The boring company kind of started as a joke, because it would be a funny name for a company.[53]
When I’d give a talk, people would ask me about opportunities, and I'd say, “tunnels, can someone please build tunnels.” After four or five years of begging people to build tunnels and still seeing no tunnels I said, “Okay, I’m gonna build a tunnel.”[53]
So we started digging a tunnel. I wanted to start the tunnel somewhere I could see it from my office at SpaceX. We carved off part of the parking lot across the road, so I could see if anything was happening or not. We named our first boring machine Godot because I kept waiting for it and it never came. Finally it did, we got it going and started making good progress.[53]
I told them, “Get started today, I want as big of a hole as we can by Sunday.” My assistant Elissa Butterfield scrambled to get Tesla workers to move their cars out of the lot, and within three hours the two tunneling machines were digging away. By Sunday, there was a gaping fifty-foot-wide hole leading down to the beginning of a tunnel.
We are funding the company through merchandise sales. Thank you to anyone who bought a flamethrower! You will not be sorry… or maybe you will. But it won't be boring!
We'll have boring machines on the moon and Mars.
There's probably going to be a lot of Hobbit holes on Mars and the Moon, because their atmospheres are thin. Anything that can be underground you want underground so it's shielded from radiation and it's insulated from temperature changes.[173]
To be clear, it's less than 2 percent of my time. It might occasionally be 20 percent of my tweets, but tweets do not correlate to actual time spent. I just have fun with the boring company.[53]
It may sound like I've got a lot of different endeavors, but it's overwhelmingly SpaceX and Tesla in terms of time allocation. For non-business time, almost entirely stuff with my kids.[53] My two nonwork things that I do are hang out with my kids and play video games. Then when the kids get to the right age, you can play video games with your kids which is awesome. [173]