SAN FRANCISCO — Bob Lee, founder of Cash App and the former chief technology officer of Square, was identified as the man stabbed to death early Tuesday morning near downtown San Francisco, according to his current employer, cryptocurrency startup MobileCoin.
Officers responded at about 2:35 a.m. to a report of a stabbing in the 300 block of Main Street in the city’s Rincon Hill neighborhood and arrived to find the victim, who was taken to a hospital and succumbed to his injuries there, police said.
The city’s medical examiner’s office had not yet identified the as of Tuesday evening, but friends and co-workers of Lee told KPIX he was the victim. Early Wednesday morning, MobileCoin confirmed the death of the 43-year-old Lee, who was the Chief Product Officer of San Francisco-based cryptocurrency startup.
CBS
“Bob was a force of nature,” MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard said in a statement to KPIX. “He helped to birth Android and CashApp into our world. Moby was his dream: a privacy protecting wallet for the 21st century. I will miss him every day.”
“Bob was a dad, the former CTO of Square where he created Cash App & CTO of Mobile Coin. He was a generous decent human being who didn’t deserve to be killed,” wrote Bill Barhydt, CEO of Abra, on Twitter.
MobileCoin
On Twitter Tuesday evening, a flood of messages were posted eulogizing Lee, many including his @crazybob Twitter handle.
Was scheduled to work on @mobilecoin with you tomorrow AM @crazybob. You always believed in me, I’ll be forever grateful.
Committed to seeing this project for as long as the Team will have me, to the very end.
— Kyle Zink (@kylezink) April 5, 2023
RIP to one of the realist most brilliant humans I’ve ever met @crazybob 😔💔
Rip Bob Lee
CTO Square
CTO Mobile Coin
Creator of Cash AppAnd a rad single Dad 🙏
— Joshua Charles (@JoshCDonaldson) April 5, 2023
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square (which is now called Block), responded to the news via a post early Wednesday on the decentralized social media app Nostr. “Heartbreaking,” Dorsey wrote. “Bob was instrumental to Square and Cash App.”
Mixed martial arts fighter Jake Shields remembered Lee as a “loyal friend” in a tweet, writing, “RIP brother.”
Shields’ tweet garnered the attention of Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, who chimed in to say, “Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.” Musk tagged San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in his tweet.
On Wednesday morning, Jenkins offered her own statement on her Twitter page.
“I want to extend my sincerest condolences to Mr. Lee’s family members & loved ones for his loss,” Jenkins said. “We do not tolerate these horrific acts of violence in San Francisco.”
San Francisco has been grappling with an apparent uptick in crime as it still attempts to bounce back from the pandemic. Preliminary police data reports 12 homicides in San Francisco this year, an uptick of 20% compared to the same time period in the previous year. In total, there were 56 homicides in San Francisco in 2022, which is the exact same number of homicides the city saw in 2021.
No arrest has been made in the case and San Francisco police have not released any suspect details.
Anyone with information about the fatal stabbing was asked to call the Police Department’s tip line at (415) 575-4444 or to send a tip by text message to TIP411 with “SFPD” at the start of the message.
