SAN FRANCISCO – Bob Lee, founder of Cash App and former Square CTO, has been identified as the man stabbed to death early Tuesday morning near downtown San Francisco, according to his current employer, cryptocurrency company MobileCoin.
Officers responded around 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 where he succumbed to his injuries. injuries, police said.
The city medical examiner’s office had yet to identify him as of Tuesday night, but Lee’s friends and coworkers told KPIX that he was the victim. Early Wednesday morning, MobileCoin confirmed the death of Lee, 43, who was the Director of Product for the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency startup.
CBS
“Bob was a force of nature,” MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard said in a statement to KPIX. “He helped 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 father, the former CTO of Square where he created Cash App and CTO of Mobile Coin. He was a generous and decent human being who didn’t deserve to be killed,” Bill Barhydt, Abra’s CEO, wrote in Twitter.
mobile currency
On Twitter Tuesday night, a flurry of messages were posted praising Lee, many of them including his Twitter account @crazybob.
I was scheduled to work on @mobilecoin with you tomorrow AM @locobob. You always believed in me, I will be forever grateful.
Committed to seeing this project through as long as the Team has me, until the end.
—Kyle Zink (@kylezink) April 5, 2023
RIP to one of the most brilliant realistic humans I have ever met @locobob 😔💔
rip bob lee
CTO Square
CTO mobile currency
Cash App CreatorAnd a great single dad 🙏
— Joshua Charles (@JoshCDonaldson) April 5, 2023
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square (now called Block), responded to the news via a post early Wednesday on decentralized social media application 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 bro.”
Shields’ tweet caught the attention of new Twitter owner Elon Musk, who weighed in to say: “Violent crime in San Francisco 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 his own statement on his Twitter page.
“I want to extend my sincere condolences to Mr. Lee’s family members and loved ones on his loss,” Jenkins said. “We do not tolerate these horrible acts of violence in San Francisco.”
San Francisco has been dealing with an apparent spike in crime while still trying to recover from the pandemic. Preliminary police data reports 12 homicides in San Francisco this year, an increase of 20% compared to the same period a year earlier. In total, there were 56 homicides in San Francisco in 2022, which is exactly the same number of homicides the city saw in 2021.
No arrests have been made in the case and the San Francisco police have not released any suspicious details.
Anyone with information about the fatal stabbing was asked to call the Police Department’s tip line at (415) 575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 with “SFPD” at the beginning of the message.
