San Francisco’s tech boom has fuelled a culture of debauchery known as ‘The Lifestyle’
When Bob Lee, a 43-year-old technology executive, was stabbed to death in the small hours of the morning on a San Francisco street, it looked like a brutal instance of the Californian city’s urban decay.
Commentators including Elon Musk said the case was yet another example of “horrific” crime in the city and others said they feared for their safety.
The story quickly unravelled, however. Lee was attacked in a relatively quiet part of town and, despite its problems with theft and open-air drug use, the city’s murder rate is relatively low.
The truth turned out to be stranger. US prosecutors allege that Lee, a cryptocurrency executive best known for inventing the Cash App payments service, was not killed in a random and unfortunate encounter, but by a fellow tech worker. Nima Momeni, a 37-year-old acquaintance of Lee, confronted him over a relationship with Momeni’s sister, the wife of a prominent local plastic surgeon, before allegedly stabbing him with a four-inch kitchen knife.
Instead of acting as a symbol of a city in decline, Lee’s murder has instead shone a light on a different aspect of San Francisco – an underground scene of extramarital affairs, casual drug use and partying, and the tech elite that participates in it.
Lee and Mr Momeni’s sister, Khazar, were both active participants in what insiders refer to as “The Lifestyle”, people close to the pair told The Wall Street Journal.
Lee, who was separated from his wife Krista and had recently moved out of California, was “hanging out with people who weren’t great people… a lot of swingers, cheaters and liars in that crowd,” one friend, Dana Wagner, told the newspaper.
Silicon Valley has lost much of its countercultural appeal in recent years as its companies have become impossibly wealthy, house prices have soared and more questions have been raised about the downsides of the technology invented there. But there is still a side of it that harks back to the free love for which the city was once known. The internet boom of the last decade has created a fusion of data-driven millionaires and an established alternative nightlife.
“There’s a lot of people from the tech community who would either come to voyeur, just to sort of see it in a state of shock,” says Stefanos Tiziano, who organises BDSM events in the city, and which he says draws a different crowd to the swinging scene (BDSM is an umbrella term that covers bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism).
“There were folks from some of the big companies that are still there that I partied with, and a lot of them knew each other.” Tiziano says his events are particularly popular when big tech conferences, such as video game expo GDC, are in town, and that many spaces used for the events have only been able to stay open because of the largesse of wealthy techies.
One San Francisco native who has attended swingers’ parties in the city says that while the pursuit has a seedy, underground reputation, techies who participate in The Lifestyle practise an analytical, premeditated approach.
“In the past, people would exchange keys at the front door for swinger parties. Now people can use apps to check each other before the party.