- Elon Musk was inspired to launch The Boring Company when he was stuck in LA traffic.
- The company was created as a subsidiary of SpaceX and later became its own entity.
- The tunneling venture has several ongoing projects on the West Coast.
In typical Elon Musk fashion, the billionaire first announced plans for The Boring Company on Twitter, a platform he would buy in 2022 for $44 billion and rename to X the following year.
"Traffic is driving me nuts," Musk wrote in a post in December 2016. "Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..."
About an hour later, Musk had already given the company a name: "It shall be called 'The Boring Company.'"
"Boring, it's what we do," he quipped.
Today, The Boring Company is one of the six of Elon Musk's companies he's involved with. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO initially began developing the infrastructure and tunnel-building company as an arm of his rocket company.
The Boring Company became its own entity about two years later and one of Musk's earliest SpaceX employees, Steve Davis, became president of the venture in 2019.
The Boring Company stock is unavailable, as it is a private corporation, meaning you cannot buy shares nor easily invest in it. Very little is known about its bottom line as a result.
In 2017, Musk expressed a desire to install a multi-layered loop in LA to help ease congestion. The Hyperloop works by connecting cars to an electric skate that can propel the vehicle at up to 130 miles per hour. He debuted his vision for how the system would look in a Vancouver TED Talk that year. A Hyperloop is an ultra-high-speed transportation system that operates in a sort of vacuum, low-pressure system, in which "autonomous electric pods" can go over 600 miles per hour, according to the company's webpage.
After fielding names for the tunneling machine from Twitter at the time, the decision was made to name the machine "Godot". By June 2017, the first segment of the LA network was complete.
In 2018, The Boring Company was spun out of SpaceX into its own private corporate entity and had raised $120 million in its initial outside funding round by the next year.
Boring Projects
The Boring Company's current transportation systems look a lot different from the futuristic Hyperloops Musk initially pitched. The infrastructure company unveiled its first project in 2018, a just over one mile-long R&D tunnel in Hawthorne, California.
It was opened to the public for demos in December 2018. The tunnel operated with a fleet of Tesla Model X vehicles running through it at a maximum speed of 40 miles per hour, but Musk said at the time the company had tested out the vehicles in the tunnel at a top speed of 110 miles per hour. The location is used to test both the company's Loop and Hyperloop technology, according to its website.
A year later, in 2019, the company began a tunnel project under the Las Vegas Convention Center.
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The Boring Company opened the tunnel, which would be used to ferry people back and forth on Teslas, to the public in 2021. LVCC CEO Steve Hill said at the time that testing had shown the system could transport over 4,400 people each hour.
The company said on its website that it's working on expanding its transportation system under the LVCC into a broader Vegas Loop that would connect the location with Resorts World on the Las Vegas Strip, the nearby airport, downtown Vegas, and Allegiant Stadium. According to The Boring Company's website, the project is in construction.
The Vegas project hasn't been without setbacks. The company was issued several violations by local regulators, including two in 2023 after workers mistakebly exposed the pillars at the base of the Vegas monorail, a 3.9-mile public transit system along the Vegas Strip.
Musk's infrastructure venture has also had its fair share of stalled projects over the years. In 2021, the company quietly scrubbed any mention of its plans to build tunnels in Los Angeles and Washington DC from its website. The projects had been announced in 2018 and 2017, respectively, but faced pushback due to environmental regulations. Plans to build tunnels in Chicago and San Jose have also been dropped.
Since then, the company has expressed interest in building Boring tunnels in several other major cities, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Playful Boring Company products
Like any Musk company, The Boring Company has some playful merchandise.
In 2018, the business started selling Boring Company flamethrowers. The product which was called "Not-A-Flamethrower" moved over 17,000 units in under a week.
Musk also hawked a Boring Co. perfume called "Burnt Hair."
The company is also known for its in-house boring technology: two devices called Godot and Prufrock. Prufrock is a massive cylinder tunneling machine that the company has used to bore some of its tunnels.
The company previously said the device allowed them to begin tunneling within 48 hours of arriving at a construction site as it launches directly from ground level and resurfaces once it has run the length of the tunnel without the need to retrieve the tunneling machine.
In 2022, Musk shared a video of Prufrock II emerging from the ground at a testing site near the company's headquarters in Bastrop, Texas.
The third generation of Prufrock, also billed "The Monster," was designed so that no site prep is required, according to an X post from the Boring Company.
The company said in an X post in August 2024 that tests had begun in Bastrop for Prufrock-4, which is 308 feet long and weighs 797,000 pounds. The Boring Company also gave a sneak preview of the fifth generation Prufrock in an X post in September 2024.
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 2, 2022
Snailbrook
As part of Musk's ongoing exodus to Texas, the billionaire appears to be making a home for himself and some of his employees near The Boring Company's headquarters.
Musk plans to build a town for some of his SpaceX, Boring Co, and Tesla workers in Bastrop, Texas.
The town had been named "Snailbrook " — a reference to The Boring Company's snail mascot — and would include a swimming pool, school, outdoor sports area, and even a private compound for Musk to live on.
Some Bastrop residents have pushed back against Musk's plans for their town. In March 2023, residents gathered at a city hall meeting to address concerns over The Boring Company's plans to dump treated wastewater into the water supply.