Elon Musk Brings Up His Annual Tunnel Idea
“Traffic is driving me nuts.”
Elon Musk chose the early hours of Saturday morning to trot out his annual proposal to dig tunnels beneath the Earth to solve congestion problems on the surface.
“Traffic is driving me nuts,” tweeted the SpaceX and Tesla CEO. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…,” he announced to his 6.37 million Twitter followers.
About an hour later he revealed the name and company slogan, presumably with a wink.
“It shall be called ‘The Boring Company.’ Boring, it’s what we do.”
And later on Saturday, Musk let us know he’s not kidding around. “I am actually going to do this,” he tweeted:
Musk brought up the tunnel idea a little more seriously almost a year ago, during a question-and-answer session after the awards ceremony for a competition to design passenger pods for the hyperloop.
“It’s a really simple and obvious idea and I wish more people would do it: build more tunnels,” Musk said after the January 30, 2016 ceremony. “Tunnels are great. It’s just a hole in the ground, it’s not that hard. But if you have tunnels in cities you would massively alleviate congestion and you could have tunnels at all different levels; you could probably have 30 layers of tunnels and completely fix the congestion problem in high-density cities. So, I strongly recommend tunnels.”
Watch:
This seems like just the sort of infrastructure plan that incoming U.S. president Donald Trump could get behind!
Musk was at the table during a meeting of technology leaders with Trump this past week in New York City, but it’s unclear if this ground-breaking tunnel idea was mentioned.
Musk does have a position on Trump’s strategic policy forum — which could actually be a smart move by Trump — so, maybe, tunnels under Trump?
It would create jobs, after all. Someone’s got to supervise the autonomous boring machine.
