More staff than customers at Tesla diner
Elon’s super cool Tesla diner experience, which opened to protests, slashed its menu almost immediately, restricted its hours, and angered neighbors by blocking an apartment building’s view, is now described as a ghost town.
Less than six months since it opened, Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner has the feel of a ghost town. Gone is the Optimus robot serving popcorn, gone are the carnivore-diet-inspired “Epic Bacon” strips, gone are the hours-long, hundred-person lines wrapped around the block. Even the restaurant’s all-star chef, Eric Greenspan, is gone. The Hollywood burger-and-fries shop seems like a shell of the bustling eatery it was when it opened in late July.
On a balmy Friday afternoon in December, the parking lot for Tesla car charging was, at best, half full. Inside what the company describes as a “retro-futuristic” diner, a handful of people trickled in, ordering burgers and hotdogs or asking for merch. The upstairs deck, AKA “Skypad”, was vacant except for a pair of employees stringing holiday lights. More staff was busy at work, buffing fingerprints off the chrome walls and taking out the trash, than there were customers. The diner was spotless.
Now, with the protests gone and the novelty exhausted, what’s left is a themed charging station that answers a question no one was asking. Los Angeles already has diners. It already has chargers. What it doesn’t have is much appetite for a billionaire’s pet projects, especially when that billionaire seems determined to alienate everyone outside his shrinking fanbase.
Tesla’s diner was supposed to be a destination. Instead, it feels like the final stage of a familiar Musk project: promised, delayed, underdelivered, and quietly forgotten.
Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of democracy.
And, like many restaurants with shady investors, it’s a great way to launder money.