In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins confirmed that an arrest has been made in the April 4 fatal stabbing of Cash App founder Bob Lee. Officials named Nima Momeni — a tech entrepreneur in the Bay Area — as the suspect.
Authorities also said that Momeni knew the victim, though they would not comment on the motive. They also indicated that the investigation was ongoing.
Momeni will be arraigned on Friday, and prosecutors said that they would be filing a motion to detain him without bail.
Police made the arrest earlier on Thursday in Emeryville, California, a suburb 15 minutes outside San Francisco. Jail records say that the 38-year-old Momeni was booked on suspicion of murder at 9:19 a.m.
News of the arrest was first reported by Mission Local, a local San Francisco news publication.
In the press conference, Jenkins criticized early comments from pundits and celebrities that used the murder to paint San Francisco as a crime-ridden and violent city.
San Francisco police officers found Lee, 43, with stab wounds at 2:35 a.m. in a deserted part of downtown San Francisco. He was taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries and later died, police said at the time.
Lee had been working as chief product officer for the cryptocurrency company MobileCoin. He previously served as chief technology officer of Square (now known as Block), a financial technology company co-founded by former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey. Lee went on to create Cash App, a money transfer service.
He was also an investor in Elon Musk‘s SpaceX venture as well as other tech firms, such as the social audio app Clubhouse, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He was widely praised by former colleagues, including MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard, who said in a Twitter thread that Lee was a “brilliant” visionary with a “kaleidoscopic” mind.
