Kraken CEO Says SF Is Overrun With “Crack Zombies” Who Are “Effectively Wild Animals”
Earlier this week Jesse Powell, CEO and cofounder of massive digital assets exchange Kraken, took to Twitter to complain about living in San Francisco. The theory itself—that workers would soon leave the Bay Area for places with a better quality of life—wasn’t unusual. It was the tweet’s rhetoric that was striking: Powell claimed that two of Kraken’s employees had been attacked by “crack zombies” and that “you can pay $3k/sqft for a condo but can’t stop people from literally shitting on your door.”
Though a few people responded critically, the majority of commenters to his poll appeared to agree, eagerly chiming in about “escaping zombies” and debating where he should move. The discussion gets at the heart of the often hostile relationship between tech companies and people experiencing homelessness in the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area—and what responsibility these companies have in working to address the crisis.
That battle has only intensified in the run up to the November 6 vote on Prop. C. If passed, the proposition would generate an estimated $250 million to $350 million per year via what’s known as a gross receipts tax. That money would go to services for the homeless—almost doubling the amount San Francisco currently spends—and would disproportionally affect financial tech companies in the city.
Many prominent tech company CEOs have come out against the proposition, including Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, who has donated $75,000 to No on C campaign, and Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who has donated $150,000. (In contrast, co-CEO and founder of Salesforce Marc Benioff has been a vocal advocate, donating millions to the Yes on C campaign.)
BREAKER reached out to Powell, who doubled down on his views about “crack zombies,” stating that “some people are too far gone.” He says that he has concerns about “throwing more money at the problem,” and foresees a mass exodus of tech workers from the city, where Kraken is based.
Why did you pick San Francisco for Kraken originally?
The original thinking was that this was just where there was a critical mass of people. So this was back in like 2011. There were very few people in the world interested in crypto, and it seemed like a good thing to have a good cluster of people that were interested in the space. Also, it was close to the venture capital and engineers, the people we would need to eventually [launch] the company.
What caused you to tweet that poll?
I follow the San Francisco subreddits, and I’m following a bunch of people who live in San Francisco on Twitter, and it seems like the pace of crazy things happening just keeps increasing. We’re opening up an office in Southern California pretty soon and there’s a bunch of people in San Francisco who are planning to move, so it’s also just kind of been a discussion in the office.
Anytime you go out on the street, it’s so saturated. Just right in the middle of downtown there will be like 20—it’s not even homeless people that are the problem—it’s like, I refer to them as “crack zombies” in my tweet. It’s really these people that are just completely out of their minds, screaming at you, defecating on the sidewalk, stomping by, just completely unaware or angry with their surroundings and they’re kind of unpredictable.
I can think of two incidents where one person was standing on the street, waiting for their food order to be ready and a person charged at them, shoved them to the ground, super-forcefully, and basically had to be scared off by some other bystanders, fortunately. The other incident was someone was physically grabbed, like in a bear hug, and managed to break away, and then the person was trying to grab their arm and bite it. Totally crazy stuff like that—somebody trying to bite your arm........MUCH MORE
The sociology of the street (and street cannibals) isn't really Breaker's focus. A sample of their articles:
