Tongues are always wagging in San Francisco — and The Waggle is always listening. Got some tea to spill in our weekly gossip column? Email us at [email protected].
Rarely is there a party The Waggle is glad to have missed. We live for the gossip, the crudites, the bathroom selfies, the various ways San Francisco’s subcultures get down. But then there is a party, like Tuesday’s ChatGPT 5.5 release bash, to which we are not invited and must instead cobble details from social media. Looking at shots from this party — dubbed by a16z partner Olivia Moore “the largest ever gathering of the terminally online” — we did not feel FOMO.
The party seemed — how to put this delicately? — deeply uncool. Photos and videos from the event, held at OpenAI’s Mission Bay headquarters (start time 5:55 p.m.), show the 200 attendees, chosen from a reported 8,000 applicants, loving the boba, the empty floor space, and the overhead lighting. But if we’re being honest, this seemed like less of a party than a meet and greet for Sam Altman superfans looking to work at OpenAI. Attendees exuberantly posted their RSVPs the way kids getting into Ivies post their acceptances. At one point, Altman was even seen crouching in a corner alone, petting a statue of Yoda. (Or is that Gollum? It’s certainly some kind of goblin.)
Local tech founder Ted Bibr (opens in new tab) didn’t get an invite (opens in new tab), but did print out a painting of Altman as the Mona Lisa — “the Sama Lisa” — and waited outside the party with it, hoping it would become a ticket to crash. Apparently, the fawning worked, and Bibr and his crew got in.
The Waggle must disclose that we did seek an invite from OpenAI but were denied. Apparently, ChatGPT 5.5 (which actually planned the whole party, including the invite list, according to Core Memory’s (opens in new tab)Kylie Robison (opens in new tab)) doesn’t think we “make the codex internet feel real.” We’re OK with that. Others who were denied (or who would never want to attend a party thrown by an LLM that will one day take their jobs) headed over to Zeitgeist instead.
Of course, it wouldn’t be San Francisco’s most heated rivalry if Anthropic didn’t host its own geeked-out event — and we actually attended this one. The AI company held its Claude Code conference Wednesday at a downtown events space, welcoming hundreds of coders to eat poke nachos on an umbrella-dotted rooftop and listen to talks like “From code to orchestration: Building with Claude in Amazon Bedrock.” Featured speakers included founding siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who spoke repeatedly about “being on the exponential.” (Can someone please translate?) Other speakers included Anthropic Head of Product Ami Vora, Claude Code creator Boris Cherny, and Vercel cofounder Guillermo Rauch.
While the speaking lineup was stacked with high-powered women, the crowd was overwhelmingly male. (The line for the “gender-neutral restroom” was the opposite of neutral.) The crowd seemed deeply unconcerned about that morning’s announcement that Anthropic will partner with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to secure more computing power for its product. While the Amodeis have positioned themselves as moral paragons in the AI space, attendees did not seem to care about who or what is powering their beloved Claude.
“It’s like where your diamonds came from 30 years ago,” one attendee said. “Nobody’s like, ‘Hey, these are conflict diamonds.’”
Now here’s a party we wish we’d been invited to: Jeffrey Katzenberg’s three-day WNDR conference down at Rosewood Miramar in Montecito, the famed SoCal home of Harry, Meghan, Oprah, Ellen, and other one-name celebs. Dylan Byers at Puck had the scoop (opens in new tab) on who was there, and the list is too long to include in full, but we took note of San Francisco’s burgeoning arts sugar daddy Jensen Huang, lesbian fashion inspiration Justin Bieber, Silicon Valley inventor turned Miami arms dealer Palmer Luckey, comedian Chris Rock (who paired up with Luckey to judge a Lego contest), Disney’s Bob Iger, The Waggle’s permacrush Julia Roberts, America’s foremost everyman Nate Bargatze, and “TBPN” hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays.
A Rosewood employee reportedly shared videos of Bieber performing for the ultra-elite assembly. But we are more interested in the photo of the event schedule, which includes phrases like “Turns Out, We Need the Nerds.”
If you like seeing a room full of people who just threw down $25,000 to scream-sing the words to Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” Thursday night’s Tipping Point Community gala was your place. The anti-poverty nonprofit, founded in 2005 by Mayor Daniel Lurie, hosted its annual fundraiser at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, which ended with a Ludacris concert that had hizzoner himself shaking his moneymaker in the back of the room.
Tipping Point draws a more eclectic crew than your usual society gala, bringing in sports stars like Warriors coach Steve Kerr and four-time NBA champion Andre Iguodala, alongside philanthropic royalty like mega-donor Bill Oberndorf and investor David Dolby. This year’s gala was co-chaired by Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, perhaps due to the nonprofit’s new focus on training workers for the AI economy. Also in attendance were tech pooh-bahs like Yelp cofounder Jeremy Stoppelman, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom, and investor Sarah Guo. Oh, also, Maggie Rogers dropped by to perform a song during dinner. NBD!
The highlight of the night — other than Luda, obviously — was the auction and “power raise” fundraiser that takes place over dinner. This year, two guests got in a heated battle over a trip to Mexico to watch the 49ers play and VIP seats at the World Cup, which ultimately went for $200,000. (We believe the victor was Francisco Partners CEO Dipanjan “DJ” Deb because of the chants of “DJ! DJ!” that echoed throughout the room, but we weren’t close enough to see. If anyone knows for certain, let us know!) Another donor plunked down a cool $1 million during the power raise section, while two threw down $500,000 each. A $25 million gift from local billionaires John and Sue Sobrato brought the night’s total fundraising haul to more than $42 million — a record for the organization and more than double last year’s $20 million (opens in new tab), which was a record at the time.
The Waggle does not stalk. We don’t go through trash, or bribe bellhops, or climb trees to spy on public figures behind closed doors. We mention this because lately we have had a LOT of tips about Roberts sightings — at the ballet, at the farmers market, at the beach — and we don’t want you thinking we are trailing her like crazed paparazzi. In fact, we’ve held off publishing most tips because we value Roberts’ privacy and respect that she chose to live here and not in that other California metropolis. However, we did love the report from local Instagrammer @FillmoreStreetSF that Roberts and husband Danny Moder dined at Chouquet’s on Fillmore. Server Mark Fantino shared that she was gracious after he quoted Erin Brockovich before taking her order. “What a delightfully down-to-earth celebrity she is, so very nice and effortlessly beautiful,” he said. Agreed.
Waymo must have missed the memo when The Waggle declared last month that company merch is dead. We did this after software-for-war company Palantir released a twee chore coat, which was just a step too far. But the self-driving company has apparently been sending out bags, hats, and other swag to influencers in certain cities. This week, local A16z partner Justine Moore posted a shot of her Waymo haul, including a hat that reads “Passenger princess.” Some on social media were upset they didn’t get one. We’d like to politely remind folks that Muni and BART always have merch and that real passenger princesses ride buses.
The inescapable Martin Shkreli
Regular Waggle readers know we’ve been tracking Wu-Tang ruiner Martin Shkreli’s apparent move to the Bay. Earlier, we covered his claim that he had a baby with an early staffer of OpenAI. We had our doubts (Shkreli is a convicted fraudster, after all), but a helpful tipster let us know this week that she saw him at the OpenAI holiday party in December, lending some possible credence to his claims.
From his perch somewhere in Silicon Valley, Shkreli is attempting to play political shit-stirrer, teasing private information about Rep. Ro Khanna, noted defender of the billionaire tax, that Shkreli claims will cause the congressman’s wife to file for divorce. So far, all he seems to have revealed is that Khanna recently bought a house (opens in new tab). Keep the bombshells coming, PharmaBro!
Monday night’s Met Gala may have been tainted by Jeff Bezos’ protest-sparking sponsorship and far too many images of Lauren Sanchez Bezos, but we happily spotted some local faces posing on the steps.
The good: Olympic skier, Stanford student, and Seacliff native Eileen Gu wore a high-tech minidress covered in glass spheres that actually blew bubbles. San Carlos-born influencer Emma Chamberlain, undeniably the best-dressed celeb, resumed her annual duty as Vogue’s red carpet correspondent and had a very Bay Area moment with our favorite Oaklander, Alysa Liu. On the tech front, Thinking Labs CEO Mira Murati went viral for more than just her text messages (opens in new tab) with Altman this week — she showed up to the gala looking fierce in a sparkling, long gown. And Puerto Rican singer Raul Alejandro wore super cool pieces by San Francisco jeweler Yaaqee, owned by Ida Lajevardi, including a badass silver nose piece that we want.
The sad: Dressed appropriately in black to mourn their elimination from the NBA playoffs, Golden State’s Steph Curry and Jimmy Butler stopped by in hooded, athleisure-meets-couture ensembles.
The embarrassing: Once inside, Liu had the mixed honor of small-talking with Adam Mosseri and Mark Zuckerberg, who ditched the Met steps along with Bezos in fear of being booed.
OpenAI’s Charles Porch was also lurking around. Other billionaires bravely posed for the cameras with their wives and attempted to dress for the theme. Google’s Sergey Brin wore a Matisse-inspired suit, while Slack cofounder Stewart Butterfield sported an outfit that was really doing the most. Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel was the only founder in attendance who looked remotely normal. The Waggle pleads with the tech bros to maybe sit this one out next year.
The Waggle’s first ever correction: The Waggle last week briefly mentioned party planner and man-about-town Adam Swig’s new beverage line, Yerdrink. Swig alerted us that we had referred to the product — a mixture of coconut water and the caffeinated herb yerba mate — as an energy drink, when he would prefer to call it a functional beverage. The Waggle deeply regrets the error.
The Standard’s own sports editor Kerry Crowley emceed the 48th annual Penny Pitch contest to benefit the St. Anthony’s Foundation on Friday. Mayor Lurie was there, as was Sen. Scott Weiner, Supervisor Connie Chan, San Francisco Fire Department Chief Dean Crispen and Supervisor Bilal Mahmoud, which was lovely, but to be expected. The crowd grew extra delighted when Rep. Pelosi showed up in a Valkyries-coded purple pant suit to throw out one of the ceremonial “first pitches.” A team of performers from the nearby North Beach mainstay Club Fugazi won the 65-team tournament, which included more than 500 people. Dear San Francisco, we love you!
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