Tech News & Issues

Construction on what is being billed as the Music City Loop is expected to begin in the coming days. Officials hope it would reduce the downtown-to-airport commute, typically at least 15 minutes in regular traffic, to as few as eight minutes. The loop would be used by Tesla cars owned and operated by the Boring Company.

Mr. Lee, speaking at an airport hotel, hailed the plans as something that “might just be the coolest announcement since I’ve been here.”

Notably missing: Mayor Freddie O’Connell, a transit wonk who won voter approval of an infrastructure plan in November. “We have a number of operational questions to understand the potential impact,” Mr. O’Connell said in a statement…

Mr. Lee and others emphasized that construction on the Nashville tunnel would be privately funded by the Boring Company and would not receive tax breaks. They did not say how much it would cost to build, maintain or use.

Some proposed Boring Company projects announced elsewhere in the United States, including in Chicago, were never completed. And Nashville’s limestone bedrock and temperate weather offer challenges for the company, especially compared with Las Vegas’s dry climate…

Nashville leaders accused state officials of prioritizing tourists over residents in order to help Mr. Musk, whose businesses have already profited from his former close relationship with President Trump and other Republican leaders.

Similar concerns have been voiced over the construction of a supercomputer facility in Memphis for xAI, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence business, where residents of the predominantly Black neighborhoods nearby have raised worries about increased air pollution and other disruptions…

Some speakers pointedly said that the unanimous outcome of the hourlong hearing in Nashville on Thursday seemed preordained. With the permission of state officials, the parking lot in question had already been cordoned off by the Boring Company.

SCOOP: The founder of Altitude Ventures, the company that ran the Teslas-only Tunnel launch (and wouldn’t ID themselves), is Clayton Mcwhorter… late father of Stuart, @GovBillLee’s Commissioner of Economic Development🤔
(The Boring Company’s TN LLC used their address to file)

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 7:51 PM

(And Chad Blackburn, if social media is to be believed, is Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s incompetent son.)

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I reviewed the Tesla Diner, congrats to me on my new career as a food critic

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— Madame Bovary Summer (@milesklee.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 3:49 PM

Palate cleanser, from Rolling Stone — “Elon Musk’s Tesla Diner Is the Cybertruck of Restaurants”:

… “Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA,” Musk tweeted in 2018, long before his transformation into a misinformation superspreader and Trump megadonor. Just ahead of the launch seven years later, the Tesla CEO declared the finished restaurant to be “one of the coolest spots in LA!” He also posted on X that Tesla aimed to open up other diners in “major cities around the world,” and that the company’s Optimus robots would be serving food to customers in their Teslas by next year — though he soon deleted that last and most dubious claim. Nonetheless, a grand opening demo of an Optimus serving popcorn led many to believe that the bots would have customer-facing jobs, despite engineers on site confirming that this one was remotely operated by a person, not moving independently. As usual, Musk’s hype had driven expectations to unreasonable highs.

Earlier in the week, I had seen a lone protester outside the diner with a sign that said “Workers Should Have the Power — Not the Billionaires.” On Thursday afternoon, there was no anti-oligarch activism afoot, only excitement and anticipation. A friend who, like me, grew up in the fine diner culture of New Jersey, joined me at the end of the queue, which lasted an hour and a half. Periodically, an employee came through and asked if anyone waiting was currently charging their Teslas in the parking lot; the few who were received complicated instructions on how to order from their cars, either for delivery to the vehicle or to pick up inside when the food was ready. I was supposed to have my own Tesla for this visit, but because Hertz does not feel bound to honor its rental reservations — that’s a review for another time — we were, like so many others, lowly walk-ins unable to accelerate service. In the meantime, we were advised that we could see the menu at TeslaDiner.com. The URL led to a blank webpage.

The two-story diner is clearly meant to give the impression of an alien spacecraft, though it’s an awfully generic one — not up to Disneyland standards, anyway. Outside, it’s flanked by a pair of four-story movie screens (unbelievably, one of them totally blocks the windows and balconies of a neighboring apartment building, where residents must be furious) that play space-themed Looney Tunes cartoons, old sci-fi movies, Cybertruck ads, SpaceX launches, and abstract laser patterns, usually at low resolution and with the wrong aspect ratio. Very few of the parking spaces face either screen, as they would in the traditional drive-in theater Musk had apparently envisioned. Noise concerns had been downplayed with promises that sound would beam directly into parked Tesla vehicles, but an episode of The Jetsons blared in the summer air as we turned the corner toward the diner entrance…

We had decided to sample the imaginatively named Tesla burgers, as well as fries (cooked in tallow, to conform with the recent right-wing craze) and sides of “Epic Bacon.” The food took about 20 minutes, and my companion initially received a burger heaped with chili and a fried egg instead of what she had ordered. Although we’d given our phone numbers and been informed that a text would alert us when our orders were ready, neither of us got one; instead, the staff was just calling out receipts. After fetching our meals, we sat back down to appraise them. My burger was missing half of its bottom bun, and the attempt to deliver the advertised “smashed, crunchy edges” had left the meat fairly scorched throughout. This and the fries were no competition for many fine alternatives around Los Angeles.

The bacon was a sadder affair, and I accidentally went viral on X by posting a picture comparing mine to the far more appetizing image on the menu. It was chewy, not crunchy — despite being partly charred — with a sickly-sweet maple glaze. A properly sized carton may help with presentation, but charging $12 for four slices of this will never be justifiable. The condiments like “Electric Sauce” were the usual relabeled chipotle mayo and similar stuff. A “charged” lime rickey with “natural caffeine,” whether or not it gave me a noticeable buzz, tasted fine — I was puzzled, however, by a line on the ticket attached to my plain white cup that said “#tesla,” as if I might forget who sold me the soda. Any leftovers could be ferried home in a cardboard Cybertruck box, naturally…

The bots, which can be found on your way up to the second level, constitute almost the entirety of the restaurant’s decor. In the absence of better chow, you’d hope for at least an interesting setting, yet when you look around the ground floor, there isn’t much that catches the eye. The sleek walls offer only Tesla propaganda slogans such as “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” It was less like being in the future than in a drably minimalist McMansion. The “Skypad” rooftop is a bit nicer and feels like it takes more inspiration from Googie architecture of the Space Age. Still, it seems to go underutilized while people congregate downstairs and would be far more suitable for a cocktail bar. Moving between the different parts of the property was awkward. An attendant stood at the top of the staircase, and for some unexplained reason stopped everyone who tried to walk back down the same way, saying they had to wait for the (hot, cramped) elevator. One wonders if this was as necessary as, say, maintaining the restrooms, one of which had a floor covered in piss and empty soap dispensers. Oh, and there were only three single-use bathrooms for an eatery that seats 250.…

I went to the Tesla Diner and all I got was a robot smokin a cig

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— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@rmac.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 5:32 PM

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I actually tried the food there too and well… yea.

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— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@rmac.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 7:15 PM

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The Tesla diner is unfortunately in my neighborhood so I took a little peek to see boxes of milk and frozen foods out in the heat. Good luck to everyone’s stomachs.

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— Melissa Stetten (@melissastetten.bsky.social) July 25, 2025 at 12:15 PM

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started a betting pool with the boys, and "ICE Raid" just overtook "Salmonella Outbreak" as the most likely cause of death for the Tesla Diner

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) July 28, 2025 at 10:50 AM

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⚡️ JOIN US Saturday and Sunday outside America’s least favorite diner at 7001 Santa Monica Blvd in Hollywood ⚡️
📍 actionnetwork.org/events/tesla…
Brought to you by Tesla Takedown & Resist the Coup
#teslatakedown @teslatakedown.com

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— #TeslaTakedown Santa Monica (@teslatakedownsm.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 7:19 PM