A certain tech titan with a side hustle building rocketships came to San Francisco this week. And no, it wasn’t Elon Musk, who made a lot of people around here very rich when his SpaceXwent public Friday at $2 trillion. It was Jeff Bezos, who must be feeling a certain kinda way after his Blue Origin rocket exploded (opens in new tab) spectacularly last month.
It’s hard to remember that Bezos’ space company first landed a reusable rocket back in 2015; since then, his company has been routed by Elon’s. Anyway, that’s not what he talked about Thursday in an interview at CNBC’s office (opens in new tab) on the Embarcadero. He was there to talk up Prometheus, his AI company. In the interview, Bezos described being a CEO as “Type 2 fun,” which is when something feels awful in the moment but is fun in retrospect. (Maybe sorta like watching a billionaire’s rocket explode!)
The night before the interview, a Waggler who was headed to the Belle & Sebastian concert at the Masonic spotted Bezos at the bar inside the newly Ken Fulk-ified Huntington Hotel. The anonymous tipster wrote: “bad vibes as Jeff Bezos was having cocktails at Arabella’s.” The tipster assumed Bezos was not heading to the concert, though you never know.
No one at Arabella’s answered our questions about Bezos, including whether his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos was also there. We can only assume he was drinking one of the bar’s signature “Gilded Era-inspired” cocktails, ruminating on how even a titan of the new Gilded Era can come in second place sometimes.
It was a homecoming of sorts for at least two Hankses this week. OG Tom, who was born in Concord, was spotted doing the most Tom Hanks thing ever: visiting a typewriter shop in Berkeley. The actor, who is famously obsessed with the clacking of mechanical keyboards — so much so that he wrote a book, “Uncommon Type,” about it — was spotted (opens in new tab) June 4 at Berkeley Typewriter. Owner Ken Alexander told SFGate that Hanks “walked away with a 1930s Royal standard” after perusing the wares for an hour.
His eldest son, Colin Hanks, made an appearance the day before at the Roxie (which, unrelatedly, received a welcome donation recently from vanquished congressional candidate Saikat Chakrabarti). Colin was in the Mission for a screening of his documentary “John Candy: I Like Me.” According to Waggler Mike Trouble Lin (who is running for District 10 Supervisor in November and is “hoping to make history as the first supervisor candidate to disclose their clinical Bipolar 1 condition”), the film’s producer Sean Stuart told the audience that their next project would be a documentary about the Roxie itself, which has been hosting the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival for 25 years. We hope he wasn’t joking!
Nymphia Wind’s banana-yellow reign isn’t over — three of her jaw-dropping, self-made Season 16 runway looks are on display through Sunday at the Asian Art Museum’s Shriram Experiential Learning Center. The Taiwanese queen who won our hearts (and RuPaul’s crown) in 2024 showed up to help set up the display herself — the museum posted behind-the-scenes footage to prove it. Her talk Saturday is sold out, but the fashions are free for the ogling. Go.
Olympian Eileen Gu was in the news this week, and not for the usual reasons (gold medals, bubble dresses (opens in new tab), learning to box (opens in new tab)). It was because a huge pile of trash was dumped outside her family home in the city’s poshest neighborhood, Sea Cliff. The Standard’s George Kelly interviewed her mother, Yan Gu, who admitted to depositing the trash outside, while claiming that “her belongings were neatly packed into 20 boxes and covered in case of rain when she finished moving them to the curb at 1 a.m.” Kelly also spoke to Gu’s neighbors, who described a years-long battle over the conditions of the home. The Waggle was struck most by this detail: Neighbors called 311 repeatedly about a 7-by-10-foot “pool of sewage” that was bubbling in the backyard and creating a foul odor. Though that’s gross, we have compassion for the Gu family. Even Sea Cliff-ers must deal with the nightmare of San Francisco’s crumbling infrastructure.
Somehow things keep getting worse at Meta. The vibes have been off for a while, as we reported people were crying at work and taking mental health leave in the run-up to mass layoffs. Well this week, Wired reporters Zoe Schiffer and Paresh Dave published a (opens in new tab)devastating dispatch (opens in new tab) that has some unhinged details from inside the company. According to the piece, an employee hijacked a livestreamed all-hands this week, demanding that someone tell a certain Meta AI executive “that he’s a piece of shit,” while one presenter “covered their face with their hands.” Engineers drafted into the new Applied AI unit call themselves “draftees” and say the assignment is “literally the gulag.” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox told Instagram employees the vibe has been like “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm” and then just said “what the fuck” twice into the void. Mark Zuckerberg responded with a memo promising people would get assigned desks back. Thanks, Mark. That’ll fix everything.
San Francisco culture website Gazetteer published its second print edition and celebrated Tuesday by taking over a shuttered newsstand on Market Street. Editor in Chief Matt Haber, who once edited Gawker’s ValleyWag column (one spiritual inspiration for the Waggle), said, “Print is definitely not dead. In fact, it’s living at the moment on Market and 1st in San Francisco.”
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