Why hasn't SpaceX, worth $2T, paid this Bay Area chef the $70K it owes him?

hn_acker 41 points 32 comments October 11, 2026
www.sfchronicle.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (12 comments)

hn_acker

The original title is: > SpaceX is worth $2 trillion. So why hasn’t it paid this Bay Area chef the $70,000 it owes him?

addaon

(Paywalled.)

bko

Why is some random vendor dispute newsworthy? I miss real journalism. I don't know what the hell this is

timpera

> An accountant for SpaceX called Bell on Friday to inform him a payment was being processed — a call that came “shortly after” the Chronicle reached out to the company a second time for comment. Bell, however, told the Chronicle that this was the third time he had been told his payment had been initiated. From non-paywalled article: https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-2678070490/

14989aiuh

It is worth $2T on paper because they issued an artificially small float. They have a small fraction of Ford's revenue and tons of risky debt: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-get... This may be the first domino in a systemic AI loan and debt crisis.

righthand

> Bell did not sign a written contract with SpaceX, but said he verbally agreed to the company’s terms of payment within 30 days. Wrong move. Though I’m sure he’d win in court regardless, it is now a much longer drawn out process.

ciconia

> “It just kind of hit me,” Bell said. “We’re the blue-collar guys cooking this food, hustling to make this work for these young kids making like six figures, and this entity that has a trillion dollars, can’t pay us?” Welcome to tech bro utopia, where humanity in its entirety must grovel and worship and lick the boots of those who in their magnanimity allow us merit-less wretches to work for them for pennies, or, as in this case, for free. Oh what a wonderful future these guys have in store for us!

Kevin_Flynn

I'm going to pretend to take the headline seriously, without reading it. 1. Because real companies have accounts payable procedures, where transactions are examined and processed according to procedure, in varying degrees of time, depending on the circumstance. 2. Profitable companies, or those that hope to be so, make sure there is always a backlog of work available, which creates some amount of delay in all payments. 3. Elon whispered in someones ear and said "the food sucks, take care of it." This is pure speculation on my part, but it makes for a good scene in a villian movie.

qwe10298

The Musk brigades have flagged this evidence of financial troubles from the front page.

silverFork

What was interesting was that had promised to pay him 3 times already. If _M_sk had paid for it himself.. it will be like $5 to him or few seconds to accumulate $60k from interest alone.

hn_acker

Just because a headline is chosen to make you feel semething doesn't mean it's clickbait. The headline is the editor's/author's restatement of the restaurant owner's own questions which were quoted in the article body.

deadstate

Because spacex is run by a mean and petty sociopath cunt.

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