The Boring Company

The Boring Company
Type	Private
Industry	Tunnel construction; Infrastructure
Founded	17 December 2016
Founder	Elon Musk
Headquarters	Bastrop, Texas, United States
Key people	Elon Musk (Founder)
Products	Tunnel boring machines, Loop transportation systems
Website	boringcompany.com

The Boring Company is an American infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded on 17 December 2016 by Elon Musk. It builds tunnels in which electric vehicles carry passengers between stations, an arrangement it calls Loop, and develops the machines that bore them.

The company originated in a complaint. Musk, stuck in Los Angeles traffic, posted that traffic was driving him insane and that he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging, and that the company would be called The Boring Company. The remark was a joke that became an enterprise within weeks.

Its stated purpose is to reduce the cost of tunnelling by an order of magnitude, on the argument that tunnels solve urban congestion because a city can have any number of layers of them whereas roads occupy one, and that the constraint is cost rather than desirability.

Its principal completed work is the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, opened in 2021, comprising approximately 1.7 miles of tunnel and three stations, since extended into the wider Vegas Loop beneath the Las Vegas Strip, which is the only commercially operating system of its kind in the world.

The company was valued at approximately US$23 billion following a US$3 billion Series D in September 2026 led by the United Arab Emirates, and it has moved its operations to Bastrop, Texas, where Musk has concentrated several of his ventures.

History

The idea

Musk's argument, set out in interviews and at a 2017 TED appearance, has three parts.

Cities are three-dimensional and roads are not. A building may have fifty storeys and the street in front of it has one level, so the density of destinations exceeds the capacity of the surface to move people between them. Tunnels can be layered without limit, subject only to cost.

Tunnelling is too expensive. Urban tunnels cost in the region of US$100 million to US$1 billion a mile depending on the city, which makes the layered network impossible. Musk's stated objective was a tenfold reduction.

The cost is not fundamental. His analysis attributed it to slow boring machines that stop to install tunnel lining, to over-large tunnel diameters driven by regulatory requirements written for rail, and to the general absence of competitive pressure in an industry dominated by a small number of contractors working for public clients.

The proposed remedies were a smaller diameter, approximately 12 feet against the 28 of a conventional metro tunnel, which reduces excavation volume by roughly a factor of four; continuous boring, in which the machine advances while lining is installed rather than stopping; electric machines to remove the ventilation required for diesel; and the use of excavated material to make the lining segments.

The smaller diameter is possible because the vehicles are cars rather than trains, which is the design decision that determines everything else about the company and which is also its principal weakness.

Early work, 2016 to 2021

Digging began in 2017 on land at SpaceX's Hawthorne facility, initially in a car park.

The Hawthorne test tunnel, approximately 1.14 miles long, was completed in December 2018 and demonstrated to journalists with a Tesla fitted with guide wheels running on a track, an arrangement that was subsequently abandoned in favour of ordinary vehicles driving on a flat surface.

A series of proposals was announced and abandoned. A Los Angeles route along Sepulveda Boulevard was dropped in 2018 after litigation by community groups over environmental review. A Chicago express link between the Loop and O'Hare airport, awarded in June 2018 after a competition, was never begun and the city ended it. A Washington to Baltimore route received preliminary permits and did not proceed. Proposals in San Jose, in Miami and in Fort Lauderdale each received attention and none was built.

The company sold merchandise to fund early work, including a US$500 hat and, in January 2018, a flamethrower, of which 20,000 were sold at US$500 each, raising US$10 million. The device was described as a not-a-flamethrower in order to navigate shipping regulations and produced legislative proposals in several jurisdictions.

Las Vegas, 2019 to 2026

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop was awarded in March 2019 at a contract price of approximately US$48.7 million, and opened in June 2021.

It comprises approximately 1.7 miles of twin tunnels connecting three stations beneath the convention centre, with Tesla vehicles driven by human drivers carrying passengers between them. The journey takes approximately two minutes against a walk of approximately fifteen.

Its purpose is specific and it serves it: a convention centre whose halls are far apart needs to move delegates between them quickly, the numbers are large during events and negligible otherwise, and the system was built quickly and at a cost far below any rail alternative.

The Vegas Loop extension, approved progressively by Clark County and the City of Las Vegas from 2021, extends the network beneath the Strip to casinos including Resorts World, Westgate, Encore and others, and to the airport in plan. Approximately five miles were operating by 2024 with dozens of stations approved, and the network has carried several million passengers.

The system has been criticised. Its capacity, limited by the number of vehicles and by human drivers, is far below a rail line's; the tunnels are narrow with limited emergency egress, which produced fire safety objections from Clark County officials that were resolved through negotiated conditions; drivers have reported inadequate training and long shifts; and the vehicles have on occasion queued in the tunnels, which is traffic congestion underground and is the outcome the concept was intended to avoid.

Recent developments

The company relocated its headquarters to Bastrop, Texas, and has conducted work there including a proposed tunnel connecting facilities.

Nashville. Prufrock-MB2, a boring machine, arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, in April 2026 and completed testing in June 2026, in connection with a proposed Music City Loop.

Orlando. In 2025 the Shingle Creek Transit and Utility Community Development District began examining proposals for a system linking the Epic Universe theme park with other Universal Orlando properties.

Funding. A Series C in 2022 valued the company at approximately US$5.7 billion, and a Series D of approximately US$3 billion in September 2026, led by the United Arab Emirates, valued it at approximately US$23 billion.

The company has also proposed a Dubai Loop, announced with the emirate's authorities in 2025.

Technology

Tunnel boring machines

The company builds its own machines, named after a line in T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "do I dare disturb the universe?".

Godot, the first, was a second-hand machine bought and refurbished, named for the difficulty of waiting for it.

Line-Storm and Prufrock-1 followed, the latter designed to be launched from the surface without an excavated pit, which removes a substantial cost and a substantial delay.

Prufrock-2 and Prufrock-3 are the current generation. Their stated design objectives are continuous tunnelling, in which the machine bores and installs lining simultaneously rather than alternating, and speeds of up to one mile a day, against approximately 30 to 50 feet for a conventional urban machine.

MB3, under construction as of June 2026, was announced in 2022 with an objective of up to seven miles a day, which would be an order of magnitude beyond anything achieved and for which specifications have not been published.

Liner Truck 3, introduced in 2026, carries lining segments from the surface to the machine. It is remotely piloted, has a low profile permitting it to drive beneath the spoil conveyor, and has a range of approximately 28 miles.

The stated objective of matching the speed of a snail, which sounds absurd and which was chosen deliberately, refers to the fact that a garden snail moves approximately fourteen times faster than a conventional tunnel boring machine.

The Loop concept

A Loop is a network of narrow tunnels in which electric vehicles carry between one and sixteen passengers between stations on demand rather than on a schedule.

Its claimed advantages over rail are that the tunnels are much cheaper because they are smaller, that stations can be small because there is no platform and no train, that service is point to point with no intermediate stops, and that it can be built incrementally.

Its disadvantages are those of any system based on individual vehicles. Capacity is limited by the number of vehicles and by the headway between them, which even with autonomous operation is far below a train's; the Las Vegas system's throughput is several thousand passengers an hour against a metro line's tens of thousands. Each vehicle requires a driver until autonomy arrives. And a tunnel full of cars is subject to the same congestion dynamics as a road.

The company's answer is that a Loop is not a substitute for a metro but for a road, that it should be built where rail is not justified, and that the cost permits many of them.

Transport engineers have been generally sceptical, and the criticism made most often is that the system is a less capable version of a metro at a cost that is lower principally because the capacity is lower, and that the comparison Musk makes with rail costs is therefore not a comparison of like with like.

Criticism

Capacity. The fundamental objection, made by transport planners consistently since 2017, is that moving people in cars is the least efficient use of a tunnel, and that a system built around individual vehicles cannot approach the throughput of one built around trains regardless of how cheap the tunnel is.

Safety. The Las Vegas tunnels' width, emergency egress arrangements and ventilation drew objections from Clark County fire officials, and the approvals included conditions on evacuation and on fire suppression. Reporting has described workers suffering chemical burns from wet concrete and inadequate safety training, and the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued citations.

Labour. Drivers in Las Vegas are employed by a contractor at modest wages, and reporting has described long shifts and limited training. Tunnel construction workers have reported unsafe conditions and the company has been cited.

Unfulfilled announcements. Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington to Baltimore, San Jose, Miami and Fort Lauderdale were each announced with considerable publicity and none was built. The pattern of announcement without delivery has been the most frequently made criticism and is the reason municipal officials elsewhere have treated proposals cautiously.

Environmental review. The company has sought and in several cases obtained categorical exclusions from full environmental assessment, on the ground that the works are minor, which environmental groups have contested and which produced the litigation that ended the Los Angeles project.

Cost claims. The tenfold cost reduction has not been demonstrated on a comparable basis. The Las Vegas system was built cheaply, and it is a short, shallow, small-diameter tunnel in soft ground beneath a convention centre with no utilities to divert and no buildings to underpin, which is the easiest tunnelling in the world. Urban tunnelling costs are dominated by ground conditions, utility diversion, property acquisition, station construction and regulatory compliance, none of which the company's innovations address.

Conflict of interest. The vehicles used are Teslas, the company is one of several Musk ventures sharing personnel and facilities, and the relationships are not disclosed in the way a public company's would be.

Assessment

The Boring Company occupies an unusual position: it has built something that works and that nobody else would have built, and its central claim remains unproven.

What it has built is genuinely useful. The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop moves delegates between halls in two minutes rather than fifteen, cost approximately US$50 million, and was completed on time, which is not the normal experience of American public transport construction. The extension beneath the Strip serves a specific need that no rail line was going to meet.

What it has not demonstrated is the proposition on which the company was founded. Tunnelling has not become ten times cheaper. The machines have not reached the speeds announced. The comparison with metro costs is not made on comparable terms, since the Las Vegas conditions are exceptionally favourable and the capacity is a fraction of a metro's. And the great majority of announced projects have not been built.

The most sympathetic reading is that the company has identified a genuine gap. There are a very large number of journeys for which a metro is unjustifiable and a road is congested, and a cheap small tunnel carrying vehicles may serve them. Airport connections, campus and resort links, and connections between facilities are exactly the cases, and the Las Vegas, Nashville and Orlando proposals all fall within them.

The less sympathetic reading is that the company has built a novelty for a convention centre, has announced a great many things it has not delivered, and has been valued at US$23 billion on the strength of its founder rather than of its results.

Both readings are supported by the evidence, and which one proves correct depends on whether the boring machines reach the speeds the company has claimed for a decade, which no independent party has yet observed.

Why tunnels are expensive

The company's founding proposition requires understanding what actually determines tunnel cost, and the answer is largely not the boring.

Ground conditions dominate. Boring through soft clay is straightforward; boring through mixed ground containing rock and water is not, and a machine encountering conditions it was not specified for may be stuck for months. London's Crossrail and Seattle's Alaskan Way tunnel each lost years to ground problems.

Utilities beneath urban streets, gas, water, sewers, electricity, telecommunications, are frequently mapped inaccurately and must be located, protected or diverted before work proceeds.

Stations are the largest single cost in most urban rail projects, frequently more than the tunnels, because they require large excavations in constrained sites, ventilation, escalators, fire protection and property acquisition.

Property and legal. Acquiring rights beneath buildings, settling claims for settlement damage and conducting environmental review consume years and very large sums.

Regulation. Fire, ventilation and evacuation standards for public transport tunnels are demanding and are written for the worst case, and they determine diameter, cross-passage spacing and ventilation plant.

Procurement. Public clients in the United States and Britain use contracting arrangements that transfer risk to contractors who price it, and the resulting bids include very large contingencies.

The Boring Company's innovations address the boring itself, which is a minority of the cost, and the reduced diameter, which is genuine. Its Las Vegas cost is low principally because the tunnels are shallow, in favourable ground, beneath land the client controls, with small stations serving a private facility, and without the fire and evacuation standards that a public transport system requires.

This does not mean the company's claims are false. It means that the comparison that has been made publicly, between its costs and those of the New York Second Avenue Subway, compares two things that have almost nothing in common.

The Hyperloop connection

The Boring Company is frequently confused with Hyperloop, and the relationship is worth clarifying.

Musk published a paper in August 2013 proposing Hyperloop, a system in which capsules travel through a partially evacuated tube at very high speed on air bearings, as an alternative to California's high-speed rail project. He stated that he would not build it and made the design public.

Several companies attempted it. Hyperloop One, later Virgin Hyperloop, built a test track in Nevada, conducted a passenger run in 2020, pivoted to freight and closed in December 2023. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and others have produced little. European and Asian research programmes continue at small scale.

The Boring Company has stated that its tunnels could accommodate a Hyperloop and has not built one, and the Hawthorne test tunnel hosted a student competition for pod designs for several years.

The two ideas share the characteristic that has defined much of Musk's public engineering advocacy: a first-principles argument that an existing system is more expensive than physics requires, published without the engineering that would establish whether the conclusion survives contact with the specific difficulties.

Timeline

2016 Musk posts about traffic on 17 December and the company is founded.
2017 Digging begins at Hawthorne; the TED presentation sets out the argument.
2018 The Hawthorne test tunnel opens in December; 20,000 flamethrowers are sold; the Chicago O'Hare contract is awarded and the Los Angeles project is abandoned.
2019 The Las Vegas Convention Center contract is awarded in March at approximately US$48.7 million.
2021 The Convention Center Loop opens in June; Vegas Loop extensions begin approval.
2022 A Series C values the company at approximately US$5.7 billion; MB3 is announced with a seven miles a day objective.
2023 Vegas Loop expands beneath the Strip; the Chicago contract is formally ended.
2024 Approximately five miles of Vegas Loop operate; headquarters operations move to Bastrop, Texas.
2025 A Dubai Loop is announced; the Orlando district begins examining proposals.
2026 Prufrock-MB2 arrives in Nashville in April and completes testing in June; Liner Truck 3 is introduced; a US$3 billion Series D in September values the company at approximately US$23 billion.