you the shirt off his back,” the post read. “He would never look down on anyone and adhered to a strict no-judgment philosophy. Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the smartest person I have ever known. He will be missed by all those that knew him.” The two had recently relocated to Miami from outside of San Francisco last October.
According to his LinkedIn profile, the 43-year-old was responsible for the creation of the popular financial app as well as serving as the chief technical officer of Square (now Block). Lee also lent his expertise to the development of Android software and invested in SpaceX, Clubhouse, Tile and other tech companies. Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO who is now Block’s CEO, reacted to the news on social media as “Heartbreaking,” before continuing: “Bob was instrumental to Square and Cash App.”
Lee apparently was in town for a leadership summit held by MobileCoin and had met up with longtime friends on the night of his death. Local reporting details that surveillance cameras captured the moments after he was attacked. San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott sent out his condolences via Twitter and also stated that police couldn’t comment on details of the crime as investigations had just begun.
The incident has added to the growing concerns raised about the rate of crime in San Francisco as the city is moving out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, wrote on the platform in regard to Lee’s death that “Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.” Preliminary data released by the police show an uptick in homicides this year as compared to 2021.