According to the family, Bob Lee, the chief technology officer who founded the mobile payment company Cash App and previously worked at Square, died Tuesday after being stabbed near downtown San Francisco.
The San Francisco Police Department said officers responded to a report of the stabbing around 2:35 a.m. Tuesday. Officers found a 43-year-old man with visible stab wounds. The man suffered life-threatening injuries and was taken to hospital where he died, police said.
Authorities didn’t release the person’s name, but Lee’s father and brother identified him because the victim.
“Bobby worked harder than anyone and was the neatest person I’ve ever known. Everyone who knew him will miss him,” Richard Lee said in a post that was accompanied by an article about his son being stabbed. “Thank you to those that have reached out for support.”
The two men had been living in Miami since October after moving from California, his father said within the post. They became especially close after the death of Bob Lee’s mother in 2019. NBC News couldn’t immediately confirm why the chief returned to the Bay Area.
“Very saddened and discouraged by the lack of my brother,” Tim Oliver Lee wrote on Facebook. “He really was the most effective of us. I used to be lucky to grow up with him and I feel like I’ve lost an element of myself.”
Bob Lee worked because the product director of the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. Previously, he was the CTO of Square (now generally known as Block), a financial technology start-up co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Lee created the Cash App, a money transfer service.
He was also an investor in Elon Musk’s SpaceX enterprise, in addition to other tech firms corresponding to social media app Clubhouse, based on his LinkedIn profile. He used the “crazybob” handle on his LinkedIn and Twitter pages.
In a Wednesday statement, MobileCoin’s founder and CEO said Lee “died yesterday” and praised his entrepreneurship. He didn’t specify Lee’s explanation for death.
“Bob was a dynamo, a force of nature. Bob was an actual object,” said Joshua Goldbard. “He was made for a world that was just being born, he was a toddler of dreams and whatever he imagined, irrespective of how crazy, he made real.”
In a Twitter threadGoldbard said Lee was “like a brother to me” and praised the chief technology officer as a “good” visionary with a “kaleidoscopic” mind.
No arrests appear to have been made since early Wednesday. Police declined to release further information concerning the crime when contacted by NBC News because the homicide is under investigation, referring questions on the victim’s identity to the town’s medical expert.
When contacted by NBC News, the medical expert’s office said there was “no information to reveal or further comment at the moment.”
A fatal stabbing could intensify scrutiny over public issues of safety in San Francisco, where residents and business owners are increasingly concerned about violent crime and theft. Mayor of London Breed has committed to demolition about crime.
There have been 12 homicides in San Francisco for the reason that starting of the 12 months, based on police records. In the identical period last 12 months, there have been 10 homicides in the town.
Lee’s friends and associates paid tribute to him on social media. Former MMA fighter Jake Shields remembered the technical director as a “loyal friend”. In response to one among Shields’ tweets, Musk said he was “very sorry” to learn of Lee’s death.
Dorsey, the previous chief executive of Twitter, called Lee’s death “heartbreaking” on social media platform Nostr. “Bob was instrumental in Square and Cash App,” Dorsey wrote.
Joshua Bloch, a friend who worked with Lee at Google within the late 2000s, remembered him as a magnetic one who “all the time had an enormous smile on his face” and “continually lived life to the total.”
In a Wednesday phone interview, Bloch recalled that Lee was a technical “self-taught” who could seemingly “do anything he desired to … I do not think he realized how special he was.”
“People all the time say nice things concerning the dead,” added Bloch, “but on this case, I might say the very same thing if he were still alive. He was extraordinary.”
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