Four months ago, Elon Musk had sent out the following series of tweets:
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
It shall be called "The Boring Company"
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
Boring, it's what we do
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
Two hours later, he’d tweeted this.
I am actually going to do this
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
People had laughed then at what was an obvious joke. Musk is a pretty prolific tweeter, and one does tend to ramble when stuck in traffic. Musk also heads Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, so it’s not as though he’s twiddling his thumbs, looking for companies to set up. And no one starts a company because they came up with a clever pun.
But no is is like Elon Musk.
It turns out either Musk wasn’t kidding about his new company, or he is trolling people at a scale that was previously thinkable, because people have just reported seeing this in the SpaceX office.
There is currently a large cylinder in the SpaceX office which says ‘The Boring Company.” Large cylinders are also used to dig tunnels. Here’s it from another angle.
It appears that Musk doesn’t only have the company set up — the Boring Company has a logo with a blacked out circle as the O — but it’s also seems to have massive equipment designed, for, well, boring. Either Musk had been thinking about the idea for a while and made the most low-key company announcement four months ago via those tweets, or he’s actually followed up on an idea he had while stuck in traffic. Which is incredible either way. Like most things with Musk.
So it’s official — after electric cars, space exploration, solar energy, and connecting human minds with thought, Musk is embarking on a new passion — tunnels.