BravoSFPols

@GrantCardone It really makes no sense. I have been saying this for decades.

Why should anyone be forced to pay property taxes. The state doesn’t buy the house you did. You bought the home, improved it, put a mortgage on it and paid for it. The state collects sales taxes & business taxes to fund services. Imagine the 70 year old who owns a home today valued at $2M - they bought 30 years ago for $50,000, maintained the house for 30 years and finally paid the house off - Why should they or their heirs pay any tax much less on the increased value? They will say, “who’s going to support the roads, police, fire department and schools? Sales tax & local businesses can support those things. For those who support property taxes understand you open the door for the state to collect taxes on ALL property; boats, cars, clothes, art, bicycles, gym equipment, grills, tools, silverware, jet skis, stocks, retirement accounts - everything. 27 states reassess annually, and the rest, do so every 3 years OR lie California, any time you improve the property! It’s brutal and it’s endless! If you support property taxes on personal property you are either; a) a communist b) confused c) academic d) free loader End Property Taxes!

@BillAckman @X No question you have to fight it. And counter sue for legal and damages, libel, slander etc. But you also need some help in hiring - you should have never paid that much in salary. It’s outrageous. That’s one of the root causes.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@MLNow @io_y_g 127 is a joke. It needs to be in the thousands. And I’m not joking. Unions should be disbanded.

S.F. unions have pledged to fight "every one" of Mayor Lurie's 127 layoffs. Lurie says the layoffs are necessary to balance the city's budget. City workers say San Francisco's economic recovery is impossible without their labor. via @io_y_g missionlocal.org/2026/04/sf-lur…

@johnarnold @cpoetzscher It’s the only thing that 99% of economists agree on - rent control doesn’t work.

Rent control is the original sin of housing policy, requiring a thicket of rules to manage 2nd and 3rd order effects, more rules to deal with the unintended consequences of those regs, and more for those. Then add a large bureaucracy to enforce it all, and still no one is happy.

@financialsamura It actually sold for more than $13.5. Buyer paid buyers broker fees and I think more. They keep it out of escrow to keep prop tax basis down. I think total is $14mil+. It’s bonkers. No views for that price.

Here’s a nicely remodeled 7-bed, 5-bath, 6,075 sqft house near Presidio Terrace, on the north end of San Francisco. Originally 4,644 sqft. Asking $12 million, sold for $13.5 million. This is a house where you feel like you’ve finally “arrived.” But it feels kind of dark doesn’t it? Lot size is 4,200 sqft, and no views. What do you think? Worth the money?

@nickshirleyy Politicians have absolutely no shame.

You tried to paint me as a pervert for exposing fraud, and as a result radical leftists started trying to dox me and send death threats, wanting to kill me. Now you are taking credit for “leading the charge” on the fraud. Are you serious? You are the fraud.

@danielpearson It’s absolutely bonkers. Companies should headquarter or open offices elsewhere. Even in Austin, prices have been falling

From the trenches in the SF housing search: It is so insane. Feels like peak mania. People are bidding on places, especially "nice" places, like they are the last home on earth. Rentals are going within a day after bidding wars. Homes are selling for millions over ask, Follow @rohindhar to see examples. If you're in a rent controlled spot, do not dream of moving. If you're moving to SF, good luck!

@rohindhar These prices are flat out bonkers. The floor seems to be $2k a sq ft which used to be for nice to very nice pac heights properties. Sf revenue is going to sky rocket next year. And guess what, still won’t be enough.

San Francisco home sale in Russian Hill at $2.1MM over asking price

@bilalmahmood @SFFDPIO Bilal - this is not a solution. People can buy and bring in. Focus on things that can actually be fixed. Ask your residents. For example - renovation permit fees and preapplicatiion fees are completely outrageous.

Over 120 fires in San Francisco were caused by lithium ion batteries in the last 5 years. So today, in partnership with @SFFDPIO, I am introducing legislation to ban the sale or online delivery of uncertified batteries in San Francisco, while effectively requiring e-bikes and scooters use safer UL-certified batteries. Uncertified lithium ion batteries burn and spread hotter, while producing toxic smoke harmful to residents and to our firefighters. Uncertified lithium ion batteries are often purchased online and used in scooters and e-bikes, which have in turn caused fires in dozens of affordable housing and older apartments in the Tenderloin - displacing tenants and families. Our legislation will effectively prohibit the sale of devices or replacement batteries that are not UL-certified, and authorize the SF Fire Department to establish penalties of up to $1000 per violation to any entity that violates the order. We ultimately cannot wait for another building to burn or another family to be displaced, and this legislation is a proactive step to protect residents.

@RubiRubidoooo Omg. No one helped and they all ran away!

😱OMG😱 A wild boar is not kidding around and i have never ever seen anything like this before where they attack ppl like this in the middle of the day 😳🫣

@DanielLurie Revenue has been going up every year and population and services haven’t. Shouldn’t be that hard to cut. Sf budget is about to get a MASSIVE boost from insane home sale prices.

I wanted to share an update on San Francisco’s budget and how we are working to get our fiscal house in order.  When I took office, we inherited a significant structural deficit. That means the city was set up to spend more money than it brings in, year after year. Today, that gap is projected to reach $1 billion dollars over the next five years.  Over the past year, we’ve taken steps to close this gap and bring long-term spending more in line with revenue. We also know that increasing sustainable revenue for our city is crucial to solving our budget problem.  Since the day I became mayor, we’ve been taking steps to create the conditions for San Francisco’s economic recovery. Today, our streets are safer and cleaner, and people struggling on the streets are getting into treatment. We’re making it easier to open and operate a small business in our city.  And that progress has led to results: Businesses of all sizes are coming back to San Francisco, people are shopping downtown again, and tax revenues are higher than projected.   While we are making meaningful progress, we are not out of the woods.  Our economic recovery is very fragile. And since last year’s budget, the city has faced new federal and state funding cuts. This means our budget gap would reach $1 billion in the coming years if we don’t act. The charter requires that, as mayor, I submit a balanced budget each June—we cannot spend more money than we bring in. And we must also address this long-term $1 billion dollar deficit. Because if we don’t act now, we will have to do twice as much in the coming years, with the choices becoming more expensive and more difficult.  This year’s budget will include painful but necessary decisions. I know they will impact individuals and communities, and I take this seriously—which is why we must act now to avoid even deeper cuts later.  This year's budget will continue the work we’ve been doing since last year to manage city funds responsibly and deliver the best possible services. And it will put our city on a path to a lasting economic recovery that benefits all San Franciscans.

@EmilyDreyfuss Absolute bonkers.

This is insane

@ABC He threw the fishing hook onto the beach for someone to step on?!?!?

Onlookers captured the moment a man rushed onto a Southern California beach to rescue a shark — reportedly a juvenile great white – that got caught on a fishing line.

@natbrunell @StateFarm Ours in California went up 67%!!! It’s outrageous.

My mom’s @StateFarm homeowner’s insurance in Illinois just jumped 30% from last year. No claims. No disasters. No change in risk. This is how people on fixed incomes get pushed out of their homes. If you’re an insurer who can beat this - reach out. And if you’ve been hit with the same price increase, share this and call it out!

Earthquake.

@rohindhar 2500 a sq st. Tiniest lot. No view. Flat out bonkers.

San Francisco home sale in Presidio Heights at $1.6MM over asking price

@kirillzubovsky @rohindhar And that’s the listing price. Actual sale price will be significantly lower.

@rohindhar Wow. SF isn't a real place. For comparison, this is what you could have in Austin for $8M. Zillow doesn't even have a lot of homes listed for >$8M.

San Francisco home sale in the Cole Valley neighborhood at $2.3MM over asking price

@PhilSustainable Not true anymore after prop 19. $1mm exemption. Important to get facts right.

Prop 13 is the California family trust fund of state policy. Granny buys a LA beach shack in 1980 for $80k, it’s now worth $4M. She passes it to her grandkid, who pays taxes on $80k. Meanwhile the transplant renting the converted garage pays $50k/year in rent

@gregorykennedy It’s just too unbelievable. Convince your friends to come back?!?! Omg.

I didn’t believe it until I saw the video. The governor of NY is begging rich people to move back to fund her social programs. So, like, I guess there are consequences to over taxation after all?

@DaniilMedwed @united @MiamiOpen Go with a 70’s wooden racket and show all who is boss!

Hi @united…need a little help. Flew from PSP to Florida yesterday and none of my bags arrived. Kind of need them to play in the @MiamiOpen 😉….can you help?