Elon Musk goes underground to show ‘disturbingly long’ LA tunnel

The Boring Company CEO Elon Musk seems to be confounded about what a tunnel is. It’s ironic since the company’s main mission is to build tunnels for quick, high-speed underground travel. Or the tweets are just Musk being faux-modest about what his company’s accomplished.

Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla, said ln October that a tunnel in Los Angeles would open by the end of the year. On Saturday night he tweeted a preview of the dark and “one-dimensional” underground tube. 

He said he walked the entire tunnel and found it “disturbingly long.” The tunnel is supposed to be 2.7 miles upon completion.

These all seem to be common descriptors for tunnels, but Musk is still surprised by the tunnel’s tunnelness.

The first section of the Hawthorne test tunnel that Musk showed in a 34-second timelapse video will be open for rides, so pedestrians and cyclists can try it out, after an opening party on Dec. 10. 

In a new podcast interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher Musk talked about The Boring Company and building a network of tunnels under Los Angeles. Again he brought up the dimensionality of the tunnel — and distinguished what makes his tunnels different from a subway system. 

“…even subways tend to be essentially two-dimensional. You’ll have a subway cross another subway, but they’ve never really tried to make many layers of subways,” he said.

He called the upcoming opening event a “one-dimensional party” — it seems he really wants us to understand this is a single tunnel going from point A to point B. Low expectations.