New reports from Bloomberg and other sources suggest that Elon Musk’s Boring Company, (referring to the verb, not the adjective) has moved its sights to yet another new project broadening the capacity of underground systems for travel.
Kim Lyons at The Verge writes today about new bigger tunnels, 21 feet in diameter, that could transport shipping containers underground, also talking about 1.7 miles of existing tunnels that the company has created under Las Vegas to ferry passengers from one part of the city to another.
“The Boring Company has claimed such a system could handle roughly 50,000 passengers per hour,” Lyons writes. “The current tunnel under Las Vegas is meant to eventually transport some 4,400 people each hour, but a TechCrunch report suggested that company documents show it may only be able to transport 1,200 people per hour.”
Add this innovation to the long list of others with Elon Musk’s name attached, and you come up with a pretty amazing portfolio of inventions and disruptions.
This leads to the question what makes this individual so special, and why does he have such a big impact on markets?
Jessica Stillman, writing at Inc., talks about Musk’s unique philosophy of learning, quoting the technology magnate thus:
“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
Other sources take a different approach, noting how, (as with many of our theories about the prolific plays of William Shakespeare), Elon Musk gets a lot of credit for things that are really group activities.
“It really depends on what you mean by ‘himself personally’ and ‘anything’, writes Riley Ikni at Quora, answering a question of whether Musk has “ever invented anything himself.” “Would you consider the creation of a company an invention? If (you would say yes), he did invented (sic) more than one company (SpaceX, The Boring Co, Neuralink etc. Tesla was not created by Elon.) … from his bio he created a video game from scratch when he was a teen. But to be honest, you rarely invent stuff alone 100%; if you want to go far, you need people.”
Regardless of who’s behind the projects, whether it’s SpaceX, the Boring Company, Hyperloop or Tesla, all of these are examples of inventions whose time has come. So watch for their impact, and Musk’s impact on markets, as you invest.
