Why did the world’s richest man spend the past five years trying to sell cities a hole in the ground?
Elon Musk keeps himself busy. Electric vehicles at Tesla, space travel at SpaceX, brain-computer interfaces at Neuralink, and digging tunnels with The Boring Company. It is that final business, The Boring Company, that this article suggests is “Elon’s biggest boondoggle”.
The Boring Company was an idea of Elon’s when he was stuck in traffic in 2016 – why couldn’t he dig a tunnel from his house to his work and avoid Los Angeles traffic. Two years later, he broke ground on his first project with his new tunnel boring machine.
The challenge for Elon is that city planners and transportation experts believe there is a fundamental flaw in his logic. A flaw that has stopped Los Angeles trying to build more lanes on highways to ease congestion. That is ‘induced demand’. In a nutshell, building more capacity (either above ground or below ground) won’t ease congestion because it will induce more commuters. Elon, for his part, calls induced demand, “one of the single dumbest notions I’ve ever heard in my entire life”.
At this stage many city officials and investors are backing Elon. L.A. city council exempted, The Boring Company’s project from environmental review and the company was able to raise $675m in funding at a $5.7b valuation. But not all. Chicago officials signed up to a Boring Company tunnel in 2018, only to kill it a year later, with Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa saying, “If you look at Elon Musk’s career – he comes off as a grifter”.
This article takes a close look at The Boring Company. Conventional wisdom suggests it shouldn’t succeed. But conventional wisdom also suggested electric vehicles and reusable rockets wouldn’t either. So we watch and wait with interest.
This is an excerpt from our Thought Starters email. Once a week we send you 5 interesting articles that have caught our attention, to get you thinking. No spam, we guarantee.