Business reporter

Ethan Baron

Ethan Baron is a business reporter for the Bay Area News Group and a native of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. Baron has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and photographer in newspapers and magazines for 25 years, covering business, politics, social issues, crime, the environment, outdoor sports, war and humanitarian crises. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a BA in humanities and MA in journalism.

H-1B application documents in 2000 (Meri Simon/Bay Area News Group)

H-1B visas: Federal government mandates in-person interviews for overseas renewals

August 12, 2025 at 9:03 a.m.

Delays expected abroad and at home.

Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks Thursday, Aug. 7 on top of Google’s waterfront building in San Francisco, Calif., with college and AI-industry leaders behind him (screenshot of live-streamed press conference)

Some question Gov. Newsom’s push for AI in schools amidst a lack of research-backed benefits

August 8, 2025 at 2:29 p.m.

The announcement comes amid massive hype and significant concerns over the "generative AI" technology that can produce text, video, sound and computer code in response to prompts from users

The first images to be released that were captured by the world’s biggest camera, built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, and mounted on a telescope in Chile. This image combines 678 separate images taken by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top right) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth. (Photo courtesy of NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)

First images unveiled from world’s largest camera

June 23, 2025 at 10:14 a.m.

The $168 million, 6,600-pound camera with a lens five feet across was completed last spring.

Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)

Silicon Valley tech giants cozied up to Trump — his administration is still suing them

March 19, 2025 at 12:00 a.m.

With Republican President Donald Trump’s return to office this year, Big Tech leaders from Silicon Valley’s largest companies — all fighting federal anti-monopoly lawsuits launched under Trump’s previous term and...

May 30, 2023: Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, left, is escorted into a Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, where she will spend the next 11 years serving her sentence for overseeing an infamous blood-testing hoax. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes loses her appeal

February 24, 2025 at 11:27 a.m.

Holmes was charged in connection with $878 million in losses among investors in her startup.

Silicon Valley’s brilliant young techies help Musk, Trump penetrate government, drawing Democrat fury

February 5, 2025 at 10:35 a.m.

Bay Area members of Congress blasted incursions by Elon Musk's team into government's sensitive data and systems.

The company of opera singer Elizabeth Zharoff, shown here performing at West Bay Opera in Palo Alto, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against PayPal. (Otak Jump / West Bay Opera)

Tech giant PayPal accused of fraud over Honey online-shopping coupon finder

January 6, 2025 at 10:12 a.m.

Lawsuit alleges PayPal uses Honey browser extension to steal money from internet content creators.

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