Day: November 2, 2025

• The owner of KitKat, an iconic San Francisco bodega cat, said the feline was killed by a Waymo.
• Waymo confirmed that its vehicle encountered a cat in front of Randa’s Market on Monday night.
• The ride-hailing company is drawing ire in the neighborhood and online for the beloved cat’s death.

In front of Randa’s Market on 16th Street in the heart of the Mission District, the spot where you would usually find an affectionate cat is now replaced by bouquets of marigolds, candles, and a card that reads, “Kill a Waymo, save a cat.”

KitKat, a well-fed, nine-year-old tabby cat with emerald eyes, belonged to Mike Zeidan, who owns the liquor store that’s sandwiched between a popular bar and the Roxie Theater. KitKat’s friendly demeanor made him a popular bodega cat, and he was given the title “Mayor of 16th Street” by residents in the neighborhood.

Tragedy struck on Monday. According to an anonymous 311 complaint filed with the city at 12:51 a.m., a Waymo hit KitKat, who was “sitting in the sidewalk next to the transit lane.”

“The Waymo did not slow down, swerve, or even try to avoid the cat in any way,” the complaint said. “Waymos should not be on the street if they can’t spot small animals in the dark.”

Waymo confirmed to Business Insider that one of its vehicles encountered a cat at the location.

“We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away,” a Waymo spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. “We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him, and we will be making a donation to a local animal rights organization in his honor.”

Zeidan told Business Insider he wasn’t the individual who filed the 311 complaint and did not witness the event. He said a couple told him that KitKat had gone under a Waymo and that they attempted to rescue the cat and stop the vehicle. They were unsuccessful.

Zeidan said he was at home sleeping when he was woken up by a call that KitKat had been struck. An employee rushed the feline to an emergency room about a mile away, and Ziedan and his wife soon followed. Not long after the pair arrived, the vet informed them that KitKat had died.

“He really was the special, one-of-a-kind thing that brought everybody together,” said Zeidan. “People come a long way just to see him and give him treats and toys — he brought so much love.”

Waymo’s autonomous technology

Waymo did not address questions about what a bystander should do if they urgently need to stop a moving autonomous vehicle. Riders can stop the car using the emergency mechanisms in the app or click the “pull over” button.

Waymo relies on radar, lidar, and at least 13 external visual cameras to detect objects and movement.

Business Insider’s Lloyd Lee described Waymo’s 5th-generation autonomous driver as “a safe but not an annoyingly cautious driver.”

Missy Cummings, director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center, told Business Insider that Waymo cars “do not have a sensor that could detect something underneath the vehicle.”

Cummings said that another company, Cruise, once failed to detect a pedestrian caught under the car and dragged the woman for 20 feet. Cruise is no longer in operation.

Cats that are not kept entirely indoors run the risk of being hit by a car — autonomous or not — in an urban environment.

Throughout the week, KitKat’s memorial spot grew from just a few candles to a multitier altar, as residents turned out to grieve the feline and protest Waymo. “My name is Kitty Cat and I am resting in power,” read one handwritten sticker on the altar.

Similar sentiments spread online. A Reddit thread detailing KitKat’s passing received nearly 2,000 upvotes in a local tech forum, and a post on Randa’s Market’s Instagram account, which memorializes the cat, received thousands of likes, as well as comments directed at Waymo.

“BY A WAYMO?? This means war,” one Instagram user commented.

“Lyft and Uber drivers need our business,” wrote another on Instagram. “Killing KitKat is another strike against the billionaire techies.”

Questions of liability

Bryant Walker Smith, a professor in engineering and law at the University of South Carolina, told Business Insider that the most an owner could do in the event an autonomous vehicle hit their pet is to sue for property damages, but that could be a hurdle in this case, since KitKat mostly roamed freely.

“Law unfortunately treats pets as mere ‘chattel’ — that is, physical property,” said Smith. “The owners are generally entitled only to economic damages such as vet costs and the pet’s ‘fair market value.'”

“This is sad, because law might consider KitKat, a living creature with inherent value, to have a ‘fair market value’ of zero,” Smith added.

Autonomous vehicles have stuck pets before. In 2023, a Waymo vehicle fatally struck a dog in Bernal Heights, and in the same year, a Cruise vehicle hit a Labrador that survived. But the expansion of autonomous vehicles is not slowing down. As of July, Waymo has expanded its operation in the Bay Area to cover more of the San Francisco Peninsula, as well as parts of Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley.

At a recent TechCrunch event, journalist Kirsten Korosec asked Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana if she thinks society would accept a death potentially caused by a robot.

“I think that society will,” Mawakana responded.

• My husband and I had dreamed of renovating our bathroom for years, but we hit a construction snag.
• We moved in with my father-in-law back in March and will likely stay until December.
• There have been a lot of benefits to our new living situation.

For years, we wanted to renovate our bathroom. Months of picking out the perfect tile pairing, a gorgeous countertop, a shower door that swings just right, and a bathtub of my dreams. Little did we know that doing so would necessitate an extended stay out of our home.

A few days into our remodel, the living room turned into an indoor pond, ruining the hardwoods and drywall. With an adventurous toddler, we couldn’t stay in an active construction zone. In March, our little family of three packed our bags and headed a few neighborhoods over to live with my father-in-law in the guest room his house. We’re likely to be here until early December. Here are the pros and cons of our unexpected extended stay in our makeshift “studio apartment.”

Living here has unexpectedly given us free childcare

We went from a quiet home of three to a multigenerational household. One of the biggest benefits of this whole situation has been having help with our son. I tend to have a hard time asking for help, and moving into a multi-generational household unexpectedly opened the door not just to childcare, but free childcare. My son’s grandpa and great-grandparents, who also live here, wanted nothing more than to spend time with him.

Suddenly, since the beginning of our temporary move, I’ve had help whenever I want to do things like take a shower without having a little one pull the curtain back a million times or take hourlong breaks for Pilates. They began asking each morning if I had something to do, just so he could be with them.

Before this experience, I saw asking for help as a burden. I thought our family would be upset with us if we ever needed them to watch our son, because it would leave them unable to do whatever they needed during that time. I also felt guilty for leaving him. Now, I’m seeing that not only does it help him form bonds with his family, but it also brings them immense joy to be able to see him.

There are other unexpected perks to our living arrangement

The most laughable pro that I am certainly going to miss is having our laundry folded. My husband’s grandmother loves doing laundry, a chore I absolutely despise. If she hears the dryer running, she puts a timer on her phone so she can get to it as soon as it’s done.

I used to try to beat her to it, because I didn’t want her thinking I was lazy; over time, however, I realized how much joy it gives her to do things for us (and I sure don’t mind it, either). I also began to understand that by not letting her help us, it made her feel like we didn’t need her. Allowing her to do certain things became a win-win; it made things easier for us, and showed her that we do need her in our lives, and she’s very useful to us.

I’ve also greatly enjoyed splitting the cooking and enjoying a meal as a family. After we moved into my father-in-law’s house, my husband has been better about leaving work at a decent time. There are now more nights than not when we sit down for dinner as a family. Some nights we don’t talk much and just enjoy each other’s presence; other times, we have dinners full of conversations about anything and everything. It’s just a time to slow down and enjoy being together.

The only real con will be how much we’ll miss living here

Surprisingly, there aren’t many cons of living with my husband’s father. I may not be accustomed to the extra noise or sharing a smaller space with my husband and toddler, but overall, the experience has been a pleasure.

The biggest con of all is going to be when we go back home, and my son won’t get to see his grandpa every day. Especially the cherished moments he has with his great-grandparents. Sometimes life throws you unexpected curveballs for reasons greater than you know, and I think in this case, it was to give us extra time. Time with our family, to remind us to slow down and reconnect.

One of the greatest joys to come out of this has been the bond that my little one and his grandpa have formed. He has brought a spark of new joy and hope into our family. Being able to spend these months here, seeing how much my father-in-law has enjoyed it, has been the biggest blessing of all. The happy dances my son did in the morning, asking for Grandpa, and the skinned knees from playing a little too roughly outside, will all be missed.

• The AI boom is more grounded than the dot-com bubble, but still poses risks, Liz Ann Sonders said.
• Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist says today’s tech leaders are much stronger.
• But investor disappointment could hit an economy that’s already showing signs of strain, she said.

The AI boom is far more robust than the dot-com bubble, but there’s still a risk it disappoints investors and sends shockwaves through markets and the economy, Liz Ann Sonders says.

Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist told Business Insider that “extreme enthusiasm” about innovation and circular deals between tech companies reminded her of the internet bubble 25 years ago.

But she said a key difference is that many dot-com companies were small and loss-making, whereas today’s AI leaders are massive companies with strong balance sheets and fast-growing revenues and profits, she said.

For example, Nvidia became the first company to notch a $5 trillion market capitalization this week, but that valuation has some support in the form of the microchip giant’s $47 billion revenue and $26 billion net income for the quarter ended July 27.

Sonders said the immense concentration of investor wealth in Big Tech companies means there’s “more exposure to the equity market than ever before.” She said that if a bear market takes hold, it “could have feeders into the economy” as consumers might balk at their portfolio losses and cut back on spending, curbing economic growth.

The Wall Street veteran said there’s a danger that AI companies fail to deliver on their bullish growth forecasts, which have driven the stock market to record highs.

“That’s the ultimate risk — that you’ve set the expectations bar too high,” she said. In that situation, even a slight miss could trigger market behavior that’s a “little more egregious,” she added.

Sonders said that speculation in more niche areas, such as meme stocks, drones, and quantum computing, made her a “little less uncomfortable” about investor exuberance, as “you could have cracks in that armor show up” without tanking the wider stock market.

She added that gold’s surge to record highs of over $4,000 this month was an “area where the enthusiasm pendulum swung maybe a bit too far,” and the moves were “more about FOMO than fundamentally driven.”

Sonders said it’s tricky to gauge the health of the US economy right now as the government shutdown has disrupted some data releases: “We’re all flying this plane a little blind right now.”

But she said that economic gauges in recent months have shown rising pressure on lower-income consumers and a softening labor market, which could erode growth.

“It’s not screaming ‘recession is imminent,'” Sonders said, but investors should “be mindful” of a weakening jobs backdrop.