Privates Beach is named not for its exclusivity but for its permissive stance on nude sunbathing. This small patch of paradise on the California coastline is adored by locals, and anyone is welcome to enjoy the clean and quiet spot. If, that is, they have a key costing $100 a year. A 9ft iron gate blocks the path to a beach staircase, set among expensive hillside homes in the tony surf town of Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. Yet by California law, all the beaches along its 840 alluring miles of coastline belong to the people...

Silicon Valley geeks say it sharpens their thinking and enhances creativity. Other people say it lifts the fog of depression. A novel experiment launching 3 September 2018 will investigate whether microdosing with LSD really does have benefits – or whether it’s all in the mind. Microdosing using psychedelic drugs – either LSD or magic mushrooms – is said to have become very popular, especially with people working in the Californian digital tech world...

While the Trump administration is putting tariffs on Chinese imports, another battle has been brewing about whether the United States should block Chinese investments in some U.S. companies that work in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other key technology. Some of these technologies have U.S. national security implications, argues the Department of Defense in a report on growing Chinese ties to U.S. firms. Lawmakers in Washington are considering expanding a Treasury Department review process that looks at investments from foreign entities.

When an average American’s social-media posts don’t go viral, it’s often understood the problem is with the content. But when that happens to a conservative pundit, it’s a left-wing conspiracy, at least according to a growing number of Republicans in the House. Several vocal lawmakers on the powerful House Judiciary Committee are threatening to clamp down on Silicon Valley unless companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can prove...

The West Coast is a growing target of foreign espionage. And it’s not ready to fight back.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk seems like the ideal person to get excited about flying cars. The Tesla CEO has made a fortune in developing future-facing vehicles, but he’s rather downbeat about the idea that the skies could hold the solution to congestion woes. Instead, during an interview about his new tunnel-digging venture, he said the future of transport lies underground, naturally.

Gig-economy companies like Uber and Instacart are on the verge of overtaking the traditional economy. And the only people who understand the threat are the ones enabling it.

Lawson was a pioneering black engineer back when it was even harder in Silicon Valley.

Professor, author and CEO of Clearly Innovative, Aaron Saunders talks about the challenges of being African-American in the tech industry.

The US technology industry formally lined up beside Apple on Thursday in the company’s legal fight with the FBI over encryption. The phalanx of Silicon Valley colleagues and rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Cisco and others filed a joint brief in California’s central district court. A second group of tech firms such as Airbnb, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Medium, Reddit and Twitter, filed another.

During the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley, the megalomaniac CEO of the search giant Hooli offers protagonist Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) $10 million for his still-nascent startup, Pied Piper. The initial script called for a much bigger offer, but show creator Mike Judge thought that was over the top. Judge said, "that's too much, no one is going to buy that it's $100 million," Middleditch said at a South By Southwest panel...

Bill Campbell — who garnered the name “The Coach” for the sage advice and counsel he gave numerous tech leaders from Apple’s Steve Jobs to Google’s Larry Page to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — has died. News of his passing popped up on Facebook early this morning and many prominent tech players also confirmed the death to me, which came after a long battle with cancer. It is a big loss for Silicon Valley, given the impact a man who said...

Are we facing another tech bubble? Or, to put it in Silicon Valley speak, are most unicorn startups born zombies? How you answer these questions depends, by and large, on where you stand on the overall health of the global economy. Some, like the prominent venture capitalist Peter Thiel, argue that virtually everything else – from publicly traded companies to houses to government bonds – is already overvalued. The options, then, are not many...

"Game of Thrones" wasn't the only show to return to HBO Sunday night. "Silicon Valley" had its season three premiere afterward. If you paid close attention, the show made a lot of subtle changes to its opening animation sequence to reflect the ever-changing look of companies in Silicon Valley. Here's how the show's animation looked during the final episode of season two...

Season three of the HBO sitcom borrowed from Facebook and Google.

A cache of internal documents shows that despite growing revenue, Palantir has lost top-tier clients, is struggling to stem staff departures, and isn’t collecting most of the money it touts in high-value deals.

Google may soon be hit with a record fine by the European Commission, as it seeks to punish Google and discourage other tech giants from taking advantage of their dominant market position. The Telegraph reports that the commission is currently planning to issue a 3 billion euro fine (about $3.39 billion USD) after finding that Google abused its search monopoly. Its highest fine to date is 1.1 billion euros, in 2009.

EXCLUSIVE: Silicon Valley star Martin Starr is joining the burgeoning cast of Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Jon Watts-directed pic from Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios.

Last year, Ellen Pao sued her former employer, venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for allegations of gender-based discrimination. Though she ultimately lost her case, Pao inspired much-needed conversations about Silicon Valley’s diversity problem. Her fight against discrimination in the tech world also blew up at Reddit, where she resigned from her job as the interim C.E.O. after factions of the online community revolted against her decision to shut down subreddits that encouraged harassment.

In a pilot study influential incubator Y Combinator will hand over cash monthly to 100 families in Oakland, California. What’s UBI’s payoff for tech entrepreneurs?

When the technology investor Peter Thiel takes the stage just before Donald J. Trump at the Republican convention this week, he will become the most prominent public face of a species so endangered it might as well be called extinct: the Silicon Valley Trump supporter. Nobody knows what Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will say (he declined an interview), but in the tech industry, his appearance at the convention is being greeted with more apprehension than excitement. Venture capitalists have a special term for investment opportunities that offer the potential for a...

Once Kate Downing and her husband Steve did the math, it was obvious that if they wanted to raise a family, staying in Palo Alto, California, was not an option. Although Steve, 33, works as a software engineer at a nearby Silicon Valley technology company and Kate, 31, is a product attorney at another tech firm, the cost of owning a home near their jobs has simply become too steep for them. If they wanted to purchase their current house – which they rent with another couple for $6,200 a month total...

On 12 July 1967, Florida newspaper the St Petersburg Times had an eye-catching front-page headline: “Dame Margot, Nureyev seized in hippie raid.” Police had busted a party in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, and unexpectedly ensnared two world-famous gatecrashers: Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, who had been in the city all of four hours. “Marijuana cigarettes were found at the scene,” noted the paper, although the two ballet dancers had to be released as there was no evidence that they had been smoking them. A high-spirited Nureyev had, however, performed a jeté into the back of a police van.

Telling my story isn’t going to be easy. Oftentimes I feel embarrassed, enraged, and regretful when I have to relive it, but in the end it is a story and life lesson which should be shared so that others may know major red flags to look out for when choosing to work for a startup or new business. What you are about to read is true and happened within the last four months. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty.

The median income for American millennials is $35,300. That's according to the Federal Reserve's 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted every three years, which also finds a generation—roughly those aged 22 to 35—who are mired in college loans, less invested in the stock market, and far less likely to own a home than previous generations.

Older workers are trying lawsuits, classes, makeovers—even surgery—to keep working.

Is the head of Y Combinator fixing the world, or trying to take over Silicon Valley? One balmy May evening, thirty of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs gathered in a private room at the Berlinetta Lounge, in San Francisco. Paul Graham considered the founders of Instacart, DoorDash, Docker, and Stripe, in their hoodies and black jeans, and said, “This is Silicon Valley, right here.”

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people are convinced that we are living in a computer simulation. And now they’re trying to do something about it. At least two of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires are pouring money into efforts to break humans out of the simulation that they believe that it is living in, according to a new report.

In Silicon Valley, 40 is the new 80, and ageism is rampant. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

It is election day in the United States, and the tech figure who had one of the biggest impacts on the current cycle is perhaps a non-obvious one: Jeff Bezos. Back in 2013 Bezos bought the Washington Post, whose coverage of the campaign has been exemplary. The august newspaper’s reporting, particularly the work of David Fahrenthold, has uncovered stories that have had a far bigger impact than any number of tweets or blog posts or calls for days-off-work in Democrat-safe California ever could have had. What Bezos understood is a technology industry truism...

In October, a Donald Trump supporter stood up at a Santa Monica technology conference and berated billionaire tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban for being dismissive of Trump. Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner who built his wealth in online radio streaming in the mid-90s, had said Trump wasn’t a viable option for president. The exchange went on for minutes, but instead of losing his cool, Cuban told the audience that having your views challenged can only make people and companies stronger.

For the last year, the tech industry has been fretting about a bubble. Investors on all sides argued over whether valuations were too high or whether the tech sector as a whole was still undervalued. Yet while Silicon Valley was obsessing over the startup bubble, it collectively failed to realize it was living in a completely different kind of bubble: a political bubble.

The explosion could be felt 30 miles away. At 9.07am on 1 September, a SpaceX rocket containing 75,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene ignited into a fireball that could be seen from orbit, billowing black smoke into the gray sky around its Cape Canaveral launch pad. On board was a $200m, 12,000lb communications satellite – part of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet.org project to deliver broadband access to sub-Saharan Africa.

Silicon Valley’s power brokers want you to think they’re different. But they’re just average robber barons. By Emmett Rensin.

Apple has been ordered to cut a $2 million check for denying some of its retail workers meal breaks. The lawsuit was first filed in 2011 by four Apple employees in San Diego. They alleged that the company failed to give them meal and rest breaks, and didn't pay them in a timely manner, among other complaints. California law requires employers to give hourly workers a 30 minute meal break if they're working more than five hours a day.