The Times - UK (2022-06-08)

42 2GM Wednesday June 8 2022 | the times

Business

By his own admission, Elon Musk did
not want to set up another business, but
in the end the chief executive of Tesla
and SpaceX and co-founder of Neura-
link could not help himself. And having

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bold. In April it said that it had raised

$675 million. The financing round, led

by Vy Capital, of Dubai, and Sequoia

Capital, the Silicon Valley-based ven-

ture capital firm, valued it at $5.68 bil-

lion. Shaun Maguire, a partner at

Sequoia, hailed an “inflection point” for

the group, which he said planned to “ag-

gressively” expand its operation.

“Elon companies have long gestation

periods, usually starting by building the

system that builds the systems,”

Maguire wrote in a blog post. “But as a

result, once they get to scale, they can

compound at a rate never seen before.”

Boring is a relatively closed book.

Davis did not respond to an interview

request. Gary the snail has not been

seen in some time. “It turns out snails

don’t live that long,” Musk said in late

2018, introducing one as “Gary the

In the final part of our

series on Elon Musk,

Callum Jones looks at

the tycoon’s answer to

our crowded roads

already looked to the stars and at

sending humans to Mars, not to men-

tion upending the global automotive

industry and even implanting chips in

people’s brains, he lowered his gaze —

to tunnels.

You don’t need to dig far, though, to

find the typical traits of a Musk vision:

immense frustration with the status

quo; an ambitious solution that is im-

pressive or improbable, depending on

who you ask; and acute impatience to

get it done.

The billionaire had been driven to

distraction by traffic, and the proposed

solutions, in America’s largest cities.

California, home to Silicon Valley’s

technology giants and Nasa

researchers, was preparing to build a

high-speed train that was “both one of

the most expensive per mile and one of

the slowest in the world”, he com-

plained. So he published his own

alternative in a 2013 “white paper”: an

unprecendented, underground “hyper-

loop” transportation system that would

ferry passengers the 380-odd miles

between Los Angeles and San Fran-

cisco in a mere 35 minutes for just $20.

He spent several years insisting his

proposal was much easier to deliver

than people might think — it is, after all,

essentially a “tube with an air hockey

table”, Musk told CNN — without

doing much about it. Then, in a Decem-

ber 2016 tweet, having again bemoaned

congestion, he declared that he would

“just start digging” himself.

When The Boring Company was in-

corporated in 2017, some were unsure

how seriously to take the venture. Its

founder, who said later that it had been

started as a joke, challenged the start-

up’s engineers to develop a tunnelling

machine that could move faster than

Gary, a snail serving as its mascot. Steve

Davis, one of the earliest SpaceX

employees, was picked to lead the busi-

ness. He had no experience of tunnel-

ling but did have a reputation for work-

ing relentlessly hard. The group raised

millions of dollars by selling thousands

of branded hats and flamethrowers.

Boring sought to cut the cost and

time incurred during tunnelling. From

the outset, it pledged to revolutionise

city transportation with an under-

ground network comprising hundreds

of lanes, complete with ultra-fast

autonomous passenger pods that reach

the tunnels via a multitude of stations

the size of parking spaces.

Alleviating traffic on the ground

requires a solution either in the sky or

underground, according to Boring.

Flying cars “don’t reduce anxiety”,

Davis remarked during a 2018 presen-

tation, alongside Musk and Gary.

“They don’t really exist,” he said, “while

tunnels do exist and are very buildable.

It’s all about building them better.”

Boring’s only complete project so far

is in Las Vegas, comprising two tunnels

almost a mile long under the Nevada

city’s convention centre. They do not

have everyone convinced. “Sadly, with

the method of transport being a small

fleet of his very own Tesla cars, it all

rather screams ‘Vanity Project’ to me,”

Tris Thomas, editorial director of Tun-

nelling Journal, wrote last year.

Yet though there are sceptics, Musk’s

ambition has its fans, too. The entre-

preneur “has rightly identified the

imperative to grow the utilisation of

underground space and to find much

better ways to deliver these projects”,

according to Colin Eddie, a British

industry veteran who leads CECL-

Global, a tunnelling consultancy. Bor-

ing’s work to date “appears to be pretty

much business as usual as far as tunnel-

ling technology is concerned”, Eddie

added, although he credited its founder

for being “on the lookout for ways to

improve tunnelling technologies”.

Moreover, the business has persuad-

ed a growing number of deep-pocketed

investors that its ambitions remain

Grand plan for rapid transport