Elon Musk Will Subject His Notoriously Thin Skin To Restaurant Critics

Elon Musk, the Tesla investor turned CEO whose decisions as unelected leader of the US government have prompted a stock-tanking backlash against his electric car company and an unprecedented exodus from his social media company, X (formerly Twitter), has set his sights on a new industry to ruin: restaurants. That’s right, friends. The notoriously thin-skinned magnate, who announced this week that the government would “go after” people who have the temerity to criticize his car brand, has revived long-dormant plans to open a Tesla-themed restaurant in Los Angeles, multiple outlets have reported. Little does Elon Musk realize that the average protester at a Tesla dealership has nothing on a Yelp’s Elite squad member.

According to a tweet from Sawyer Merritt, a prominent Tesla investor who has clashed with Musk over Merrit’s tweets sharing “confidsential” Tesla information, the car company is plotting a Hollywood diner with “1950s retro charm, dazzling neon lights, [and] the unmistakable scent of freshly grilled burgers & hand-spun milkshakes.” Also on deck for the restaurant, Merritt writes, “a drive-in movie theater with two 45-foot LED movie screens and over 75 V4 Supercharger stalls.”

The bio-dad of 14 (at least two of whom he allegedly ignores) appeared to confirm the news when he commented “It will be cool” beneath Merritt’s tweet soon after.

The restaurant’s head chef will be Eric Greenspan, Merritt reports. Greenspan is an LA-based chef who’s appeared on Iron Chef America and multiple shows from chef/TV host Guy Fieri, whose comments in relation to President Donald Trump are not as supportively full-throated as Musk’s, but are definitely not resistant to his agenda. Perhaps that’s why the Instagram account Merritt claims is for the business has “Diner, drive-in movie and big chargers” as its profile description, arguably a take on Fieri’s series Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.

The New York Times reports that in addition to Greenspan, the restaurant’s incorporation documents name William Chait as the company manager. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that Chiat was the former managing partner of influential restaurant group Sprout LA; until recently, he was also listed as a partner in Tartine, a San Francisco bakery made nationally famous by its Tartine Bread cookbook, a mainstay of many a baker’s kitchen. (According to a spokesperson for Tartine who spoke with the SF Standard, “Bill Chait is not part of the Tartine management team…He is one of the company’s many investors. Tartine has nothing to do with Tesla, except both words start with the letter’ T.’” Chait and Greenspan have not responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)

News of a Tesla diner first surfaced in 2018, when Musk tweeted that he was “Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA.” Back then, the news was greeted with pleasure by SoCal denizens and Tesla fans, who likely had no clue that the once-admirable magnate would be standing on stage making a Nazi-reminiscent gesture and/or announcing that his very-much-alive daughter is dead just a few years later.

According to Mona Holmes with Eater LA, construction finally began on the restaurant site (a former Shakey’s Pizza on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea Avenue) around a year ago, citing a post to X by Tesla chief designer Alex Ingram. Now close to completion, as you can see in the recent photo above, no opening date has been announced.

Speaking of X, Musk also announced on Friday that he had sold the social media platform…to himself. More precisely, he sold the social media company (which he purchased in 2022) to his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, in a $33 billion all-stock deal.

Money moves like these are fairly common for first-time restauranteurs, I say only partially in jest. It’s a punishing, low-margin business, that comes with obstacles and harsh critiques from all sides—critiques that get even harsher when politics are brought into the mix. Just ask Andrew Dudum, the pro-RFK co-founder of Trump-supporting weight loss/erectile disfunction drug sales company Hims & Hers, about the drubbing he took on Yelp when he co-opened a San Francisco doughnut shop.

Some have theorized that Musk first purchased the company, then known as Twitter, because he hoped to silence his critics, and we don’t have to theorize when it comes to how he feels about those who speak out against Tesla. “People are committing violence. They are firebombing Tesla dealerships. They are shooting guns into stores. They’re threatening people,” Musk told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Thursday. “Why? What’s happening, it seems to me, is they’re being fed propaganda by the far left, and they believe it.”

“The ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them,” the man who has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” continued. “I think there’s some real evil out there. We have to overcome it.”

It’s unclear exactly how Musk expects to silence those critical of his (frankly, mid) cars, especially given the hundreds of protests planned at dealerships this weekend. But shutting up people who want to say unpleasant things about his restaurant might be too big a task even for him. That said, Yelp was co-founded by Jeremy Stoppelman, who Vanity Fair described in 2013 as “a member of the PayPal Mafia, an informal group of PayPal founders that includes Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel.” Will Musk’s tech bro connections lead to the removal of negative Yelp reviews? If so, that might be the greatest trick that guy has pulled yet.