> Desperate, Bell called SpaceX’s senior accountant on Sept. 17 and left a voicemail. “I said, ‘Something seems a little weird, and I don’t know if I should be getting a lawyer,’” he said.

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

> On Friday, shortly after the Chronicle reached out to SpaceX for the second time, an accountant called Bell and told him payment was on its way. Bell said this is the third time the company has told him payment has been initiated.

This is just how "random" vendor "disputes" go? I disagree.

Isn't this like every other dispute that goes to a public forum and gets resolved? You see these every other week where Google or some other company locks someone out of their account and then they make a stink and then it gets resolved.

When people get locked out of their Google/other accounts, Google/other usually doesn't have a contractual obligation to have a good reason for disabling the account (and thus money/compensation is not owed or overdue in such cases).

Vendor disputes literally happen every day. There's likely billions of accounts payable overdue on any given day. It sounds like you're not familiar w this space.

How many of those overdue payments are overdue for this long despite a comparable capacity to pay back (a 5 figure sum from a 13 figure net worth buyer)? Imagine a 7 figure retirement couple (now a modest baseline for retirement in the US) delaying to pay back a 2 figure restaurant bill for over a month for reasons that might be good if only they were willing to disclose the reasons. Still a lot, maybe? Until you add that the buyer wrongly told the restaurant owner on three separate occasions that at least one payment (whether full or partial) would go through, which in some ways is worse than radio silence.

Maybe my retirement couple numbers were too forgiving. Change the 7 above to 8. Now I regret using retirement as an example. Imagine a 9 figure net worth business being unable to pay back a 9 - (13-5) = 1 figure B2B bill. Make it 2 figures for margin of error.

An invoice being just a few days over it's due date is indeed not really serious. I don't think it's a smart move on the restaurant either, if they had any intention on continuing the contract this just about kills it.

It’s the San Francisco Chronicle’s Restaurant section.

I saw it on the hacker news front page.