Why hasn’t SpaceX paid this Bay Area boss the $70,000 it owes him?

This year, SpaceX, the aerospace technology company founded by Elon Musk, went public and reached a record market capitalization of $2 trillion, making Musk the world’s first billionaire. It recently launched its giant spacecraft into orbit, bringing the company one step closer to sending astronauts to the Moon.

But Darryl Bell, a Bay Area restaurant owner, says SpaceX still hasn’t paid the roughly $70,000 he owes him for two catered dinners at the Texas company’s Palo Alto campus.

“It doesn’t even mean a cent to them,” said Bell, who provided invoices for the events to the Chronicle.

In July, Bell’s Napa barbecue restaurant, Stateline Road Smokehouse, hosted the first of what Bell hoped would be six monthly dinners for 425 SpaceX employees. At the second dinner in August, Bell said SpaceX’s culinary team gave positive feedback.

Yet payment for the dinners, set at just over $35,000 each, or $78 per person, is now months past due, according to Bell.

In an Oct. 2 email reviewed by the Chronicle, SpaceX acknowledged that “Stateline has not yet been paid and has exceeded its payment terms.”

Bell did not sign a written contract with SpaceX, but said he verbally agreed to the company’s payment terms within 30 days. Two weeks before Stateline’s third planned dinner, Bell mentioned getting a lawyer involved with a SpaceX accountant and the company suspended future events “until the payment issue is resolved,” according to messages reviewed by the Chronicle.

“It’s uncomfortably tight right now,” Bell said. “Restaurants are already tough.” Because his business is built around meat, the cost of which has risen sharply this year, he said, “the margins are even lower.”

“We’re building things in three months,” he said, “and there are things we can’t move anymore because we spent them expecting to get $70,000.”

SpaceX did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment.

When Bell was contacted by SpaceX this spring about the possibility of offering monthly dinners between July and December, he was attracted by the opportunity to “grow the dining side” of his business. But he had to buy about $7,000 worth of equipment, including eight carts and 100 hotel trays, to make it happen.

“We figured if we commit to doing this on a six-month basis, we can commit to buying some things, knowing that it will eventually get paid for,” he said.

The selection process was intense, Bell said, as his team had to complete numerous security checks and sign a nondisclosure agreement, which was also reviewed by the Chronicle. To host the dinners, several Bell employees agreed to work 14-hour shifts on what would have been their days off.

While Stateline typically requires a 50% deposit for events with more than 100 people, SpaceX had “no such (deposit) structure,” Bell said. “I thought, ‘It’s a big business. It’s just the way they run it.'”

Every two months, the company sent Bell and the other leased restaurants a schedule for the dinners, which are held every Wednesday and Thursday. According to a July email sent to SpaceX’s eight “supplier partners” in the Bay Area, reviewed by the Chronicle, Stateline was scheduled to host a dinner on Aug. 26 and Sept. 30.

Bell said the two dinners in Palo Alto on July 29 and Aug. 26 went well. The first red flag came at the end of the August event, when he asked SpaceX’s head chef about paying the July bill for $35,885, and did not receive an update.

In September, when the July payment was late, Bell said he began “constantly reaching out” to SpaceX. “I was just trying to get answers,” but he rarely got an answer, he said. Sometimes he was directed to another person, asked to resend his invoice or add a purchase order number to the invoice, he said.

Desperate, Bell called SpaceX’s senior accountant on September 17 and left him a voicemail. “I said, ‘Something seems a little strange and I don’t know if I should get a lawyer,'” he said.

Bell said he received two responses within the hour. The first was a call from the accountant, telling her that her payment had been initiated and should land in her bank account in the next few days. Bell said that as of October 9, it had not arrived.

The second was a text message from a SpaceX boss, which the Chronicle reviewed, informing Bell that the company was “postponing” the remaining Stateline dinners. The chief also told Bell that his voicemail “was perceived as a threat of legal action” and that he had “done everything I could at this point.”

In a follow-up email, Bell asked SpaceX if Stateline could still prepare the next dinner on September 30, as planning was already underway, but said he had received no response.

Bell estimated that at the end of the first two dinners he would break even, taking into account the equipment he purchased, as well as food and other costs, including a U-Haul rental to get everything to Palo Alto. But he hoped the remaining dinners would help him “actually turn a profit.” Now those dinners appear to be off the table, and Bell said “all this equipment we bought is of no use” because Stateline is not currently hosting any other events with this volume.

On Friday, shortly after the Chronicle contacted SpaceX for the second time, an accountant called Bell and told him the payment was pending. Bell said this is the third time the company has told him a payment has been initiated.

Bell said he was unable to pay his staff for the SpaceX dinners they worked at and that in recent weeks it had been difficult to pay his own bills, including those of suppliers, on time.

“It just hit me,” Bell said. “We’re blue-collar workers making this food, hustling to make it work for these young kids making six figures, and this trillion-dollar entity can’t pay us?”