Elon Musk has expanded many companies in Texas, including Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Co., and Neuralink. Earlier this year, Tesla held a groundbreaking ceremony for a lithium refinery in Texas with Governor Greg Abbott in attendance.
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between doses space x Going public with largest IPO in history and deploying driverless vehicles tesla Elon Musk is also digging a tunnel in his CyberCab in Austin, Texas. His tunnel-boring venture, The Boring Company, announced late Wednesday that it was valued at $23 billion.
The Boring Company, which was founded within SpaceX in 2017 and spun out a year later, says its goal is to “revolutionize transportation” by creating an underground loop with stations for passengers to board and hop off.
The Boring Company has announced about a dozen city projects, but the only loop currently available for public use is in Las Vegas. Passengers can travel by Tesla between the downtown convention center and various casino resorts via the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) Loop.
Last July, Boring also won a contract to build a 20-mile tunnel in Nashville, Tennessee. The project, called the Music City Loop, would transport paying passengers between downtown and the airport in Tesla vehicles.
The rushed project has sparked partisan feuds, and a survey conducted by Vanderbilt University in March found that most Nashville residents did not want the tunnel built in their city. A month before the survey, the company broke ground in Nashville, and this week shared a clip showing its Prufrock machines drilling through the city’s limestone geology.
The latest funding brings Boring to an additional $3 billion in a UAE-led round as the company plans to build more than 150 kilometers (93 miles) of tunnels, including the Dubai Loop project announced last February.
To fund the costly endeavor, Musk turned to many of the same investors who previously backed Tesla, SpaceX and his 2022 acquisition of Twitter. Its investors include Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Singapore’s Temasek and Baron Capital.
Like other companies where Mr. Musk’s grand promises sometimes fail to materialize, many of Boring’s plans have fallen by the wayside. The company abandoned a tunnel project in Los Angeles in 2018, and other projects in the Chicago and Washington, D.C., areas never materialized.
Earlier this year, the Boring Company held a contest called the Tunnel Vision Challenge, promising a “free” one-mile tunnel to the winner. The Baltimore Ravens, who participated in and won the challenge, turned down Musk’s offer after the first meeting with the company.
Some communities are hesitant to work with Musk’s company because of its safety and environmental record. ProPublica reports that Boring has racked up hundreds of environmental violations in Las Vegas, and more workplace safety and environmental violations in its home state of Texas.
The Boring Company did not respond to a request for comment.
The company sees many opportunities for growth, including expansion plans underway in Las Vegas.
“Over the past two years, The Boring Company has grown from a single-operation loop system to a multi-city tunneling program, combining its first hard rock project, first international construction contract, and significant expansion of the Vegas Loop with high-speed mechanical design,” the company wrote in a post Wednesday about the funding.
Following the announcement, Musk posted on X: “Congratulations to the Boring Company team!”
The company won approval from the Nevada System of Higher Education in June to build a station on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, and is working to extend the Vegas Loop’s reach to the airport and Allegiant Stadium, where the NFL’s Raiders play.
Boring’s expanding ambitions are a potential boon for Tesla. The two companies have worked together for years, with Tesla paying Boring about $1 million in 2025 to dig a “cyber tunnel” beneath the company’s Austin Gigafactory, connecting Cybertruck assembly lines to the site for loading vehicles. Tesla vehicles will be used to shuttle passengers between Boring Co. stations.
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