2022 dealt us a bad hand — let’s toss it in

Is it Christmas yet? Not for a long time has there been a bigger rush to close out a bad luck year. We can’t wait for 2022 to be over. Christmas ads started appearing on television in midOctober, a Christmas tree went up in Union Square just after Halloween, and Mayor London Breed flipped a switch to light a holiday tree at Pier 39 on a warm autumn evening two days before Thanksgiving. Broadcast live on the radio, too.

The Thanksgiving leftovers are still on the table, and we’re ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Out with the old!

At first I thought that the rush to celebrate the holidays early was only a symbol of economic desperation. Times are turning tough. There’s a lot of unsold inventory. There were fears that Black Friday may have been only gray. A recession is looming. And so is Donald Trump.

But on further review, as they say in football, there may be another reason to celebrate the holidays early. This year, which started with a lot of hope, rapidly turned sour. We all thought things would be better in 2022. The pandemic was on the run. Masks were coming off. People were getting together. It was a nice summer. And then, it all went bad.

There were clouds on the horizon, but we didn’t notice. A lot of San Francisco’s downtown and Financial District was still empty. Muni buses, BART and Peninsula commute trains were still only half full. There were still homeless people on the streets, still tents in side alleys, still a drug epidemic.

But there were good signs: We heard more people were returning to offices, we began to notice more tech buses lumbering up the hills around Noe Valley. The tech boom was still on. The city’s parks were crowded on weekends. We even had a couple of nice rainstorms. Resilience! That’s the word.

It was all an illusion, wasn’t it? Especially here, especially in the Bay Area, a region that thinks of itself as on the cutting edge of ideas, tech, lifestyles.

I remember an older Italian lady, kind of an honorary aunt. She liked to cook big meals, listen to scratchy LP records and give advice. “If it’s too good to be true,” she’d say, “it is.”

The city government was delighted when Twitter moved into the old Merchandise Mart on Market Street. Wasn’t Twitter invented in San Francisco? Doesn’t everybody from the pope to Putin send tweets to the world? San Francisco was so pleased to be the capital of the Twittersphere it gave the company a tax break.

And then Elon Musk bought Twitter, walked into the Market Street headquarters just the other day and fired almost everybody.

Meanwhile, only days later, Elizabeth Holmes, a brilliant Stanford dropout who had claimed she had developed a tech health system that would revolutionize blood testing, met her fate.

Holmes was only 19 when she founded Theranos. She was hailed as a genius, the new Steve Jobs. A lot of people who should have known better believed in the company, including Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. At its peak, Theranos was valued at $10 billion. But it was too good to be true, and on Nov. 18 a San Jose judge sentenced Holmes to 11 years in prison for fraud.

Some of the best minds in the Bay Area were also involved in one of the year’s biggest grand illusions — FTX, the great cypto firm. On its website the company still calls itself “FTX Crypto Exchange, built by traders, for everyone.”

At its peak, FTX was valued at $32 billion — three times more than Theranos.

The founder of the firm, Sam BankmanFried, is a Bay Area product, born at Stanford in 1992. His parents are both Stanford law professors, and he first opened his business in an office he rented in Berkeley. His principal partner Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, is a Stanford graduate.

FTX was a real symbol of the illusion of 2022. This year, for the first time, every Major League Baseball umpire wore an ad on his shirt — the three initials FTX.

And UC Berkeley sold the naming rights to its Memorial Stadium to FTX in a 10-year deal signed in August 2021 for $17.5 million. The university called the deal “historic” and said the full payment would be made in cryptocurrency.

Not long before the Cal-Stanford Big Game last weekend, crews removed the FTX logo from the field and replaced it with logos of the school symbol, a golden bear.

All of those illusions — Elon Musk at Twitter, Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to prison, the collapse of FTX — happened within a few days of each other, and all were connected to the Bay Area. There must be something in the autumn air.

So how do we deal with those events? Throw in a bad hand. Call off the rest of the year. Celebrate early. ’Tis the season.

Guy Wathen/The Chronicle S.F.’s city government was delighted when Twitter became a mainstay on Market Street, but that changed when Elon Musk took over the social media platform.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes was 19 when she founded Theranos, once valued at $10 billion. Now she’s been handed an 11-year prison term for fraud.