A Silicon Valley tech executive was stabbed to death in San Francisco
back in March.
Prosecutors allege that the man behind the killing of Bob Lee,
that's the tech executive is a guy named Nima Momeni.
And the Wall Street Journal did a pretty lengthy piece on this story,
kind of diving into who Nima Momeni is and what the possible motive could be for
him to carry out this horrible alleged crime.
Now, he is facing charges, that case has not been settled yet, but
prosecutors are in fact going after Momeni.
And it does seem like there's some clear evidence and a motive here.
Lee was allegedly sleeping with Momeni's married sister.
Her name is Khazar.
Now, before we get into the details, who was Bob Lee?
Well, he worked at Google, and he helped write code for
the Android operating system.
Later, he was named the chief technology officer for Square, where he helped
design the company's popular cash app, which is a venmo competitor.
Then he left the company back in 2014.
At the time of his death, he was working as chief product officer for
a crypto startup known as MobileCoin.
Friends described him as a multimillionaire,
although his net worth could not be confirmed.
Now, with that said, let's talk about what happened,
like who the suspect is and what the potential motive in that case could be.
So the suspect seems to be a pretty jealous and insecure person.
So Nima Momeni and Lee crossed over a woman, apparently,
according to Keith Kraft, a friend of both the woman and Lee.
Kraft said he recalled hanging out once with the woman and Momeni, and Momeni kept
shooting him, threatening glances, as if he might steal the friend away from him.
Finally, Kraft said he told him, look, bro, I'm gay.
I'm not a threat to you.
He later told The Wall Street Journal that he really felt that Momeni had
some deep seated insecurity.
Now, after the friend broke up with Momeni,
the girl in question in this whole scenario, she later began seeing Bob Lee,
the man who was murdered, stabbed to death in San Francisco.
At another point, following a breakup with a longer term girlfriend, Lee
told friends that he was casually sleeping with Nima Momeni's sister, Khazar Momeni.
According to people familiar with their relationship, Momeni was married, but
the relationship had possibly been in jeopardy,
prosecutors have alleged in court documents.
So, Nima Momeni's sister is in fact married to a pretty
prominent plastic surgeon who operates out of San Francisco.
Friends of Lee said he told them that he was casually sleeping with KHazar Momeni,
37 years old.
Before that, about three years ago,
Lee was together with a woman that Nima Momeni also had dated.
So it seems like there could be some potential jealousy issues and
a brother being overprotective of his sister.
So prosecutors allege that on the afternoon of April 3,
Lee met with Khazar Momeni at a house party in San Francisco.
And that's when things began to go awry.
And I'll tell you how in just a moment.
Cenk, I want to give you an opportunity to jump in.
>> Yeah, so, look, the drama of this story is fascinating, and
who's sleeping with who and who's killing who, etc,
among the super wealthy in San Francisco.
But to me, an even more interesting part of the story was the culture.
And one of the things I got out of the culture is they have so
much money, they just don't know what to do with it, right.
And so this Lee guy, very open hearted,
seems like a really good guy.
He's just given money to everybody for everything.
And he's an interesting character because he's both incredibly smart in the coding,
etc, but not that bright in the real world.
He paid $25 for ice cream in Mexico that cost 25 cents.
And if he just wanted to give the guy a giant tip, that's totally okay.
I love him for that, right?
But he didn't even realize, that it should cost $0.25, like, no clue.
So a lot of not very street wise, to put it that way.
But they have these parties, the lifestyle which we'll get into in a second,
where drugs are everywhere, sex with married people, or
sex with that guy's ex girlfriend, etc.
And I think the guy that did the killing here, that allegedly but, man,
they got a lot of evidence.
>> Yep.
>> I think he was more mad that Lee slept with one of his ex girlfriends than that
he slept with his sister who's married, right.
>> Yeah, so let me tell you a little bit about the Momenis.
So apparently they immigrated here from Iran,
just based on what I know about the culture,
just because there's a massive Armenian diaspora in Iran.
And so a lot of that culture rubs off on the diaspora, and it's conservative,
you know what I'm saying?
So brothers are overprotective of their sisters.
It's very similar to Nima culture in that way as well.
So I do think that there's a possibility here that news of his
sister allegedly sleeping with Lee, partying with Lee,
maybe even doing drugs with Lee, got under Nima Momeni's skin.
>> Yeah, no, but the guy's super unstable.
>> Yeah, he is.
And I'm not justifying anything he did, to be clear.
>> Yeah, and sure, that culture, of course, exists in a lot of the Old world,
including in Turkish culture.
But this guy's totally unhinged.
He kept shooting everybody, dirty looks, total weird.
>> Insecure.
>> And eventually, Lee was stabbed with, like, a kitchen knife over and over again.
>> So let's get to those details because I think it's important to actually break
down the surveillance and the evidence that prosecutors have here.
So, as I mentioned earlier, the prosecutors had alleged that
on the afternoon of April 3, Lee met with Khazar Momeni.
So that is the suspect's sister at a house party in San francisco.
That house party took place at the condo belonging to a man named Jeremy Boivin.
Now, after the gathering, according to the Wall Street Journal, at Boivin's condo,
say prosecutors, a witness overheard a conversation in which Nima Momeni
confronted Lee, asking whether his sister was doing drugs or anything inappropriate.
Lee assured Momeni that nothing inappropriate had happened,
prosecutors said, citing the witness.
Now, what happened later that night?
Well, apparently,Nima Momeni and Lee met at Miss Momeni,
meaning his sister's apartment in Millennium Tower.
Surveillance footage from the Millennium Tower shows Nima Momeni
pull up in a white BMW.
And then later, around 2:00, a.m, Lee and Momeni leave the building and
climb into Nima Momeni's car together.
Now, what happens next is prosecutors allege that Momeni drove Lee to a dark and
secluded area several streets over in San Francisco's Rinken Hill neighborhood.
They alleged that Momeni used a silver kitchen knife with
a four inch black blade to repeatedly stab Lee.
Momeni drove quickly away from the scene,
according to court documents that cite surveillance video.
So they've got surveillance video.
They have a possible motive.
That seems to make a lot of sense here.
Lee ended up bleeding profusely.
He called 911 for help, but he collapsed on the sidewalk.
And even though he was rushed to the hospital, he didn't make it.
He unfortunately and tragically died.
Now, investigators later recovered a text message that Miss Momeni
sent to Mr Lee's phone, sent after he and her brother left her home.
And this is what it said.
Just wanted to make sure you're doing okay,
because I know Nima came way down hard on you, and thank you for
being such a classy man, handling it with class love, you selfish pricks.
That's what she said.
So that shows that there was some conflict, and
the prosecutors are now pursuing this case.
But you're right, Cenk.
I think the Silicon Valley exec culture of partying,
the kind of drugs that they do right.
Bob Lee was found to have drugs in his system on the day that he was murdered or
the night that he was murdered.
The autopsy report revealed a number of drugs, including cocaine and ketamine,
according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiners.
In a particularly disgusting twist to this story,
the Momeni's attorney said something nasty.
So it was, quote, the Walgreens of recreational drugs,
mr Momeni's attorney told reporters in early May.
She later apologized for the obviously insensitive comments, but his friends were
very concerned about the crowd that he had been hanging out with and partying with.
They were like, look, there is this underground lifestyle for
Silicon Valley execs.
They sleep around, they share partners, they do all these drugs, but
it's almost like a circle of trust.
Bob Lee, according to them, had kind of moved on to seedier territory,
and they were concerned about that.
>> Not in what he was doing, but in the people that he was consorting with.
And of course, all the things that we're telling you here the fares, the drugs,
the murder, et cetera has to be proven in court, right?
But there does seem to be a lot of public evidence, too, that backs all of this up.
Look, Lee, there's one other thing I got out of it.
So Lee's apparently a great coder, and then he winds up having so
much money because of Silicon Valley.
You just stumble over millions of dollars.
>> I mean is it really that easy, [LAUGH] >> Well, I don't know if it still is,
but over the last 20 years, there's a guy who sells Persian rugs.
There's a guy this, that, the guy who's selling diapers, and next thing you know,
20 million, 500 million, 40 million.
There's so much money being made there,
you almost accidentally can get super rich.
But not in this case, because he's apparently talented,
according to all the reports.
But then he winds up having so much money, he winds up becoming an investor.
He even invested in SpaceX, etc.
And I have heard not just in the printed stories, but in circles in the business
community that almost I don't want to say almost everybody that's probably too much.
But a ton of executives that run these Silicon Valley
companies are micro dosing at work.
Okay, so then that made me read Lee's story.
You read other stories.
They have so much free time.
That's the thing that makes me want to pull all my hair out, right?
They're constantly going on massive vacations, barely working,
partying all night, partying all day, etc.
So I know this is kind of a funny thing to get out of this story, but
when they describe what they call the lifestyle, I was like.
So these are the guys that tell us all the time that, my God,
the very rich, they deserve it because they work so hard.
You regular folks, you wouldn't know about working hard.
Are you kidding me?
Regular folks actually have to have two jobs oftentimes to make ends meet.
And something, you get minimum wage, you're getting $15,000 a year.
These guys send $15,000 a night without thinking twice about it, right.
So a lot of folks barely working high most of the time having sex with one another.
And in some ways, you could say, hey, that's living the dream, right?
I mean, that's the American dream for a lot of young guys as they see that, right?
But don't tell me that, my God, taxes couldn't be higher.
We shouldn't have any regulations because these are the masters of the universe, and
they're the hardest working people in the world.
No, when you actually just lift up the COVID a little bit,
you see that ain't what's happening at all.