Daily Digest: Instacart names new CEO, value of Elon Musk's brain company Neuralink soars
Happy Wednesday, Bay Area. Starting your day with real estate, the Bay Area is leading the Western U.S. region in office investment this year, surpassing $1 billion in year-to-date sales volume, according to a new report from CommercialEdge. In terms of pricing, San Diego tallied the highest sale price in the West and the second highest nationally, averaging $364 per square foot, while San Francisco followed at $325 per square foot, ahead of Los Angeles at $298. Turning to housing, state officials have certified Atherton's housing element as compliant with California law. This comes after the state rejected two previous versions of the housing element and requested changes in February. In other news, immigrants seeking asylum were arrested at immigration courts in Concord and San Francisco on Tuesday, according to advocates and multiple news agencies. Here in the city, plainclothes federal agents detained at least four people Tuesday morning in what were believed to be among the first such arrests at San Francisco Immigration Court.
Here's the rest of what's in the local news at midweek.
GET TO KNOW YOUR CITY
Find Local Events Near You
Connect with a community of local professionals.
Explore All Events
Layoffs roll into Six Flags
Six Flags Entertainment will eliminate 135 jobs across its California parks and dissolve all individual park president roles, part of a larger cost-cutting initiative following last year's $8 billion merger with entertainment company Cedar Fair. The layoffs will affect Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, where 19 staffers will lose their jobs.
Elon Musk pays $300 million to get Grok in front of Telegram users
Elon Musk's startup xAI — which has offices in Palo Alto — is paying the Dubai-based messaging platform Telegram $300 million in cash and stock to roll out its Grok AI chatbot, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced in a post on Wednesday. Telegram, which has over a billion users, will also earn 50% of the revenue from xAI subscriptions that are sold on the platform.
Sign up for the Business Times' free morning and afternoon daily newsletters to receive the latest business news driving change in San Francisco. Download the free San Francisco Business Times app for breaking news alerts on your phone.
People on the Move
Instacart on Wednesday appointed business chief Chris Rogers as its new CEO, less than a month after OpenAI announced CEO Fidji Simo as its new head of applications. Rogers joined Instacart in 2019 after after 11 years at Apple and will start on Aug. 15. He will also join the board of directors, and Simo will retain her chair position at the grocery-delivery company.
expand
Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.
Instacart
Craig H. Missakian was sworn in Tuesday as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. Appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Missakian is a Southern California lawyer who worked on the Republican-led committee that investigated the 2012 Benghazi attack.
Bank of Marin Bancorp (Nasdaq: BMRC) and Bank of Marin, its wholly owned subsidiary, announced James C. Hale has been elected chair of their boards of directors effective May 21. He succeeds longtime board member Willie McDevitt, who retired after nearly 20 years of service to the Bank of Marin Bancorp and Bank of Marin boards.
Funding Watch
Elon Musk's Neuralink raised $600 million in a deal that values the brain-mapping company at $9 billion before the new cash, Semafor reported, citing anonymous sources. The startup was last valued at $3.5 billion in late 2023, according to Pitchbook.
expand
A technician laser-milling a needle designed with custom geometry to enable the Neuralink's R1 Robot to grasp, insert, and release threads of the N1Implant during surgery.
Neuralink
Hex, a San Francisco-based data-analytics workspace, raised $70 million in Series C funding. Avra led, joined by Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Box Group, Snowflake Ventures, a16z and Amplify.
Alameda-based identification management company Cerby announced that it raised $40 million in Series B funding. DTCP led, joined by insiders Okta Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.
Final thought …
Could new AI data centers in the Bay Area help drive down customers' PG&E bills? PG&E is extending its investment in downtown San Jose in particular and the South Bay overall as the utility is being flooded with requests for new data centers amid tech's hunger for energy sources to power the AI boom, the Mercury News reports. And for every gigawatt of new data center load, customer bills could decrease by 1% to 2% in the coming years, PG&E estimates.
DOWNLOAD the free SFBT app for breaking news alerts on your phone.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
13 minutes ago
Trump's funding bill faces pushback from some Senate republicans
Republican Rep. Russell Fry from South Carolina joined ABC News to talk about President Donald Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill.'
CBS News
14 minutes ago
- CBS News
All-electric aircraft makes historic landing at JFK Airport
JFK Airport has its first ever all-electric aircraft landing JFK Airport has its first ever all-electric aircraft landing JFK Airport has its first ever all-electric aircraft landing History was made Tuesday at John F. Kennedy International Airport as an all-electric aircraft made a successful runway landing for the first time. The aircraft made a 45-minute journey from Suffolk County to Queens in a first-of-its-kind passenger-carrying demonstration flight. "So quiet, so efficient, so green" Beta Technologies, a Vermont-based start-up, is now the first United States company to land an all-electric aircraft at an airport in the New York-New Jersey region. The company's founder and CEO, Kyle Clark, piloted the Alia CX300 himself, landing successfully – and quietly. He says the historic flight showcases the future of urban air mobility amid a longstanding push for electric aviation. "That flight we just took from East Hampton to here was like $8 in electricity," he said. Clark says the company's all-electric aircraft have undergone years of rigorous safety testing. "It's super meaningful to bring an aircraft of new technology through six years of development and testing to the point that we can actually put passengers in it," Clark said. Joining him on Tuesday's flight were four passengers, including Andrew Kimball, CEO of NYC Economic Development Corporation. "So quiet, so efficient, so green. Really will transform the industry," Kimball said. "It was terrific. It was quiet," another passenger said. Beta Technologies aims to fly commercial passengers by 2026 Clark says the goal for such electric aircraft is to ease congestion, reduce emissions and increase accessibility for all. He hopes to be flying commercial passengers by 2026, although at this time, it's unclear exactly how much a commercial flight would cost. "Next year, we will achieve [Federal Aviation Administration] certification, we expect. It's gonna be a lot of hard work, more testing, so 18, 20 months from now, you can probably be flying one of these airplanes around New York," Clark said. "The airports have a big job to do in terms of establishing charging stations, developing areas where they can safely land and take off," said Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Executive Director Rick Cotton. In October 2024, the FAA finalized comprehensive training and pilot certification rules for flying such electric aircraft, calling it "the final piece in the puzzle for safely introducing these aircraft in the near term."
Politico
20 minutes ago
- Politico
The populist right takes a victory lap
MORAL COMPASS — A who's who of Republican elites is set to gather this evening at the National Building Museum for a swanky gala hosted by American Compass, the institutional home of conservative economic populism in Washington. The black-tie affair is nominally being held to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the think tank, which was founded in 2020 by the conservative economist and former Mitt Romney adviser Oren Cass. But among American Compass's supporters in the capital, the event is broadly understood to represent a victory lap of sorts, marking the ascendancy of Cass's brand of economic populism in the Trump era and the newfound prominence of two of American Compass's primary political allies: Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — both of whom are scheduled to speak at tonight's event. Yet despite American Compass's success in establishing itself as a buzzy hub of new conservative economic thinking in Washington, the gala comes at a particularly fraught moment for this ascendant wing of the GOP. Cass's brand of economic thinking — which rejects the GOP's traditional mélange of free trade, tax cuts and deregulation in favor of trade protectionism, industrial policy, immigration restriction and a relatively friendlier stance toward organized labor — has made definite inroads in Washington, as the Trump administration's aggressive tariff policies and public courting of organized labor suggest. But the limits of the administration's commitment to American Compass-style populism have been put on stark display in recent weeks thanks to the fight over Trump's 'big, beautiful' domestic spending bill. The legislation, which is currently under consideration in the Senate, includes a slew of decidedly un-populist provisions — tax cuts for corporations and high-earners, rollbacks to Medicaid coverage and funding cuts for food assistance programs for low-income Americans — and has been met with unusually strong resistance among populist-leaning Republicans in the upper chamber, especially Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who has publicly opposed the bill's Medicaid cuts. Notably, Cass has also spoken out publicly against some of the bill's tax provisions. In a recent interview with POLITICO Magazine, Cass criticized congressional Republicans for their inability to articulate a coherent economic rationale for proposed tax cuts, calling the negotiation process 'a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making.' He also called out the House package for exacerbating America's ongoing 'fiscal crisis' by adding to the national debt — a claim that the Trump White House continues to deny, despite multiple independent estimates showing that the bill would add over $3 trillion to the debt over the next decade. The tension inside the Building Museum will be heightened by the presence of Vance and Rubio, both of whom serve as ambassadors of sorts between the GOP's economic populist wing and the Trump White House. In the Senate, both Vance and Rubio emerged as leading champions of Cass-style economic populism, with Vance taking a stand on tariffs and rail-safety regulation, and Rubio positioning himself as a vocal advocate of targeted industrial policy as a tool for the U.S. to compete with China. Vance's elevation to the No. 2 spot in the administration was also a major win for the cohort: Vance and Cass have been friendly for nearly a decade, Cass told me, dating back to the publication of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. The two have deepened their political ties in recent years as well, with Vance headlining a conference hosted by American Compass in 2023 and hiring the group's former research director to his Senate office. But now that both men have left the Senate for Cabinet-level roles in the administration, they have had to downplay any ideological daylight between Trump's economic agenda and the conservative populist's vision. That's especially true on tax reform — where American Compass and others in the movement have unsuccessfully urged the administration to raise rates on corporations and high-earners — and welfare cuts, where populist have come out against the 'big, beautiful' bills cuts to Medicaid and other popular social safety net programs. The departure of Vance and Rubio from the Senate has also thrust Cass and his fellow economic populists into another sort of political bind. When acting as a unified bloc in the upper chamber, Vance, Rubio and Hawley (and, to a lesser extent, other populist-curious Republican senators like Tom Cotton and Eric Schmitt) wielded significant leverage over leadership. But with Vance and Rubio now out of the picture, Hawley has been forced into the uncomfortable position of allying with more moderate (and MAGA-skeptical) Senate Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski to push populists' preferred changes to Trump's mega-bill. That dilemma points to a broader challenge facing Cass and his fellow conservative populists at the dawn of the second Trump administration. Although American Compass has found champions among a handful of high-profile Republicans in Washington — and, importantly, has made inroads with a broad swath of younger Republican staffers on the Hill — they've yet to win broad-based support among rank-and-file Republicans. In particular, Republicans in the House have kept American Compass's heterodox economic argument at a comfortable arm's length, giving the anti-tax budget hawks in the Freedom Caucus disproportionate power over the economic agenda in the lower chamber. That lack of broad-based political support is partly a function of the relative novelty of American Compass's message — it is, after all, only five years old — and partly a result of the personality of its founder. Cass, a bespectacled and soft-spoken budget wonk, has always appealed more to the self-styled conservative intellectuals in the Senate than he has to the conservative bomb-throwers in the House. Cass is also not a typical go-along-to-get-along creature of the Washington swamp: As his recent criticisms of the 'big, beautiful' bill suggest, he is one of the few MAGA-aligned conservatives in Washington who is still willing to offer principled criticisms of the administration's actions — a tendency that has not always endeared him to White House officials. A self-described policy nerd, he is also something of an odd fit within the smashmouth rhetorical frame of the MAGA mainstream. With all these low-level tensions simmering in the background, the gala represents an opportunity for two of the administration's high-profile emissaries to tend to some sore spots between the White House and the GOP's economic populists. Vance — who is slated to sit for a Q&A with Cass at the gala — has emerged as a particularly adept mediator among MAGA's various factions: In March, he used a similar speech at a high-profile gathering of right-leaning tech figures to broker a truce of sorts between the tech right and the populist-right. In that respect, the Building Museum serves as a thematically appropriate venue for the event. With Trump's domestic policy agenda dangling in a delicate legislative limbo, the administration needs to quickly build some bridges with the party's economic populists to get the bill across the finish line. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@ Or contact tonight's author at iward@ or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports. What'd I Miss? — Congress finally gets Trump's request to codify DOGE cuts to NPR, PBS, foreign aid: President Donald Trump has sent Congress a request to nix $9.4 billion in current funding for public broadcasting, National Public Radio and foreign aid — the first test of Republicans' willingness to back the administration's gutting of federal agencies. The 'rescissions' memo was officially transmitted today to Capitol Hill, according to Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), but it has yet to be publicly released. The request now starts a 45-day clock — not counting breaks longer than three days — for Congress to either approve or rebuff Trump's request to claw back funding that's supposed to be flowing now. — Fetterman's chief of staff leaves amid string of departures: Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman's chief of staff is leaving her post, two people familiar with the matter confirmed to POLITICO today. The move is yet another key departure for a congressional office that's been marked by turnover amid mounting questions about the Democrat's health and shifting political persona. Axios first reported Krysta Sinclair Juris' plans to part ways with Fetterman's office. POLITICO has learned Cabelle St. John, who previously served as Fetterman's deputy chief of staff, senior adviser and scheduling director, is taking over as his new top aide. — Navy set to rename ship honoring Harvey Milk amid DEI purge: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to rename a naval vessel named after gay rights activist Harvey Milk, with several other ships honoring civil rights activists and women also potentially being rechristened. The move targeting the ship named after the gay rights icon comes as LGBTQ+ communities kick off pride month celebrations across the country. The step furthers Hegseth's agenda to stomp out DEI initiatives at the Pentagon, which has included removing books from service academies and scrubbing some mentions of women and people of color in the armed services from DOD websites. — Musk goes nuclear on Trump's 'big beautiful bill': Elon Musk came out swinging against President Donald Trump's 'big beautiful bill' today, slamming the reconciliation package as a 'disgusting abomination' in a massive break from the president just days after stepping away from his role in the administration. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Musk wrote on his social media platform X. 'This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.' Musk, who Trump had tapped to lead the federal expense-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, went on to criticize the bill for setting up Congress to 'increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion (!!!)' and saddle Americans with 'crushingly unsustainable debt.' AROUND THE WORLD SPY GAME — Ukrainian spies launched an underwater assault against the pillars of the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia's mainland with Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow has illegally occupied since 2014. 'The underwater supports of the piers were severely damaged at the sea bottom level — 1,100 kg of explosives in TNT equivalent contributed to this. The bridge is in an emergency state,' the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, Kyiv's main counterintelligence agency, said in a statement today after the attack. The bridge was closed for transport as of 3 p.m., Russian authorities reported, issuing no more details. The attack on the Kerch Bridge happened just two days after the SBU's daring Spiderweb drone operation damaged dozens of strategic bombers thousands of kilometers inside Russia. The Kerch Bridge was personally opened by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2018 and today marked Ukraine's third attempt to strike it. QUITTING TIME — Dutch far-right figurehead Geert Wilders announced this morning that his party would quit the government in The Hague, throwing the Netherlands into turmoil. Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV) left the coalition in a heated dispute over the government's position on asylum. 'No signature for our asylum plans. No changes to the [coalition] agreement. PVV is leaving the coalition,' Wilders posted on X. Prime Minister Dick Schoof announced this afternoon that he'd hand in the resignation of the government to the King, triggering a new election less than a year after his government took office. While the PVV members of the government are resigning, Schoof said that the remainder of the government — including himself — would stay on in a caretaker capacity until there's a new administration. Schoof called Wilders' move 'unnecessary and irresponsible.' But, he said, 'if one party lacks the will to continue [to carry out the government program], you cannot move forward with each other.' The outgoing Dutch government, a coalition between Wilders' far-right PVV, the populist Farmer-Citizens Movement (BBB), the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) and the liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), had scheduled crisis talks this morning to discuss Wilders' demands for stricter asylum measures. Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP AI ANXIETY — While the advent of generative AI has bolstered unconventional uses of large language models like ChatGPT, it has also become a go-to therapist and interpreter for relationship woes. Users appreciate the platform's constant availability for emotional analysis and its stark evaluations of personal conversations. However, WIRED's Megan Farokhmanesh reports that such practices actually promote greater social anxiety in users while inhibiting the growth of their interpersonal communication skills. Privacy concerns also abound as users upload extensive chat records and personal information into the model to have it fully assess their emotional needs. Parting Image Marisa Guerra Echeverria contributed to this newsletter. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
