Elon Musk’s Next Big Idea? Underground Traffic Tunnels.

Everyone's favorite madcap inventor is going boring

January 25, 2017 9:00 am

Private space flight. Electric cars. 600 MPH trains

Um, tunnels.

Elon Musk is a visionary 99% of the time. When it comes to bad traffic, the man is just like us.

As the madcap inventor tweeted this morning, “Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so,” alluding to his earlier tweet regarding a plan to dig a tunnel between his desk at SpaceX and the airport to bypass traffic (which is about five minutes apart on a good day).

Is he serious? Yes. Musk even added “Tunnels” to his Twitter bio, alongside far more interesting projects like Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI. And he’s aware that it’s not that interesting. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,” he tweeted back in December, noting, “It shall be called ‘The Boring Company.’”

Better idea, also reiterated by Musk early this morning: A climate change plan involving carbon taxes that finds him and the CEO of Exxon in serious agreement.

Not boring.

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