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What's Going On With The Boring Company | Untangled - YouTube
Channel: Tech Insider
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The Boring Company is
owned almost entirely
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by Elon Musk. I mean, he
owns 90% of the company.
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Boring Company is kind of at the level
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of a hobby for him right now, I think.
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Although as hobbies go, it could be
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worth billions of dollars.
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I don't think there've
been any canceled projects,
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but I don't think there've
really been any projects.
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We think we're gonna do
something in Chicago.
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We're interested in doing
something in Las Vegas.
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We've talked about doing
something in New York.
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These are kinda still at the
proposal and discussion stage,
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and this is actually not
that unusual as far as
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big infrastructure projects go.
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An infrastructure project
requires a lot of steps.
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I mean, a lot of people need to weigh in
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on what's gonna happen
if you're gonna build
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a new freeway or a bridge.
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Much of what the Boring
Company is doing at this point
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is setting itself up as, I think,
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just as a player in the space.
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They're not necessarily doing
anything particularly advanced
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as far as the technology here.
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Rapidly being able to dig tunnels
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that vehicles or people can move through
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at high speeds is an
antidote to the problem
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of gridlocking congestion in urban areas.
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The Boring Company itself is working on
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a tunneling machine that can
operate at much higher speed,
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and I think the idea is it
might be able to operate
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in kind of a drone-like
way or a computerized way.
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Now as far as the projects are concerned,
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they've created a sample,
like a test tunnel.
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It's a little over a mile
long near SpaceX headquarters,
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and then there is the Chicago project.
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A high-speed Elon Musk-ified people mover
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to connect, in the case of Chicago,
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downtown with O'Hare Airport.
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The idea in Vegas is to move
people around at higher speed,
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not so much a bunch of
Boring Company tunnels
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that are gonna be running
underneath freeways
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and are gonna provide you with
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maybe what the initial promise was.
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When they first rolled it out, they said,
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"OK, what we're gonna have is essentially
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cars going down into these tunnels
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and getting on these high-speed sleds."
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But the idea now is that we could have a,
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what people might recognize
more as mass transit,
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where people would go down into the tunnel
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and get on some sort of
sled that accommodates
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20 people or 50 people
or something like that,
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and that would move through the tunnel
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as opposed to it being
one person in their car
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going down there and be able
to bypass all the traffic.
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You know, the only thing
that really is preventing
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these projects from moving
forward is financing,
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public will, some kind of civic buy-in,
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then government support, I mean,
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you need a package to
make this stuff happen.
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And then we'll also have to look at
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what are the environmental effects.
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Sounds to me like the Vegas
tunnel is the closest one
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to actually happening.
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Vegas is kind of interested in doing this.
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It sounds to me like the Chicago tunnel
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was highly dependent on Mayor Rahm Emanuel
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being able to drive it
through city council.
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Without him driving the project forward,
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there could be some issues with it.
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That's not to say it won't happen.
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It's just that sometimes, I don't know,
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it's something about the
way things work in America
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that you need to have someone dropping in,
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parachuting in with some
crazy, high-tech idea.
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It's like, "Oh, this is a game changer.
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It's gonna change everything."
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Instead of it taking, whatever,
half an hour to 45 minutes
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to go from Manhattan out to JFK,
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you could do it in 15 minutes,
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and you're gonna be
going 275 miles an hour,
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and you're not even gonna know it.
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So there is that aspect of it,
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and then there's the marketing value of it
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for Elon Musk's other companies.
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If Elon is out doing a
project, a high-tech project
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that's gonna revolutionize tunneling,
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it continues the narrative
of him being a revolutionary
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Silicon Valley problem-solver.
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The financing and political aspect of it
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is where all the tricky
stuff comes into play.
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The places where that kind of
financing would be available
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are typically large urban areas
where the political aspects
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of such a project are
gonna be quite complicated.
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People might be concerned
that boring tunnels
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underneath where they
live is gonna geologically
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destabilize their area.
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Of the companies that he's created,
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the one that is gonna
have the most challenges
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actually getting
anything, well, fulfilling
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some of its more ambitious objectives
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is probably gonna be the
Boring Company, ironically.
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If the Boring Company does grow,
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and they sign up some real contracts
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and start doing some real projects,
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then there might be some
significant follow-on investment,
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and I've seen people
talking about valuations
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of anywhere from $10
billion to $20 billion
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in that ballpark.
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They have discovered
that by selling merch,
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they can raise quite a bit of money.
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So the first thing they
did were they did the hats,
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Boring Company hats,
and I think they raised
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something like $5
billion, million dollars,
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some ridiculous amount
of money on just hats.
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Then they did these flamethrowers.
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At the moment, I think
what would take it out of,
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you know, Elon Musk's big
hobby is the financing,
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right? So when they get to the point
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that they are actually talking
about doing some projects,
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there'll be large sums of
money attached to that.
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That money will represent
revenue to the Boring Company.
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So once we start seeing
that dynamic take over
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where the business becomes capitalized
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outside of the founder,
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then you have a real company.
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I'd say it's still a pretty
glorious hobby at this point
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for Elon Musk, but I think that because
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they're making progress and are sort of
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working out the kinks in the technology
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and all that kind of
stuff, that it's becoming
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more of a real thing.
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And if they do a project
in Vegas in particular,
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then I think everybody will go,
"Ah, well, this is for real.
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This isn't just an amusing
name for a company.
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It's an actual business doing
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actual things in the actual world."
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Digging a tunnel, eh?
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Didn't we do that 100
and something years ago?
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I drive through the
Lincoln Tunnel every day.
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It's been there forever.
Since I was a little kid
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it was there. I've been driving through it
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since I was 10 years old, you know?
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