In 2016, Elon Musk, the billionaire behind a growing list of tech and tech-adjacent companies, tweeted his way into a new venture: The Boring Company.
It began as a rant about traffic-related frustrations; after a few minutes, Musk had the idea in hand — "I am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging" — and the name.
"I'm actually going to do this," he wrote at the time.
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The Boring Company broke ground on its first project in February 2017, and has so far completed three projects: the R&D Tunnel, the Hyperloop Test Track and the Las Vegas Convention Center. The company is currently working on a 68-mile Vegas Loop station whose eventual goal is to connect Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The Boring Company, according to a recent report by The Information, has achieved an implied valuation of $7 billion after a recent sale of shares held by employees and investors. The shares were sold at a price 22% higher than in a funding round held by the company last year.
According to two people familiar with the sale, the shares were priced at $24 each; the company's $675 million Series C funding round in April of last year priced shares at $19 each. The Boring Company reportedly said that investors could buy up to $20 million in secondary shares as part of the recent sale.
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The Boring Company's big proposition is that it can make tunneling cheap and fast through new technologies; the company's Prufrock machine can currently mine about one mile per week, drastically speeding up the tunnel-building process. New models of the machine are expected to operate even quicker.
In a September post, an X user speculated that Boring will have mined more than 10,000 miles of tunnel and achieved a $1 trillion valuation by 2030, the beginning of the company's exponential rise.
In a response to the tweet, Musk said that this bullish expectation could be achieved.
"This is actually possible from a technology standpoint," he said. "By far the biggest impediment is getting permits. Construction is becoming practically illegal in North America and Europe!"
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