
We’re revising price targets on 5 Club stocks, adding a U.S. retailer to the bullpen and sticking with a key bank
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adminThe Club on Friday is updating five price targets for stocks in the portfolio to reflect recent developments at the companies and broader macroeconomic trends. We’re also adding a new stock to the bullpen, while reiterating our support for Morgan Stanley amid the recent upheaval in the banking sector. Meta We’re increasing our price target on Meta Platforms (META) to $220 per share, from $195. This new target represents about 18-times 2024 earnings estimates. Over the last two months, analysts have steadily increased their earnings estimates on Meta, and the stock has appreciated alongside those revisions to above our previous target. Since Jan. 31, the day before Meta announced fourth-quarter results , the consensus earnings-per-share (EPS) estimate for 2023 has moved up about 24%, to $10, from $8.08 per share. For 2024, the consensus EPS estimate has risen 2%, to $12.39, from $10.14 a share. The driving forces behind those analyst revisions are the company’s emphasis on improving efficiency through a second round of layoffs , controlling its costs by reducing its 2023 expenses outlook and, most recently, signs of so-called green shoots at its advertising business for its family of applications. That’s a result of the continued monetization of its Reels short-form video offering on Facebook and Instagram, along with the easing of ad-targeting headwinds. The two fundamental ingredients that drive higher stock prices are earnings and the valuation multiple investors are willing to pay for those earnings. Generally, higher earnings are our preference of the two. Sometimes multiple expansion is just a great fool theory. In essence, you are buying a stock because you think someone else will pay more for it in the future. But when earnings are up, it’s because the value of the company is increasing. With estimates pushing higher, we think the rally in META still has more room to run, prompting us to raise our price target. Nvidia We’re increasing our price target on Nvidia (NVDA) to $300 per share, from $240. This new target puts Nvidia’s valuation at a pricey 67-times the consensus EPS estimate for next year. But the chipmaker is uniquely worthy of such a premium because it is the unrivaled leader in accelerated computing and artificial intelligence (AI), which is finally at an inflection point after having what CEO Jensen Huang called its “iPhone moment.” Nvidia has previously said generative AI — which includes applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — has a total addressable market of $600 billion split between hardware and software. Indeed, with the channel inventory correction in gaming largely behind Nvidia and new orders for its H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerating to support generative AI, it’s likely that earnings estimates this year are too low. Energy We’re reducing our price targets on Coterra Energy (CTRA), Devon Energy (DVN), and Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) to reflect the lower prices of both oil and natural gas. For all three names, we are lowering our price targets to the consensus price, according to FactSet. That means reducing Devon Energy to $68 per share from $82, Coterra Energy to $30 per share from $40, and Pioneer to $259 per share from $300. We’re also downgrading Devon to a 3 rating , meaning we’ll look to sell shares into strength — part of a broader move to consolidate our energy holdings and free up space in the portfolio. Our rationale behind keeping Pioneer is its higher dividend yield of 11.8%, compared with Devon’s 7.6% yield. With Coterra, we support its shift to focus on share repurchases over paying out a variable dividend. Favoring buybacks over dividends make more sense to us, with the stock down more than 30% from last year’s high. Bullpen The newest addition to our bullpen is Foot Locker (FL). The sneakers and athletic-wear retailer plays a large role in the $80 billion sneaker market, which has been growing at a mid-single digit clip thanks to three big tailwinds, according to the company. The first is mass casualization, whereby hybrid work and new norms of wearing sneakers with dress clothes have boosted sneaker sales. The second is traditional and new performance sneaker brands becoming fashion statements. And the third tailwind is the rise of sneakers as a vehicle of individual expression. In the 2021 Piper Sandler Spring Teen Survey, 25% of teens identified as a “sneakerhead” or a sneaker enthusiast that is likely to own multiple pairs. But the rising tide of sneakers hasn’t lifted all ships. Foot Locker has struggled over the past few years because it was mostly thought of as a reseller of Nike (NKE), which has shifted gears to double down on its own direct-to-consumer business. Foot Locker has also been a victim of the shift to shopping on ecommerce platforms, given its large presence in malls. Foot Locker needed a change. And in September, the company appointed retail industry veteran Mary Dillon, the former CEO of Ulta Beauty (ULTA), as its new CEO. On Monday, Dillon unveiled Foot Locker’s new “Lace Up” strategy, in conjunction with its fourth-quarter results and Investor Day event, while stopping by “Mad Money” to talk with Jim Cramer. Dillon is hitting the reset button in 2023 in order to put the business on a path towards sustainable growth. To do this, management plans to diversify its brand mix to offer more sneaker choices to become less beholden to Nike; optimize its store footprint by exiting 400 underperforming stores; launch new store concepts; and accelerate investments in technology and its loyalty program. But all these actions will come at a price, with management expecting 2023 earnings to be down 30%. We don’t want to make light of how big this haircut to earnings will be, but as Foot Locker’s growth initiatives and cost savings programs play out, it should quickly return to growth in 2024. And in the years after that, management’s financial targets look very robust. In 2024 through 2026, management expects annual sales growth of 5% to 6%, with comparable sales growth of 3% to 4%, and earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins reaching 8.5% to 9% by the end of 2026. For comparison, EBIT margins are expected to be 5.7% in 2023. After including share buybacks every year, Foot Locker sees its adjusted EPS growing by a low-to-mid-twenties percentage rate annually from 2024 to 2026. For a stock that currently trades at about 11-times earnings, this isn’t growth at a reasonable price, it’s growth at a very cheap price. Of course, a price-to-earnings multiple that low implies some skepticism around Foot Locker’s ability to make good on its goals. Turnarounds are never easy and the company continues to face headwinds from Nike and its traditional mall presence. So it’s now up to Dillon to deliver. But if she can do for Foot Locker what she achieved at Ulta Beauty, Footlocker’s shares can go much higher. And in the interim, the company’s current 4% dividend yield represents a solid payment to hold us over. Morgan Stanley We continue to see great value in the Morgan Stanley (MS) franchise but haven’t added to our position because we already own so much and can’t meaningfully improve our cost basis while the stock is in the $80s-per-share range. We would like to see it go a little lower, with a dividend yield closer to 4%, as we await a resolution to the troubles at First Republic Bank (FRC). Despite the challenges facing regional and community banks, Morgan Stanley should still emerge as a net winner from the ongoing turmoil. Along with other big banks, Morgan Stanley committed $2.5 billion of uninsured deposits to First Republic Bank, in a likely sign that MS saw inflows since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank two weeks sparked the current uncertainty. Furthermore, Morgan Stanley’s business model is driven by wealth-and-asset-management fees and is less reliant on collecting deposits and issuing loans. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
An employee arranges a sneaker display at a Foot Locker Inc. store inside the South Park Mall in Strongsville, Ohio.
Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Club on Friday is updating five price targets for stocks in the portfolio to reflect recent developments at the companies and broader macroeconomic trends. We’re also adding a new stock to the bullpen, while reiterating our support for Morgan Stanley amid the recent upheaval in the banking sector.
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Environment
Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street’s invisible backbone
Published
8 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
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CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren’t corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality.
From that sparse office, they launched “Frontier,” Ethereum‘s first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system.
Bitcoin had captured headlines as “digital gold,” but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers.
One year earlier and 520 miles away in Zurich, Paul Brody got a call from IBM security: A kid was wandering the lab unattended.
“That’s not a child,” Brody told them. “That’s Vitalik. He’s a grown-up — he just looks really young.”
Paul Brody and Vitalik Buterin with IBM and Samsung executives at CES 2015, where IBM unveiled its first blockchain prototype built on Ethereum’s early code.
Paul Brody
At the time, Buterin was building the bones of Ethereum. The blockchain was still in its alpha stage, an early version of what would become a $420 billion platform rewiring Wall Street and powering decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenized markets across the globe.
Brody, then leading a research team at IBM, remembers how quickly the idea clicked.
“One of the guys on the research team came to me and said, ‘I’ve met this really interesting guy. He’s got a really cool idea…It’s like a version of bitcoin, but we’re going to make it much faster and programmable,'” he said. “And when he said that to me, I thought, ‘That’s it. That is what I want. That is what we need.'”
With Buterin’s help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum’s early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. “That was how I ended up down this path,” Brody said. “I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain.”
Even now, as EY’s global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. “This is a kid, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that.”
He added, “I don’t think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age.”
Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivers a keynote at ETHCC, laying out the network’s next steps — and its values test — as institutional adoption accelerates.
EthCC
“It’s very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone’s expectations,” Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain’s flagship event in Europe.
Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. Ten years ago, he recalled, the crypto community was “just a very small space,” with only a handful of people working on bitcoin and a few other projects.
Since then, Ethereum has become “this big thing,” Buterin reflected, with major corporations now launching assets on both its base layer and layer-two networks. Parts of national economies are beginning to run on Ethereum infrastructure, a far cry from its cypherpunk origins.
But Buterin warned that mainstream adoption brings risks as well as benefits. One concern is that if too few issuers or intermediaries dominate, they could become “de facto controllers of the ecosystem.” He described a scenario where Ethereum might appear open, but, in practice, all the keys are managed by centralized providers.
“That’s the thing that we don’t want,” he said.
Prague to the Riviera
Two years earlier in Prague, CNBC met Buterin at Paralelní Polis, a sprawling industrial complex turned anarchist tech hub in the city’s Holešovice district. The building’s labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power.
It was a place built on Václav Benda’s concept of a “parallel society,” where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It’s the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists.
At the time, Buterin described crypto’s greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets.
ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.
Pavel Sinagl
“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value,” he told CNBC at the time. “Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there.”
Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn’t be trusted.
This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum’s flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring.
It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum’s journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon.
Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. “The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes,” he said.
“What’s happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure,” Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance.
Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow.

Becoming the plumbing of Wall Street
Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two.
Circle’s USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum’s rails. According to CoinGecko’s latest “State of Stablecoins” report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity.
Between Circle’s IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation.
Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements.
Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto.

As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it’s launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets.
BlackRock‘s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last year, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC.
Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there’s a misconception about what institutions actually want.
“A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it’s stable and dependable, because it doesn’t go down,” he said.
He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, “really value.”
Institutions are choosing various layer twos to meet specific needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum’s base layer.
“The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability,” Brody said.
He added that the fact it isn’t the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times “is secondary to the fact that it’s overall the most widely adopted and flexible system.”
Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset.
Engineers, he said, “love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard,” and Ethereum has become precisely that.
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, in Cannes for Europe’s largest annual gathering for the blockchain.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem.
“Institutions choose Ethereum over and over again for its values,” Stańczak said. “Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance.”
When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it’s treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it’s delivered. “That’s what Ethereum guarantees,” added Stańczak.
Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain.
Scaling without losing its soul
Ethereum’s path hasn’t been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it’s too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors.
In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum’s energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in Prague, where he finds refuge with like-minded programmers looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.
CNBC
The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise.
Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to “the finish line” in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger.
Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch.
There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum “a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place.”
Buterin believes the real change won’t come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it.
“This type of disruption doesn’t feel like overturning the existing system,” he said. “It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don’t even have to look at the old thing if you didn’t want to.”

Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure.
That shift, Brody added, won’t simply copy old financial systems onto new technology.
“One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it’s not that we replace like for like,” he said. “When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we’ll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can’t do today.”
If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won’t make headlines. It’ll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
WATCH: Robinhood hits record high as OpenAI, SpaceX go on-chain

Environment
How Florida quietly surpassed California in solar growth
Published
10 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
admin
Solar energy is booming across the U.S. and, for the first time, Florida is catching up to industry powerhouses Texas and California.
Despite removing climate change from its official state policy in 2024, Florida added more utility-scale solar than California last year, with over 3 gigawatts of new capacity coming online.
“This is not a fluke,” said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “Florida is now shaping national solar growth.”
The surge is being driven by utilities, not rooftop panels. Florida Power & Light alone built over 70% of the state’s new solar last year. A state rule lets developers skip lengthy siting reviews for projects under 75 megawatts, which speeds up construction and cuts costs.
“There’s no silver bullet,” said Syd Kitson, founder of Babcock Ranch, a town designed to be powered almost entirely by solar. “But one thing Florida got right is acceptance. Here, people want solar. And we’re proving it works.”
Babcock Ranch runs on its own microgrid and stayed online during Hurricane Ian in 2022, while much of southwest Florida went dark.
“We didn’t lose power, internet, or water,” said Don Bishop, a homeowner there. “That changes how you think about energy.”
The economics are doing the rest. With industrial demand rising and natural gas prices climbing, solar is increasingly the cheapest option, even without subsidies.
“Utilities aren’t building solar because it’s green,” Martinez said. “They’re doing it because it’s cheaper.”
But new challenges are emerging.
In July, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which accelerates the rollback of solar and wind tax credits. Homeowners lose the federal investment credit after 2025. Developers face tighter deadlines and stricter sourcing rules.
“It won’t kill the market,” said Zoë Gaston, an analyst who follows the solar industry at Wood Mackenzie. “But it makes the math harder.”
Analysts now expect a 42% drop in rooftop solar installs in Florida over the next five years. And while utility-scale growth continues, grid constraints are becoming an issue. Utilities are pouring money into storage, smart infrastructure, and grid upgrades to keep up.
Babcock Ranch is piloting new microgrid systems to add resilience. The hope is that other communities can take the playbook and adapt it, storm-proofing neighborhoods one block at a time.
“We’ve been testing this for years,” Kitson said. “Now it’s about scale. It’s about showing others they can do it too.”
The bigger question is whether Florida can keep this momentum going without policy support, and while still leaning heavily on natural gas.
“Florida has the solar resources,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “What’s missing is political consistency.”
Watch the video to see how Florida became a solar leader and what could slow it down.
Environment
The Tesla Diner has been open for 12 days and it’s going kinda rough so far
Published
13 hours agoon
August 2, 2025By
admin

Tesla opened its retro-futuristic “Tesla Diner” last Monday, July 21st. It’s a cool concept and the realization of a plan that was first talked about in 2018… but in the 12 days since it opened, it hasn’t been all roses so far.
The diner has been through a few twists and turns since it was first proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on a conference call in 2018. At first, the plan was to build it alongside a Supercharger location in Santa Monica, but the restaurant portion didn’t get off the ground and Tesla just build a Supercharger location there instead.
Then Tesla moved the project to Hollywood… on Santa Monica Blvd. So, kind of still Santa Monica, right? It took the place of an old Shakey’s Pizza, and has been under construction for quite some time.
The plans were to offer a diner with a Supercharger, carhop service, large drive-in movie screens and a retro-futuristic aesthetic around it all. It opened on July 21st, at 4:20pm (420 being a reference to Musk’s reported drug addictions), delivering all that, along with a merchandise shop and one of Tesla’s Optimus robots serving popcorn.
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Pretty much immediately, the Diner had quite a festive atmosphere. The line to get food has reportedly consistently been an hour or more long since it was opened, which speaks to the site’s popularity – but perhaps also a failure to provide the kind of rapid service that a fast casual diner with car service might seek to offer.
Given that the site is also a Supercharger, one would expect to have a premium on fast service, so that cars don’t end up parked in spots for too long which could otherwise be used for fast charging (Tesla charges idle fees for EVs which charge for too long and clog up chargers, but we’ve heard conflicting information over whether these idle fees apply to people waiting for food at the Diner)
One remedy for these long lines, though, is Tesla’s in-car computer, which cleverly allows drivers to order food from inside their car ahead of time while navigating to the site. Tesla then knows when the driver will show up, based on in-car navigation, and theoretically can have the order ready by then – but perhaps that will become more relevant once lines die down.
In theory, it definitely does seem like a “Supercharger done right.” We’ve covered several instances of these, charging plazas that aren’t just a place to charge, but which offer other amenities that drivers might want while charging – like ROVE’s Santa Ana “full service” charger with grocery store, lounge and car wash; or Rivian’s “Outpost” locations. And we definitely want to see more of this, giving people things to do while they’re charging, which can lead to electric roadtrips feeling even better than gas ones.
But so far the Diner hasn’t been without its problems, and we’ve heard a number of them in the past 12 days.
Some of the problems Tesla Diner has seen since opening
Both during construction and now that the site is open, many of the site’s neighbors aren’t particularly happy, according to a 404 media article including several interviews. An apartment block directly beside the site has seen significant turnover and vacancies as renters were fed up with years of construction, operating 14 hours a day, and loud generators that also emitted polluting exhaust.
Residents in the article were afraid to use their full names, lest they be exposed to abuse by Tesla fans as a result – something that we at Electrek can attest to, having received similar responses after writing truthful articles about the company.
Some renters have had their windows blocked by the 40-foot-tall movie screen, and while the screen doesn’t produce sound itself (that’s piped through vehicle speakers), it does have fans on the back of it which make a constant whir – thus blocking their view and adding noise pollution.
And since the diner is open 24/7, there’s no reprieve from the hustle and bustle, which has also caused traffic backups along the small nearby streets and has forced the apartment building to reinforce its entry door.
Much of this could be blamed on the planning commission, perhaps, for allowing the project to go on as-is – assuming Tesla was upfront about the site’s uses. And some of the chaos will calm down once the novelty of the site goes down, and some noise is to be expected for those living in a relatively busy part of the LA area in the first place. One resident did say they liked the hustle and bustle, but according to the article, this resident seems to be in the minority.
Beyond the planning issues and busy nature of the site, there have been several operational issues so far.
On the very first day, Tesla’s popcorn-scooping Optimus robot failed. Tesla has touted its expertise with “real-world AI,” using its Optimus robots as an example, showing the robot’s dexterity and ability to do factory tasks. But the problem is, in most public displays of the robot so far, it has been teleoperated – that is, remote controlled by a human. Reportedly, Diner employees confirmed that the popcorn-bot was teleoperated, despite doing quite a simple and repetitive task.
$TSLA optimus froze and couldn’t serve popcorn at Tesla diner
🍿 too many people using starlink wifi network
🍿 teleoperator couldn’t connect to optimus pic.twitter.com/8jXKux9eiI
— Stonk King ((((🌕)))) (@StonkKing4) July 23, 2025
The robot also has multiple tenders – videos show Diner employees handing popcorn containers to it, as it can’t separate the containers itself, and having to refill the popcorn machine and clean up any dropped popcorn. Combine those employees and the reported teleoperator for the robot, and this feels like we’re seeing a decrease in labor efficiency here, rather than an increase.
One widely-shared report showed perishable items stacked outside – but given that it was just a single photo, it seems likely that these items were mid-delivery.
More concerningly, TMZ reported that a woman was struck on the head by an awning/umbrella, and her husband claimed that she appeared confused and briefly lost consciousness afterwards. The LA Fire Department responded and the woman left the scene without an ambulance.
And of course, as is the case with anything Tesla these days, the Diner has attracted controversy. In Los Angeles – a city which is currently being occupied by nazi-like goons who are demanding that residents show their papers lest they be kidnapped and potentially shipped to a death camp – the man who last year became the largest individual global funder of the fascist regime that is now causing these illegal disappearances is not very popular. And you don’t have to go far back to remember when Musk himself said that his current actions are “not good for America or the world.”
Tesla locations in the LA area (and around the globe) have been subject to routine “Tesla Takedown” protests for months, starting after Musk did two clear nazi salutes and had spent his first few weeks in an advisory role in which he recommended that the US government haphazardly and illegally cut thousands of important jobs, increasing government chaos and ballooning the US deficit.
The protests also note Musk’s recommendation to cut USAid, an incredibly effective and relatively inexpensive international soft power program for the US, cuts of which are projected to cause millions of deaths globally (USAID is credited with saving 91 million lives from 2001-2021).
On the Diner’s first day, a lone protester showed up, a harbinger of things to come. Then, on it’s first weekend, the protest became much more significant – with protesters erecting two “wacky waving inflatable arm men” designed to look like Musk and repeatedly mimic his nazi salutes.
Another protest is scheduled for later today, starting at 4PM, and Tesla Takedown plans to protest from 4-7pm every Saturday and Sunday until further notice.
Finally, one video called the whole thing, and particularly the long line for dining, a “disaster.” It pointed out the difficulty a new Ioniq 6 owner was having with operating his Tesla app to grab a Supercharge (Tesla’s network is now open to Hyundai EVs). This did not appear to be a site-specific problem, rather an issue with the Tesla app as best we can tell, but the frustration of all the traffic chaos must not have made attempts to find a solution any easier.
While Tesla does have a spotlight on everything it does, this seems like a significant collection of difficulties and unforced errors for less than two weeks of operation (hmm, where have we seen something similar before…). Let’s see if they’re able to iron out the kinks.
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Sports2 years ago
Game 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
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MLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
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Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
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Button battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
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Environment2 years ago
Japan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
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Environment2 years ago
Game-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike