The missing teen daughter of two prestigious Silicon Valley magnates was seen at a ferry port some 50 miles from her mother’s home in the San Francisco-area on Monday, a family friend has said.
Mint Butterfield, 16, vanished from her mother’s home in affluent Bolinas, on April 21. Her mom, Flickr founder Caterina Fake, reported her missing the following day.
According to the missing poster in the case, Mint was last seen in Bolinas around 10pm Sunday. In a Facebook post, a family friend said that the teen was spotted in Larkspur Landing, a coastal community located north of San Francisco on April 23.
Mint, who the heiress to a $1.6 billion fortune thanks in part to her father, Stewart Butterfield being a founder of work messaging app Slack, is a student at a boarding school in Napa County.
He sold Slack to Salesforce in 2021 for $28 billion and formally left the company in 2022.
Adam Schermerhorn, a sergeant with the Marin County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday that it’s believed Mint is in the infamous Tenderloin section of San Francisco, an area she has frequented in the past.
She has a substance abuse problem, reports The Daily Beast.
Mint Butterfield, the 16-year-old daughter of billionaire tech CEO Stewart Butterfield, has vanished
A map showing the various locations where Butterfield has been seen recently in the Bay Area
Mint’s father, Stewart Butterfield, moved back to his native Canada shortly after his daughter was born in 2007
Her mother, Caterina Fake, has deep ties to Finland and frequently visits the country
She is five feet tall and weighs around 100 pounds.
Anyone with any information on Mint’s whereabouts is asked to contact the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. The San Francisco Police Department have not said if they are involved in the search.
X influencer and journalist Yashar Ali reposted Mint’s missing poster in a message that has been viewed 500,000 times. ‘I don’t ask for your help often, but I need it now…my friend’s 16-year-old has gone missing,’ Ali wrote.
Prominent Bay Area politician Matt Dorsey also reposted the image.
Fake and Butterfield were married in 2002 after meeting in 2000 in San Francisco. In 2004, the couple founded Flickr together before selling up to Yahoo in 2005.
They divorced the same year that Mint, their only child together, was born, in 2007 for undisclosed reasons. Following their split, he moved to Vancouver to start a new company.
‘I felt like my whole life was falling apart and that I should leave and go to India or something. It was a horrible period,’ Butterfield told Wired in 2014.
Butterfield became engaged to fellow tech CEO Jennifer Rubio in 2019. The couple have two children together.
Butterfield now has two children with his new partner, fellow tech CEO Jen Rubio, shown here earlier this month at a gala for the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Stewart Butterfield $19 million San Francisco home located in the upmarket Presidio Heights
Scenes from an average day in San Francisco’s crime ridden Tenderloin District
According to authorities, Mint Butterfield is known to frequent the area
Fake, a Pittsburgh native, has deep ties to Finland. In 2020, she wrote in a post on X that her daughter ‘speaks fluent Finnish.’ In 2015, Fake opened a coffee shop in Helsinki. The restaurant is now permanently closed, according to Google.
Her partner is Finnish tech entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom. In a 2015 interview with Wired, the pair described home schooling the three children that they shared. They piece mentions that two of those children since went on to public school.
In 2021, Butterfield purchased a $31.7 million mansion in Aspen, Colorado. The residence, which sits in the exclusive Five Trees neighborhood, sprawls over a five-acre estate overlooking the Castle Creek Valley.
According to the listing, the property boasts a generous home gym, a state of the art home theatre, a second entertaining area with a bar and billiards table, a 500 bottle wine cellar, a tasting room, various separate gathering areas, six beautifully appointed en-suite bedrooms and a three-car garage.
Butterfield also owns a $19 million home in San Francisco, which has seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms and sits in the posh Presidio Heights neighborhood.
The properties make up part of the $140 million property portfolio he owns with Rubio, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The couple splurged on at least five pricey homes between January 2021 and August 2022, spanning three states.
In addition to their California and Colorado homes, the couple own two downtown Manhattan properties, a sprawling Hamptons mansion and a ranch designed by renowned Japanese architect Tadao Ando in New Mexico.
