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

38 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by hn_acker
(sfchronicle.com)

33 Comments

14989aiuh

10 hours ago

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.

ben_w

9 hours ago

I dunno about first domino, but I do suspect new laws will get written to prevent future businesses performing a "Musk scheme".

atmavatar

6 hours ago

I doubt that will happen anytime soon, as stiffing contractors is also one of the favorite past-times of our current President.

I expect if you dig around, you'll find a number of wealthy individuals who frequently do the same, given that the wealthiest of us are largely immune from the consequences of doing so. You may also notice that these types of stories also nearly always involve small mom-and-pop operations or other, small businesses whose continued existence relies on the large contracts they hold with the perpetrator.

hn_acker

10 hours ago

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?

epolanski

10 hours ago

Is there anything "original" anymore when it comes to thumbnails or titles?

They are tweaked all time to maximize views.

hn_acker

9 hours ago

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.

silverFork

9 hours ago

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.

toomuchtodo

9 hours ago

It’s about power and control, as it always is in this context. It would take but a moment to arrange a wire transfer, it is an active choice not to make the vendor whole.

timpera

10 hours ago

> 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/

ciconia

10 hours ago

> “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!

bulbar

9 hours ago

Exactly. How people think that billionaires in power will act for the best of the general population is beyond me. The current US billionaire-president even campaigned with "draining the swamp", while he is part of the very elites that are at one end of corruption. Well, now they are at both ends.

righthand

10 hours ago

> 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.

gibbitz

9 hours ago

Exactly. SpaceX saves 70k by waiting for the chef to go bankrupt waiting for his day in court. It's the Trump playbook and is money and power weaponizing the court against justice.

qwe10298

10 hours ago

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

Zigurd

4 hours ago

Fewer of those since the Yandex data center went boom.

deadstate

9 hours ago

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

addaon

10 hours ago

(Paywalled.)

bko

10 hours ago

Why is some random vendor dispute newsworthy?

I miss real journalism. I don't know what the hell this is

hn_acker

9 hours ago

> Desperate, Bell called SpaceX’s senior accountant on Sept. 17 and left a voicemail. “I said, ‘Something seems a little weird, and I don’t know if I should be getting a lawyer,’” he said.

> Bell said he received two responses within the hour. The first was a call from the accountant, who told him his payment had been initiated and should land in his bank account in the next few days. Bell said that as of Oct. 9 it had not arrived.

> On Friday, shortly after the Chronicle reached out to SpaceX for the second time, an accountant called Bell and told him payment was on its way. Bell said this is the third time the company has told him payment has been initiated.

This is just how "random" vendor "disputes" go? I disagree.

bko

9 hours ago

Isn't this like every other dispute that goes to a public forum and gets resolved? You see these every other week where Google or some other company locks someone out of their account and then they make a stink and then it gets resolved.

hn_acker

9 hours ago

When people get locked out of their Google/other accounts, Google/other usually doesn't have a contractual obligation to have a good reason for disabling the account (and thus money/compensation is not owed or overdue in such cases).

bko

5 hours ago

Vendor disputes literally happen every day. There's likely billions of accounts payable overdue on any given day. It sounds like you're not familiar w this space.

hn_acker

4 hours ago

How many of those overdue payments are overdue for this long despite a comparable capacity to pay back (a 5 figure sum from a 13 figure net worth buyer)? Imagine a 7 figure retirement couple (now a modest baseline for retirement in the US) delaying to pay back a 2 figure restaurant bill for over a month for reasons that might be good if only they were willing to disclose the reasons. Still a lot, maybe? Until you add that the buyer wrongly told the restaurant owner on three separate occasions that at least one payment (whether full or partial) would go through, which in some ways is worse than radio silence.

Maybe my retirement couple numbers were too forgiving. Change the 7 above to 8. Now I regret using retirement as an example. Imagine a 9 figure net worth business being unable to pay back a 9 - (13-5) = 1 figure B2B bill. Make it 2 figures for margin of error.

nvdk

10 hours ago

An invoice being just a few days over it's due date is indeed not really serious. I don't think it's a smart move on the restaurant either, if they had any intention on continuing the contract this just about kills it.

hluska

10 hours ago

It’s the San Francisco Chronicle’s Restaurant section.

nomel

9 hours ago

I saw it on the hacker news front page.

Kevin_Flynn

10 hours ago

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.

hn_acker

9 hours ago

> 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.

Your first two points are addressed by:

> Desperate, Bell called SpaceX’s senior accountant on Sept. 17 and left a voicemail. “I said, ‘Something seems a little weird, and I don’t know if I should be getting a lawyer,’” he said.

> Bell said he received two responses within the hour. The first was a call from the accountant, who told him his payment had been initiated and should land in his bank account in the next few days. Bell said that as of Oct. 9 it had not arrived.

> On Friday, shortly after the Chronicle reached out to SpaceX for the second time, an accountant called Bell and told him payment was on its way. Bell said this is the third time the company has told him payment has been initiated.

Your third point can go unaddressed.

Kevin_Flynn

8 hours ago

> Desperate, Bell called SpaceX’s senior accountant on Sept. 17 and left a voicemail. “I said, ‘Something seems a little weird, and I don’t know if I should be getting a lawyer,’” he said.

Were I the CEO of SpaceX, I would have been certain to implement a program that instructed employees to be on the alert for suspicious ( desperate ) sounding callers, requesting payments outside the ordinary workflow.

> Bell said he received two responses within the hour. The first was a call from the accountant, who told him his payment had been initiated and should land in his bank account in the next few days. Bell said that as of Oct. 9 it had not arrived.

From having managed a restaurant myself, I can tell you, theres a million details that an owner/manager has to get right on any given day, and they have to do it every day, consistently, or the customers leave.

Perhaps, he heard "payment was initiated" but what was really said was "your invoice is in the system and were processing it" but, because he mentioned the forbidden word "attorney" that immediately altered the procedure required. This happens in the auto insurance industry. If you tell your insurance company you have retained an attorney, the way they deal with you changes.

This story can be framed either way, and thats why I didn't read it.

If it said "class action lawsuit filed ... 1,000+ vendors claim SpaceX has punked them" ... I'd read it.

hn_acker

8 hours ago

> Perhaps, he heard "payment was initiated" but what was really said was "your invoice is in the system and were processing it"

If that were what happened, what might have led the restaurant owner to get a misunderstanding of the "the payment... should land in his bank account in the next few days" sort?

Kevin_Flynn

7 hours ago

Realistically, people misunderstand each other all the time.

Corporate workflows across different industries complicate this.

Theres no reason SpaceX as a corporation wouldn't pay it same as any other bill.

If it is being treated 'special' its because of some unique attribute, concerning this particular transaction, due to some human foiable.

hn_acker

3 hours ago

> Realistically, people misunderstand each other all the time.

If the restaurant owner in this case truly has made a multi-layer misunderstanding, SpaceX continues to have an opportunity to clear up the misunderstanding. I hope SpaceX will do so within the next month.