If you made it through Walter Isaacson’s 615-page biography of Elon Musk, you may have noticed that Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, is allotted all of three pages.
I found that to be a bit peculiar. While hardly the size of SpaceX, Boring Company is still one of the most valuable startups in the world—last worth some $5.6 billion in 2022 (though a recent employee share sale implies a more than $7 billion figure). The City of Las Vegas has entrusted Boring with the initial approvals it needs to build a 68-mile underground public transit system—a shocking vote of confidence for a startup that has built a mere 2.4 miles of operating tunnel since inception.
There has been little in-depth reporting about the company: what happened to projects from California to Illinois, Texas, Florida, and Maryland that have all fizzled or been disbanded, its high turnover levels, how Boring’s president, Steve Davis, is running the whole operation, or why the City of Las Vegas took such a big bet on Musk’s tunneling venture when the City’s own Mayor has worries about being a “guinea pig.”
In my recent feature story about the company, I dig into it all. I spoke with former Boring Company executives and staffers, as well as politicians and lobbyists who worked with Musk’s tunnel company on various projects, local Las Vegas residents, and engineers. I also reviewed thousands of pages of emails between Boring Company employees and local government officials, lobbying records, maps, and Boring contracts.
The reality of The Boring Company is a drastically scaled-back version of the lofty vision Musk started working on in 2016. The Boring Company was supposed to deliver an underground maze of tunnels with small stations all across a city, where people could travel in their own autonomous vehicles at speeds of 150 miles per hour. The initial goal, according to Musk, was to build one mile of tunnel in a week.
In seven years, Boring has completed just 2.4 miles of operational tunnels. It has put its self-driving vehicle plans on the back burner in favor of a Tesla chauffeur service, and it’s moving people at relatively mild speeds of under 40 miles per hour in Vegas. Former employees report a nearly constant churn of staffers and executives (“Working at Boring Company is like a big fire drill every single day,” one former employee told me). Perhaps most importantly, the company seems to have lost the close attention of the man who started it all: Musk.
One former employee summed up the company’s predicament in a nutshell: “Elon’s idea for the Boring Company was a good one. It just hasn’t been executed on.”
You can read the whole story here.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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