San Francisco Lost Another Giant and Nobody Noticed

[00:00:00]Picture the heart of one of America's richest cities, and then picture more than a third of it sitting dark and empty.

[00:00:08]That's downtown San Francisco today. And this is the story of how it got that way. Told through one company that just packed up and left, eBay.

[00:00:19]The company filed paperwork in April of 2026 to close its office at 300 Mission Street. And on the surface, it looked like one more tech giant turning its back on a struggling American city.

[00:00:33]The truth runs deeper and stranger than the headline suggests. And by the end of this video, you'll understand both what eBay actually did and what its quiet exit reveals about a downtown caught between collapse and rebirth.

[00:00:52]Let's begin with the facts, because the details carry the whole story here.

[00:00:56]On April 10th, 2026, eBay filed something called a WARN notice with the state of California, which stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, a legal document companies must submit whenever they make major changes to a workplace.

[00:01:15]That notice spelled out eBay's plan to close its office at 300 Mission Street in San Francisco, effective September 30th, 2026.

[00:01:27]Roland Lee, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, who covers commercial real estate, was the first to break [music] the news.

[00:01:36]Here's where you need to pay close attention, because most people get this part wrong.

[00:01:41]eBay's headquarters has never sat in San Francisco, not once in the company's history.

[00:01:47]The company was founded in San Jose, California, >> [music] >> back in 1995, and it has stayed headquartered there ever since at an address on Hamilton Avenue. San and San Francisco are two separate cities, roughly an hour apart at opposite ends of the San Francisco Bay.

[00:02:05]So, when you hear that eBay is leaving San Francisco, what's truly happening is that the company is closing a small satellite office and shifting those workers down to its main headquarters in San Jose.

[00:02:17]A small office, and that word matters.

[00:02:21]eBay subleased about 30,000 square feet inside the tower at 300 Mission Street.

[00:02:27]A single floor and nothing more.

[00:02:30]That space affects 198 employees.

[00:02:34]And the reporting describes them as software engineers, applied researchers, directors, and financial analysts.

[00:02:42]Here's the part the alarming headlines tend to leave out, though.

[00:02:46]Those 198 people are not losing their jobs.

[00:02:51]Every one of them is being reassigned to eBay's San Jose headquarters. And the company stated plainly that no layoffs are tied to this closure at all.

[00:03:01]eBay's own explanation was about as plain as it gets.

[00:03:05]A company representative put it this way, and I'm quoting directly, "We made the decision not to renew our existing San Francisco office lease.

[00:03:14]Our locally based team will continue to work from our San Jose headquarters."

[00:03:20]The sublease was running out, and eBay simply chose not to renew it.

[00:03:25]If this is just a small office consolidation, then why does any of it matter?

[00:03:30]And why is it making headlines at all?

[00:03:32]The answer is that eBay's exit slots into a much larger and far more troubling pattern. And to understand it, we need to look first at the building eBay is leaving, and then at downtown San Francisco as a whole.

[00:03:47]Start with that building.

[00:03:49]300 Mission Street stands at the corner of Beale and Mission in the South Financial District of San Francisco. A Class A tower, which marks the highest grade of office building you can get.

[00:04:02]Construction dates back to 1968 with a major renovation in 2014.

[00:04:08]eBay's floor wasn't even leased straight from the building's owner, which is the strange twist.

[00:04:14]The company was subleasing that space from a different tenant entirely.

[00:04:19]The job listings website, Glassdoor.

[00:04:23]Here's how that arrangement came together.

[00:04:25]Glassdoor leased four floors in the building back in 2019, roughly 117,000 square feet, to serve as its corporate headquarters.

[00:04:36]The pandemic arrived in 2020, and that changed everything for Glassdoor, which shifted to remote work and started hunting for a way to unload all that office space.

[00:04:48]eBay stepped in during October of 2021 and picked up one of those floors as a sublease.

[00:04:55]A separate company, Rakuten, claimed another floor in early 2024.

[00:05:02]And eventually, Glassdoor walked away from its remaining floors completely.

[00:05:08]This one building tells the entire story in miniature.

[00:05:12]A software company rents the place as a headquarters. The pandemic empties it out. The space gets carved up and handed off to other tenants. And then those tenants depart one by one.

[00:05:25]Before eBay ever announced a thing, the building had already lost the software company Autodesk, which vacated about 117,000 square feet in 2022.

[00:05:37]And it had lost Glassdoor as a direct tenant, too.

[00:05:41]eBay walking out is simply the newest chapter in a book that was already half written.

[00:05:46]The situation grows worse because even the landlord landed in trouble.

[00:05:51]300 Mission Street belongs to a New York-based office company called Paramount Group. And the pressure on San Francisco office buildings has been so brutal that Paramount marked some of its San Francisco properties down to essentially nothing on its own books.

[00:06:07]Paramount Group itself got swallowed in 2025, acquired by another firm called Rhythm Capital for 1.6 billion dollars.

[00:06:16]The building eBay is leaving belongs to a company that the downturn itself consumed.

[00:06:22]Now, let's pull back and take in the bigger picture because eBay is nowhere close to alone here.

[00:06:28]To grasp how dramatic the shift has been, you have to start with where San Francisco stood before the pandemic.

[00:06:36]The downtown office vacancy rate touched a record low of just 4.7% in the second quarter of 2019.

[00:06:44]Picture what that number means in practice. Nearly every office was full.

[00:06:48]Space was so scarce and so expensive that San Francisco ranked for a time as the priciest office market in the entire country.

[00:06:57]And anyone who wanted a downtown office paid a premium and felt lucky to find anything open at all.

[00:07:03]The world turned over in 2020.

[00:07:06]As the pandemic pushed companies into remote work, San Francisco's office market dropped into freefall. And this wasn't only small firms feeling the pain.

[00:07:16]Some of the biggest names in technology pulled back hard.

[00:07:20]Block, the payments company once known as Square, walked away from a lease of about 470,000 square feet on Market Street rather than renew it when the term expired in the fall of 2022.

[00:07:33]The social media company once called Twitter, now going by X, abandoned its Market Street headquarters in 2024.

[00:07:41]Lyft, the ride-hailing firm, held onto its space, but sliced it roughly in half, dropping from 335,000 sq ft down to 170,000.

[00:07:53]Even Salesforce, the single largest private employer in the city, and the company whose name crowns the tallest tower on the skyline, trimmed its San Francisco footprint by about [music] 45% falling to 900,000 sq ft as of January 2024 from 1.6 million a year before.

[00:08:14]The numbers underneath this exodus are staggering to lay out.

[00:08:19]The commercial real estate firm CBRE [music] found that the technology sector as a whole dumped roughly 30 million sq ft of space back onto the North American sublease market. For a sense of scale, that very same figure had measured only about 9.5 million sq ft at the close of 2019.

[00:08:40]So, San Francisco's vacancy rate, sitting at that record low of 4.7% in 2019, [music] climbed and climbed without stopping. By 2024, according to CBRE, >> [music] >> it crested at 36.9%.

[00:08:57]Sit with that for a moment. More than a third of every downtown office standing empty, which works out to roughly a sevenfold jump in just a handful of years.

[00:09:07]This is the backdrop that makes [music] eBay's departure worth reporting.

[00:09:12]On its own, one company folding up one floor barely rates a footnote.

[00:09:17]Added as one more name to a very long list, though, it becomes a symbol of a downtown that's been hollowing out for years.

[00:09:25]People have a phrase for it, the doom loop, and you may have heard it before.

[00:09:31]The idea runs like this.

[00:09:33]Empty offices mean fewer workers downtown, which means struggling restaurants and shops, which means thinner tax revenue for the city, which forces service cuts, which makes the whole area less appealing, which empties even more offices.

[00:09:49]A downward spiral feeding on itself.

[00:09:52]There's real evidence behind that grim view, too.

[00:09:56]>> [music] >> Roughly a third of downtown office space still sat empty as of 2025.

[00:10:02]The city of San Francisco stared down a budget deficit of around $800 million across 2 years.

[00:10:10]And in one especially telling case, a downtown office building changed hands for $44 million in August of 2025.

[00:10:20]That price ran about 70% below the $141 million the same building had commanded back in 2016.

[00:10:29]Heather Knight, the San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times, refused to sugarcoat it.

[00:10:35]Her words were, "We can't have rose-colored glasses about this.

[00:10:40]35% of our office space downtown [music] is vacant."

[00:10:45]Here's the thing, though, and it matters enormously.

[00:10:49]That grim view is not the whole story.

[00:10:51]>> [music] >> At the very moment eBay was boxing up its single floor, something else was unfolding downtown, and it points in the exact opposite direction.

[00:11:01]That something is artificial intelligence.

[00:11:04]While the older tech giants shrank, a fresh generation of AI companies has been pouring into San Francisco in a serious way.

[00:11:13]Consider OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which has gathered up nearly 1 million square feet of office space in the city, anchored by about 500,000 square feet at least in the Mission Bay neighborhood back in October of 2023.

[00:11:29]Anthropic, another major AI firm, is closing in on roughly a million square feet of its own, packed along a stretch of Howard Street that locals have started calling AI alley.

[00:11:40]Anthropic leased an entire 25-story office tower at 300 Howard Street in February of 2026, about 466,000 square feet on a 13-year lease.

[00:11:53]And the real estate firms involved called it one of the largest leasing commitments in the city's history.

[00:11:59]A remarkable detail ties this whole thing into a knot.

[00:12:04]That tower Anthropic is now taking over on Howard Street happens to be the very same building where eBay, through its StubHub ticketing subsidiary, once held office space years ago.

[00:12:16]As eBay shrinks its San Francisco presence, an AI company moves into a building eBay used to fill.

[00:12:23]The old guard heads out the door while the new guard walks in.

[00:12:27]This AI surge is no minor blip.

[00:12:30]According to CBRE's Tech Insight Center, AI companies have leased over 1 million square feet in San Francisco since late 2024, which accounts for nearly 90% of all new leasing activity across that period.

[00:12:47]Almost every bit of fresh demand in the city traces back to artificial intelligence.

[00:12:52]And the money [music] fueling these companies runs enormous.

[00:12:56]Data from CBRE shows that San Francisco captured $103 billion out of the $239 billion in venture capital invested in AI companies nationally between 2020 and early 2025, which means nearly half of all of all the AI investment in the country flowed straight into this one city.

[00:13:20]The result was a vacancy rate that had peaked at 36.9% in 2024, finally beginning to fall.

[00:13:29]CBRE measured it at 34.4% by the third quarter of 2025.

[00:13:36]Still painfully high against historical standards, yet moving in the right direction for the first time in years.

[00:13:44]This is why plenty of people reject the doom loop label outright and [music] reach instead for a different phrase, the boom loop.

[00:13:52]San Francisco's mayor, Daniel Lurie, who took office in January of 2025, plants himself firmly in that camp. He described 2025 in his state of the city address as the year that cleaner, safer streets helped San Francisco's economy come roaring back.

[00:14:11]A survey from the firm KPMG found that 96% of San Francisco business leaders believed the city stood well positioned to attract talent and business over the coming year and a half.

[00:14:23]So, which is it? The doom loop or the boom loop?

[00:14:28]The honest answer, the one the data actually backs up, is that it's both at once and it depends entirely on which building you happen to be standing in.

[00:14:38]The recovery is real, yet it runs deeply uneven.

[00:14:43]Demand from AI companies concentrates overwhelmingly in the best buildings, the trophy towers, the class A space loaded with modern amenities. And those buildings are filling back up fast.

[00:14:57]The older, lower grade buildings, the ones the industry tags as class B and class C, may sit empty for a very long stretch, possibly for years on end.

[00:15:08]Analysts at CBRE describe the recovery as uneven and segmented. Some corners of downtown are roaring back to life, while others get left behind entirely.

[00:15:20]There isn't one San Francisco There are two.

[00:15:24]eBay's story lands right on top of that fault line, which is what makes it such a useful case.

[00:15:31]The company gave up a single subleased floor in a building that had already lost its anchor tenants, owned by a landlord, marked down to nothing.

[00:15:40]And that's the struggling side of the ledger.

[00:15:43]Just a few blocks away, meanwhile, AI companies are signing some of the largest leases the city has ever recorded. Same downtown.

[00:15:53]Two completely different realities playing out at the same time.

[00:15:57]Let's circle back to where we started, and let's be precise about what eBay actually did, because the precision is the entire point.

[00:16:06]eBay did not abandon a headquarters in San Francisco, because it never had one there to abandon.

[00:16:13]The company's home has been San Jose since 1995.

[00:16:17]And San Jose is exactly where these 198 employees are headed, with nobody losing a job in the move.

[00:16:25]What truly happened is that a sublease expired, and a company juggling other pressures decided that paying for a satellite floor in San Francisco no longer added up.

[00:16:34]eBay cut about 800 jobs, roughly 6% of its workforce, in February of 2026.

[00:16:42]And it spent $1.2 billion that same month acquiring the resale app Depop.

[00:16:49]Consolidating one floor it never leaned on much fits that picture cleanly. And on its own, the decision would barely register anywhere.

[00:16:57]eBay's departure carries weight because of everything surrounding it.

[00:17:01]The company becomes one more name added to a list that already holds Block, and X, and Lyft, >> [music] >> and Salesforce. A list that helped drive San Francisco's office vacancy from under 5% all the way to nearly 37% in just a few years.

[00:17:19]At the very same time that identical downtown is being rebuilt floor by floor by a wave of artificial intelligence companies betting billions of dollars on its future.

[00:17:32]The next time a headline announces that another tech giant has fled San Francisco, hold the full picture in your mind.

[00:17:40]Sometimes a giant truly is fleeing.

[00:17:43]Sometimes the company is just consolidating a floor it never needed much in the first place.

[00:17:49]And sometimes in a building right around the corner, a brand new giant is moving in and signing a lease for the next 13 years.

[00:17:58]The story of downtown San Francisco isn't simply one of decline and it isn't simply one of recovery either.

[00:18:05]It's the story of one era of technology handing the keys to the next and not every building and not every block will survive the handoff.

[00:18:15]That's what eBay's quiet exit really tells us.

[00:18:18]Not that San Francisco is dying, but that it's changing dramatically and the winners and losers of that change are being decided right now, one floor at a time.