Did Elon get… bored?
Tunnel to Nowhere
We wouldn’t blame you for having forgotten about Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company.
And apart from opening a seemingly redundant project that ferries visitors at the Las Vegas Convention Center through Tesla-lined tunnels two years ago, the company doesn’t have an awful lot else to show after all these years.
As Fortune reports, the company has only completed a measly 2.4 miles of operational tunnels in its seven-year existence, and has largely ditched plans to have autonomous vehicles move passengers through the Las Vegas tunnel in favor of human drivers.
Plans for several other tunnels across the country have also either fizzled or abandoned.
In short, the company is seemingly as far away as ever — or, if possible, even further — from the optimistic future of an autonomous people-moving system illustrated in its flashy marketing materials five long years ago. And, needless to say, another black eye for the flailing Elon Musk.
Hole Milk
Whether it’ll ever have a chance to realize its vision remains to be seen. The Boring Company is churning through staffers and executives at an alarming rate, according to Fortune. Meanwhile, Musk has spent very little — if any — time at the company.
“Elon’s idea for the Boring Company was a good one,” one former employee told the magazine last week. “It just hasn’t been executed on.”
Attracting new talent for the venture has also proven difficult.
“Tunnel engineers are different than those hired at Elon’s other companies in that they have a much lower risk profile and are much more conservative in their thinking,” one former executive told Fortune, “so it’s hard to attract people with a moonshot.”
“If you want to work for Elon, Boring Company is your last choice,” they added.
Many planned projects, like a twin tunnel system connecting Baltimore and Washington DC, have largely fallen apart and the company is seemingly focusing most if not all of its efforts on expanding its existing Las Vegas tunnel to 68 miles.
“This is part of the problem of public transportation, is that it’s very expensive to operate,” Peter Muller, an autonomous transportation system consultant, told Fortune. “[Pretty much] no public transportation system in the US makes money.”
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