The Tragedy of The Boring Company

Smart people with half-baked ideas

The creation of Elon Musk’s tunnel-boring firm, The Boring Company, rested on three assumptions.

The first was that in cities, most trips happen on planes, i.e., two-dimensional spaces, but cities only have one major plane, at ground level. Tunneling allows the construction of many more plane fragments.

The second was that, just as in the aerospace sector before SpaceX or in the automotive industry before Tesla, in the tunnel-boring sector there was a plethora of lazy cartels and a dearth of innovation. Therefore, just as with SpaceX or Tesla, a group of smart, passionate, well-capitalized outsiders could find ways to drill faster and cheaper.

The third was that, once you have bored these tunnels, the best way to use them would be to move car traffic.

The tragedy of the Boring Company is that one of these three foundational insights was wise; one was mistaken; and one was catastrophically stupid.