Less than six months after opening, Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner in Hollywood has the feel of a Rhodesian ghost town.

The celebrity chef is gone. Eric Greenspan, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate who helped build Mr Beast Burger, quietly departed and scrubbed his Instagram of any association with the venture. The hundred-person lines evaporated. The global expansion plan went the same way as Musk’s other promises, nowhere. On a recent Friday afternoon, more staff lifted fingerprints off chrome walls than there were customers.

The Guardian reports that the novelty of eating at a restaurant owned by the world’s most hated man “seems to have worn off.” A more precise diagnosis: the reputational cost of association with investments in Musk now exceeds any benefit, and the competent professionals have done the math.

Greenspan’s Instagram scrubbing is the digital equivalent of removing a company from your résumé before it gets raided. He hasn’t publicly explained his departure. He doesn’t need to. The AfD promotion in Germany and Nazi salutes at Trump’s inauguration—”repeatedly portrayed in the picket signs held by Tesla Diner protesters,” per the Guardian—made the calculation straightforward.

This is what the Musk ecosystem is all about: not dramatic collapse, but a leaky hype balloon with gradual evacuation by anyone with options, leaving behind only the true believers. The diner can absorb not being a diner. A shiny chrome dumpster fire in Hollywood is embarrassing but survivable.

Starlink is the other side of this coin.

The same week the Guardian documented the diner’s decline, Forbes published what reads like Starlink investor relations copy. Joel Shulman, who discloses financial affiliations with investment vehicles that benefit from exactly this narrative, celebrates Musk as playing “a different entrepreneurial game.”

Different is an interesting word choice. The piece inadvertently catalogs every Musk vulnerability while fraudulently framing them as strengths:

“His companies iterate faster than regulators, incumbents, and even capital markets are structured to absorb.”

The simple stupidity of raw speed is presented as true genius. It’s actually the explicit strategy of toddler-like skills, operating outside democratic accountability. The speed isn’t about innovation—it’s about fait accompli. Get the absolute worst possible version of infrastructure embedded before anyone can object.

“A vertically integrated, globally scalable communications network that bypasses nearly every legacy constraint of the telecom industry.”

Those “constraints” include safety and reliability, regulatory oversight, spectrum licensing, and the political processes that prevent private actors from controlling critical infrastructure without accountability. Bypassing them isn’t really a feature, especially after governments decide it isn’t.

“Infrastructure that governments, industries, and populations increasingly depend on.”

The Ukraine episode already demonstrated what happens when Musk controls infrastructure that anyone depends on. He toggled access based on a personal whim. The piece treats dependency as a moat. It’s actually an invitation to regulatory intervention, if not forfeiture.

“Switching costs are high where Starlink is the only viable option.”

The monopoly framing. This is the argument for why regulators will eventually act, not why they won’t. Shulman bizarrely invokes railroads and electricity as precedents for infrastructure monopolies that compound private wealth indefinitely. He appears not to have read the second half of that history.

Railroads: The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Federal rate regulation. Antitrust action. Eventually nationalization of passenger rail. The robber baron era ended precisely because railroad dependency triggered democratic backlash.

Electricity: Heavily regulated as a public utility. Rate-setting by state commissions. Must-serve obligations. Prohibition on discriminatory pricing.

The monopoly dream Shulman celebrates was tamed by regulation in every historical instance he cites. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was broken up. AT&T was broken up. The Gilded Age produced the Progressive Era.

“Infrastructure makes it permanent,” Shulman writes, as if history ends at the moment of monopoly formation.

It doesn’t.

The political economy of essential infrastructure has a second act: public assertion of control over private power to prevent catastrophe. He’s describing the conditions under which democratic societies historically decide that private control of critical infrastructure is obviously unacceptable.

Apparently he wants to rewrite history, or just doesn’t realize he’s making the argument against himself.

The Tesla diner shows the trajectory. The Forbes piece shows the radical investor class hasn’t noticed.

When the competent people flee and only the loyalists remain—people selected for devotion rather than capability—you get soggy industrial fries served in a soulless, empty and shiny corporate diner.

That’s the optimistic scenario.

The pessimistic scenario is the same dynamic applied to global communications infrastructure that governments and militaries depend on. An erratic autocrat who has already demonstrated he’ll use infrastructure access as political leverage. A workforce increasingly selected for loyalty over competence. No democratic accountability structure. Explicitly designed to outrun regulation.

Starlink is exposed as an erratic, autocratic, global communications infrastructure, maintained by a loyalty cult.

The diner is the proof of concept—showing exactly what happens when the reputational toxicity reaches escape velocity and the professionals calculate their exit.

The only question is timeline.