Lemonade Entrepreneurs In Therapy After Nearly Being Trampled By Hopeful Investors Post-tweet from Elon Musk
Musk’s caption read, “Now, this is the true spirit of entrepreneurship”
Joe and José had been looking forward to Thursday for weeks. Their parents had helped them build a wooden lemonade stand and they had finally perfected their recipe. They couldn’t have predicted the horrifying results of their efforts.
That day, after visiting his plant in Fremont, California, Elon Musk drove through Newark, a suburban neighborhood between San Francisco and San Jose. He saw the lemonade stand by the side of the road and stopped to buy a glass.
“The boys didn’t know who he was,” Mrs. Rodreigez told reporters. “But we did. I mean me, my husband, and Joe’s Moms. We were excited and so we didn’t really think anything of it when Mr. Musk took a picture with the boys and their stand.”
But less than two hours later, the investors started arriving. “It was so sudden. We had turned our backs to carry some dirty glasses into the house and they descended. Like…” She paused for a moment, searching for a word. “Like locusts.”
It was only 35 minutes after Musk posted his image online that investors posted the home addresses of the Rodriguez and Dubrowski families in forums like Reddit. They felt spurred on by Musk’s caption, “Now this is the true spirit of entrepreneurship.”
“I’ve never seen so much cash. They had fists full of it, bills flying everywhere when they started fighting each other.” Joe said, his injured ankle propped on a pillow. “If it weren’t for José, I would have been hurt much worse, I think.”
Lena Dubrowski saw no alternative than to turn pepper spray on the increasingly violent crowd. After she started, several other neighbors joined in with their own sprays. Ambulences were called for those too incapacitated to flee, but rescue efforts were delayed by roads choked with investors, many driving Teslas.
“Mr. Musk feels horrible.” Mrs. Rodriguez told us. “He’s paid for us to work with privacy experts to disappear until this dies down, but it might be too dangerous for the boys to even go back to their old school.”
“I keep hearing them call to me, in my nightmares…” recounted Joe, with a distant look in his eyes. “They cried: take my money! Take my money!”
