It’s a new Elon Musk initiative that’s anything but boring: it’s called “The Boring Company,” but it’s really all about innovating transportation.
The Boring Company, according to breaking reports, has now gotten new funding in the form of $120 million from a collection of venture capital firms.
Tech media outlets are reporting the big funding, which changes up the strategy from last year when most of the money was provided by Elon Musk himself.
Reports also show that in order to jump-start The Boring Company, which purports to add tunnel transportation to American cities and other areas of the world, Musk used both SpaceX employees and other SpaceX resources.
That led to a debate about what’s proper in the blending of multiple companies to achieve results.
Part of the big interest in The Boring Company – no pun intended – is that it presents an opportunity and the potential for new ways of getting where we need to go.
We’ve known for a long time that most American cities suffer from a lack of underground transport. With the exception of New York City, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, there are not many cities that have an extensive underground metro service. The Boring Company, it seems, could change that, though the idea still does have its skeptics.
“The logistics of the system are still unclear,” wrote Aarian Marshall in WIRED early last year. “If the system still carries cars, how will the Boring Company ensure that the public pods are prioritized? How many tunnels do there have to be to guarantee your pod won’t get stuck between another pod making one of thousands of stops? If there are no real stations, where will people wait to be picked up? What happens if there’s a crash—does the whole system shut down? Are there emergency exits? Wouldn’t it be much, much, much cheaper and easier to build a bus rapid transit system, where buses can leap through traffic in their very own dedicated lanes?”
More recently, though, support for various Muskian adventures has been snowballing:
A piece in Asian Weekly just yesterday notes involvement by yet other VC parties.
“A venture capital fund set up by Japanese soccer player Keisuke Honda and American actor Will Smith has invested in two of Tesla founder Elon Musk’s other ventures, including a company working on a way to connect brains with computers,” writes Kyohei Suga, referring to Musk’s Neuralink company that is pioneering brain connections to hardware.
Will Neuralink help boost The Boring Company? Keep an eye on all of Musk’s various firms and efforts to innovate to profit handily from new advances.
