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Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the ready-for-showtime dept.

New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.

2 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Unique concept! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Musk's idea is original and terrific! He is proposing building a network of tunnels to move people around LA. No other cities anywhere will have such things. These subterranean roadways, or subways, will be... oh wait.

    To keep the concept fresh, he could sell sandwiches on them as well. They would be Subway Sand... nevermind.

    1. Re: Unique concept! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      SpaceX has had unprofitable periods and profitable periods. General consensus is that it's probably running around the break even point on average, but it's doing that while plumbing a large amount of R&D money into reusable rocket technologies, developing them and currently trying to drive the refurb window down to days. That may not meet your definition of "profitable", but if nothing else, it's employing a lot of people, helping local economies, advancing the state of the art in aerospace, and has directly driven launch costs down while causing competitors to find ways to make access to space cheaper too. That's already a win, even if they go bust tomorrow, which is unlikely.

      There's a similar situation for Tesla, plumbing a huge amount of money into a battery factory and generally investing for the long haul, not for immediate profit.

      Unlike many businessmen, Musk is not in it for the money. He's in it to change the world in ways he believe are for the better. Will it all work out? Probably some will, some won't (I'm not sold on the viability of the Boring idea), and there are problems with his approaches (e.g, running employees to the bone) but it's still a damn sight more impressive than "schlub at Starbucks". He's done more for the world than you will do if you had a hundred lifetimes to do it in.