Elon Musk’s SpaceX has fallen months behind on a roughly $70,000 restaurant tab, leaving the owner struggling to pay staff and bills, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“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?” asked Darryl Bell, the owner of Stateline Road Smokehouse in California, speaking with the Chronicle.
According to the Chronicle, Bell agreed to cater six monthly dinners for around 425 SpaceX employees at just over $35,000 each, or about $78 a person. According to Bell, he was told that he would receive payment for dinners within 30 days.
In anticipation of catering the dinners, Bell said he purchased around $7,000 worth of equipment. The first dinner was held in July, and the second in August, where some of his staff “agreed to work 14-hour shifts on what would have been their days off,” the Chronicle reported.
But the payments never came, Bell claimed, and are now months past due.
The Chronicle reviewed an email from SpaceX sent on Oct. 2 in which the company acknowledged that Bell had “not been paid yet and is past their payment terms.” Nevertheless, Bell said he’s still waiting to be made whole, and that the remaining SpaceX dinners had been placed on hold.
“That’s not even a penny for them,” Bell said of the outstanding $70,000 balance from a company that recently went public and reached a record market cap of $2 trillion. “We’re building stuff three months out and there are things we can’t move around anymore because we spent it expecting to get $70,000.”
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.