Another burger ...
ON LOSERDOM
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Will the burger stuff ever end?
This week—in what many are calling yet another 9/11 for fabulousness—Tesla opened its long-teased “retro-futuristic” diner in West Hollywood. The diner, a 24-hour supercharging station and I guess outdoor movie theater, launched with Musk’s typical loserish aplomb; sycophants arrived hours ahead of the 4:20 pm opening time (haha!), jockeying to be one of the first customers to order a $12 side of Epic Bacon (roflcopter!).
I don’t normally care about burger-based openings, which seem to happen every day now. I’m not on any PR lists so I don’t have to put up that sort of facade. I was never fooled by Elon Musk so I don’t have to walk around now being like oh my god he’s so AWFUL to make up for it. But I’m interested in the Tesla Diner as sort of a Rosetta Stone for loserdom.
First of all, it’s very funny. A grilled cheese and a kids’ menu grilled cheese cost the same. Wagyu beef chili (hilarious and greasy) costs far less than a non-Wagyu burger. It literally says Epic Bacon.
The Tesla Diner menu is a rich text, emblematic of the tightrope these effete MAGA guys must walk. At face value, it’s quintessential conservative: burgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese. Beef and dairy, babey. Upon closer inspection, it’s actually giving quite woke, quite DEI. The menu is dripping with “organic,” “free-range,” and “wild-caught” labels and everything is fried in tallow, reflecting the continued right-wing reclamation of crunchy, but it goes far beyond that. An avocado toast with pepitas, radish, and arugula sounds like something Elon would call gay on Twitter. The tortillas for the breakfast tacos come from the Tehachapi Grain Project, which sounds like something the official DOGE account would call gay on Twitter and then take away their USDA grant.
The diner is helmed by Eric Greenspan, known for his grilled cheeses at the Foundry on Melrose in the aughts. Greenspan is also behind a fewer-preservatives American Cheese venture, featured heavily on the Tesla menu. A huge investor in ghost kitchens, he also helped open MrBeast Burger, apparently a chain of 2,000 burger-based ghost kitchens associated with the obviously evil Youtuber. Did you guys know about this?
MrBeast burger has been financially ruinous apparently. The devil himself sued his ghost kitchen partner for breach of contract in 2023 and was countersued for $100 million at the beginning of this year. Seems messy. I should care more about Mr Beast because he’s so obviously going to destroy everything I hold dear but I find him so distasteful I simply can’t get involved. It’s like if the Night King had really bad vibes. Alas.
Why are the richest men on Earth trying to open burger stands? And not in a Shaq franchise way, like they’re pouring money into burger-based vanity projects. What’s up with that?
Musk and, uh, Beast (?) aren’t just part of the Huel class of pleasureless tech guys, they’re its overlords. These are two men who’ve never once been cool, who went out and got more money than basically anyone has ever had, who try each and every day to be a baller and fail. So removed are they from the human experience, digging so deep through their dim recollection of what life is like, desperately asking Grok for the answer to “how do people hang out?” and all these poor suckers can come up with is Burger.
But as facile as it seems, it’s working. Everyone is burger’d up. The line at Tesla Diner wraps around the block. The scene-y girls and the boys who look like Noel Gallagher are queueing up for viral smashburgers while the gorpy girls and the boys who look like Tom Selleck are scoffing and trekking for tavern-style burgers off the main drag. I guess people are ordering the MrBeast burgers to their homes, I don’t really understand that one.
Few are doing it so gauche, but Musk’s “retro-futurism” abounds. Vintage burgers are offset by cool wines and bifurcated shoes. Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe has a DJ from Thursday to Saturday. Yes it’s a burger, but it’s also a brand activation. And God, it’s so boring.
I’m sorry, to quote another burger, don’t hate me! 🫒
perfect as always
The core message here is an interesting one: Why are today’s super rich such losers?
I just finished my annual re-watch of “Citizen Kane”, and its two models, Hearst and Howard Hughes, make Gates and Zuckerberg and Musk look like Marty McFly’s dad.
But my favorite line from that film explains a lot: “There’s no trick to making a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money.”
Once they get it, they think they’re Howard Hughes, and all their mirrors lie to them.