Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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Elon Musk has developed breakthrough tech companies and made himself a figure in global politics. Could his erratic behavior undermine those successes?
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The law is seen an important test case. More than a dozen other states are weighing similar bans of the wildly popular video-streaming app, which is owned by a Chinese tech company. -
ChatGPT was introduced to the world a year ago. It has since become one of the fastest growing applications ever and potentially one of the most influential.
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With nearly the entire staff in open revolt against the board, Sam Altman has returned to OpenAI as CEO. The board that fired him last week has been dissolved and replaced with an interim board.
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The surprise development follows Altman's abrupt ouster from OpenAI by its board of directors over an apparent rift over balancing AI safety with the push to publicly release new powerful AI tools. -
ChatGPT-maker Open AI has pushed out its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman after a review found he was "not consistently candid in his communications" with the board of directors.
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A advertiser backlash has begun to snowball on X since Elon Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on the site and a watchdog group say the company was placing ads next to pro-Nazi content. -
A manifesto written by the terrorist leader in 2002 resurfaced on TikTok, but the backlash to the videos was more widespread than the videos themselves. -
The office-sharing company WeWork has filed for bankruptcy. Once the hottest startup in Silicon Valley, WeWork hit two major hurdles: It ran out of cash and the office-bust of the pandemic.
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With its flexible office spaces, WeWork once was seen as a Silicon Valley darling led by an eccentric and charismatic founder. Financial troubled intervened, followed by the pandemic.
