Elon Musk Gets Ready to Enter the Restaurant Business

A retro-futuristic diner is rising on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Curved, silvery and flanked by two film screens, it looks as if a flying saucer sailed out of a 1950s drive-in movie and came to rest in the carpark.

- Pete Wells

LOS ANGELES — A retro-futuristic diner is rising on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Curved, silvery and flanked by two film screens, it looks as if a flying saucer sailed out of a 1950s drive-in movie and came to rest in the carpark.

An opening date has not been announced, but Tesla's all-night diner, theatre and charging station is clearly on its way. Which means the multinational automotive and clean energy company's leader, Mr Elon Musk, is about to enter the hospitality business.

In 2023, when Mr Musk posted on his social platform, X, that Tesla would build a diner in Los Angeles, he described it as "Grease meets Jetsons with supercharging".

As he has often done, he put his finger on a major piece of culture ripe for reinvention — in this case, petrol station dining in the age of electric cars, which need longer to recharge than it takes to top up a tank — and put a gee-whiz spin on it.

That was before anti-Musk protests at Tesla dealerships became weekly occurrences in LA and other cities. Before a 50 per cent drop in Tesla's stock price took shareholders on a fast ride from "gee-whiz" to "look out below".

All of which have made Tesla's foray into restaurants a far more loaded prospect than it seemed a short time ago.