Bobby Allyn
Bobby Allyn is a business reporter at NPR based in San Francisco. He covers technology and how Silicon Valley's largest companies are transforming how we live and reshaping society.
He came to San Francisco from Washington, where he focused on national breaking news and politics. Before that, he covered criminal justice at member station WHYY.
In that role, he focused on major corruption trials, law enforcement, and local criminal justice policy. He helped lead NPR's reporting of Bill Cosby's two criminal trials. He was a guest on Fresh Air after breaking a major story about the nation's first supervised injection site plan in Philadelphia. In between daily stories, he has worked on several investigative projects, including a story that exposed how the federal government was quietly hiring debt collection law firms to target the homes of student borrowers who had defaulted on their loans. Allyn also strayed from his beat to cover Philly parking disputes that divided in the city, the last meal at one of the city's last all-night diners, and a remembrance of the man who wrote the Mister Softee jingle on a xylophone in the basement of his Northeast Philly home.
At other points in life, Allyn has been a staff reporter at Nashville Public Radio and daily newspapers including The Oregonian in Portland and The Tennessean in Nashville. His work has also appeared in BuzzFeed News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
A native of Wilkes-Barre, a former mining town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Allyn is the son of a machinist and a church organist. He's a dedicated bike commuter and long-distance runner. He is a graduate of American University in Washington.
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The State Department claimed a plan to buy thousands of armored Teslas was left over from the Biden administration. A document obtained by NPR shows the Biden plan was far smaller. -
Billionaire Elon Musk is helping the Trump administration orchestrate mass firings of federal workers, a tactic he's used in his business career. He's up against different realities in the government.
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Apple and Google removed the app after the Supreme Court upheld a law prohibiting firms from doing business with TikTok as long as it is controlled by China-based ByteDance. -
Musk and other Silicon Valley executives have long railed against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for its work overseeing the tech industry. Now, Musk hopes to eliminate the agency. -
The scope of DOGE's work and the identities of the people carrying it out isn't fully clear — leaving agencies and government workers in chaos. -
The billionaire's campaign to radically upend federal agencies is stunning former White House officials, even in a political moment when many things are described as unprecedented. -
The Chinese chatbot took the world by storm and rattled stock markets. But lost in all the attention was a focus on how the company is collecting and storing data. -
The White House is working on a plan to have Oracle and other U.S. investors take a majority stake in TikTok, sources tell NPR.
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The order follows TikTok going dark for about 14 hours after the Supreme Court upheld a law prohibiting the service from operating in the U.S. unless it breaks away from its parent company in China. -
The app had more than 170 million monthly users in the U.S. The black-out is the result of a law forcing the service offline unless it sheds its ties to ByteDance, its China-based parent company.
