The Boring Company is
owned almost entirely
by Elon Musk. I mean, he
owns 90% of the company.
Boring Company is kind of at the level
of a hobby for him right now, I think.
Although as hobbies go, it could be
worth billions of dollars.
I don't think there've
been any canceled projects,
but I don't think there've
really been any projects.
We think we're gonna do
something in Chicago.
We're interested in doing
something in Las Vegas.
We've talked about doing
something in New York.
These are kinda still at the
proposal and discussion stage,
and this is actually not
that unusual as far as
big infrastructure projects go.
An infrastructure project
requires a lot of steps.
I mean, a lot of people need to weigh in
on what's gonna happen
if you're gonna build
a new freeway or a bridge.
Much of what the Boring
Company is doing at this point
is setting itself up as, I think,
just as a player in the space.
They're not necessarily doing
anything particularly advanced
as far as the technology here.
Rapidly being able to dig tunnels
that vehicles or people can move through
at high speeds is an
antidote to the problem
of gridlocking congestion in urban areas.
The Boring Company itself is working on
a tunneling machine that can
operate at much higher speed,
and I think the idea is it
might be able to operate
in kind of a drone-like
way or a computerized way.
Now as far as the projects are concerned,
they've created a sample,
like a test tunnel.
It's a little over a mile
long near SpaceX headquarters,
and then there is the Chicago project.
A high-speed Elon Musk-ified people mover
to connect, in the case of Chicago,
downtown with O'Hare Airport.
The idea in Vegas is to move
people around at higher speed,
not so much a bunch of
Boring Company tunnels
that are gonna be running
underneath freeways
and are gonna provide you with
maybe what the initial promise was.
When they first rolled it out, they said,
"OK, what we're gonna have is essentially
cars going down into these tunnels
and getting on these high-speed sleds."
But the idea now is that we could have a,
what people might recognize
more as mass transit,
where people would go down into the tunnel
and get on some sort of
sled that accommodates
20 people or 50 people
or something like that,
and that would move through the tunnel
as opposed to it being
one person in their car
going down there and be able
to bypass all the traffic.
You know, the only thing
that really is preventing
these projects from moving
forward is financing,
public will, some kind of civic buy-in,
then government support, I mean,
you need a package to
make this stuff happen.
And then we'll also have to look at
what are the environmental effects.
Sounds to me like the Vegas
tunnel is the closest one
to actually happening.
Vegas is kind of interested in doing this.
It sounds to me like the Chicago tunnel
was highly dependent on Mayor Rahm Emanuel
being able to drive it
through city council.
Without him driving the project forward,
there could be some issues with it.
That's not to say it won't happen.
It's just that sometimes, I don't know,
it's something about the
way things work in America
that you need to have someone dropping in,
parachuting in with some
crazy, high-tech idea.
It's like, "Oh, this is a game changer.
It's gonna change everything."
Instead of it taking, whatever,
half an hour to 45 minutes
to go from Manhattan out to JFK,
you could do it in 15 minutes,
and you're gonna be
going 275 miles an hour,
and you're not even gonna know it.
So there is that aspect of it,
and then there's the marketing value of it
for Elon Musk's other companies.
If Elon is out doing a
project, a high-tech project
that's gonna revolutionize tunneling,
it continues the narrative
of him being a revolutionary
Silicon Valley problem-solver.
The financing and political aspect of it
is where all the tricky
stuff comes into play.
The places where that kind of
financing would be available
are typically large urban areas
where the political aspects
of such a project are
gonna be quite complicated.
People might be concerned
that boring tunnels
underneath where they
live is gonna geologically
destabilize their area.
Of the companies that he's created,
the one that is gonna
have the most challenges
actually getting
anything, well, fulfilling
some of its more ambitious objectives
is probably gonna be the
Boring Company, ironically.
If the Boring Company does grow,
and they sign up some real contracts
and start doing some real projects,
then there might be some
significant follow-on investment,
and I've seen people
talking about valuations
of anywhere from $10
billion to $20 billion
in that ballpark.
They have discovered
that by selling merch,
they can raise quite a bit of money.
So the first thing they
did were they did the hats,
Boring Company hats,
and I think they raised
something like $5
billion, million dollars,
some ridiculous amount
of money on just hats.
Then they did these flamethrowers.
At the moment, I think
what would take it out of,
you know, Elon Musk's big
hobby is the financing,
right? So when they get to the point
that they are actually talking
about doing some projects,
there'll be large sums of
money attached to that.
That money will represent
revenue to the Boring Company.
So once we start seeing
that dynamic take over
where the business becomes capitalized
outside of the founder,
then you have a real company.
I'd say it's still a pretty
glorious hobby at this point
for Elon Musk, but I think that because
they're making progress and are sort of
working out the kinks in the technology
and all that kind of
stuff, that it's becoming
more of a real thing.
And if they do a project
in Vegas in particular,
then I think everybody will go,
"Ah, well, this is for real.
This isn't just an amusing
name for a company.
It's an actual business doing
actual things in the actual world."
Digging a tunnel, eh?
Didn't we do that 100
and something years ago?
I drive through the
Lincoln Tunnel every day.
It's been there forever.
Since I was a little kid
it was there. I've been driving through it
since I was 10 years old, you know?
