It all started with a tweet. In the fall of 2016, now seven and a half years ago, Elon Musk took to the trill network to tell the world that he had gotten fed up with the “insane, disheartening” traffic in Los Angeles and that he had decided to remedy it. Their solution, as prosaic as it was effective, was going to consist of “building tunnels” and taking a large part of that traffic underground, to a high-performance underground network that would allow reaching its terminals from any point in the center of the big city. from the airport in less than ten minutes and at a price of just one dollar each way.
To materialize this utopia of urban mobility in record time, Musk created The Boring Company, his first major land infrastructure company, presented with the appropriate pomp in Hawthorne, California, in December 2016. Very shortly after, Boring announced the launch of The Loop, a “modular” network of underground connections that was going to begin construction in less than a year in four metropolitan areas: Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the conurbation between Washington DC and Baltimore.
Although the company's initial steps, with the construction of a first tunnel in Hawthorne, a test bed for the innovative technology of Musk's team, suggested that the Californian phase was going to be a priority, the Las Vegas Loop would end up becoming, starting in 2020, the figurehead of The Boring Company's activities. It was an ambitious project, with an initial budget of 48.7 million dollars that was going to become more than 500 once it had passed its embryonic phase. By 2024, the network was expected to reach 110 kilometers of route and 55 access stations. A fleet of Tesla Model 3 cars, mostly autonomous, was going to cover the routes at an average speed of 240 kilometers per hour.
problems appear
In recent weeks, media outlets such as
Fortune
,
Bloomberg
,
Fox
and
QZ
have been reporting on a serious incident that occurred several months ago and has just become public. As Jessica Mathews explains in
Fortune,
in May 2023, the then
security
manager
of one of The Boring Company's branches, Wayne Merideth, sent a nightly email message to his superiors in which he denounced the precarious conditions of the works. of Las Vegas tunnel excavation.
Merideth assured that the company “can feel very lucky that there have been no fatalities in recent months.” The foreman denounced a lack of active supervision and basic precautions that would have turned underground work into a continuous “flirt with death.”
Merideth attributed this state of affairs to a very poorly calibrated attempt to accelerate the pace of excavations to meet deadlines that were never realistic and, furthermore, barely took into account the particularities of the terrain on which they were going to work. Max Chafkin reports in
Bloomberg
that the excavation brigade has been forced to deal with “pools of mud several centimeters long, with the consistency of creamy ice cream” and a high degree of toxicity. Several employees say they are suffering burns, rashes and allergic reactions attributable to the high concentration of chemical accelerators in the mud. Some of these injuries would have become chronic due to continuous exposure to which those responsible for the work have not known how to remedy. Merideth concluded his report with a lapidary phrase: “No tunnel is worth the life of a human being.”
Bloomberg
also explains that the complaints have already reached the Nevada state health and safety commission. The newly opened proceedings could lead to million-dollar penalties for The Boring Company and cause new delays in the construction of the underground network that was going to transform the Las Vegas metropolitan area.
What happens in Las Vegas
The first two sections of Las Vegas, 12 meters deep, were already available in spring 2020 and entered the testing phase a year later, as soon as the last restrictions imposed by the pandemic were behind us. Tens of thousands of volunteers were willing to act as guinea pigs on wheels in this cutting-edge experiment.
Boring declared a few weeks later that the two sections and the five stations already operational had demonstrated their capacity to transport nearly 4,400 passengers per hour, on journeys almost always lasting less than five minutes. The launch and debut of the Las Vegas Loop would come a year and a half later, coinciding with the 2023 edition of the Consumer Electronic Show (CES, the Sin City technology fair).
At that time, Adrián Revuelta, a 43-year-old engineer from Madrid, resident in Las Vegas and accredited at the fair, had the opportunity to go underground to see what Elon Musk's new avant-garde disruption had to offer. “I remember that it seemed like an extravagance without much foundation, far below initial expectations,” he explains to ICON Design. “I went down some escalators that gave access to a kind of quite precarious subway platform. Once there, after a short wait, they boarded me with another couple of travelers into a white Tesla Model Y piloted by a company driver. In a few minutes, at a constant speed of about 60 kilometers, we traveled the only section available that day, around four kilometers between one end of the fairgrounds and the other.”
The driver, apparently relying on the arguments that the company had provided him, assured Revuelta that this was the first “of more than a hundred tunnels that were going to be available in a few months and that very soon would absorb between 5 and 10% of the private traffic of the city of Las Vegas.” Revuelta showed his skepticism and even told him that that corridor “just three and a half meters wide, illuminated with rather dim LED lights” seemed a bit “claustrophobic” to him. The driver shrugged his shoulders and acknowledged that there were still “minor details” to iron out. He then spoke to him about the magnificent opportunity that this cutting-edge engineering work was going to provide for professional drivers like him. “He imagined a fleet of thousands of electric cars making continuous journeys from one end of the network to the other. I asked him if it was not planned to replace them with autonomous vehicles in the very short term and he replied that this idea had been rejected for safety reasons.
Once on the surface, Revuelta met a co-worker who had also gone down to Musk's underground tunnel and was as cautious as him. He “He told me that it seemed to him like a cross between a private limousine service and the reinvention of the subway. We agreed that, no matter how much they promised individual routes for one dollar and daily passes for less than five dollars, it seemed to be conceived rather as a very restricted and elitist network, a minority solution so that the richest could avoid the inconvenience of circulate on the surface. It seemed to us then and it still seems to me now that its impact on city traffic is going to be very limited. "I consider it very unlikely that a network of these characteristics will one day absorb between a twentieth and a tenth of the vehicles that circulate through the city."
Revuelta lives very close to the southern end of the Strip, the most popular “and most congested” avenue in Las Vegas. Very few earthlings could be more interested than him in seeing Musk's umpteenth idea be a success. Furthermore, he is willing to recognize his “indisputable potential” and give him the benefit of the doubt. But, as he tells it now, nothing he has seen or read so far invites him to “even moderate” optimism.
The stuff dreams are made of
The four local variants of The Loop project have barely made significant progress in the 15 months since CES 2023. The Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore projects appear to have gone into hibernation and are barely generating news anymore. Except for the controversy in Las Vegas and the complaints from its workers.
In the opinion of the most prestigious of his biographers, Walter Issacson, Elon Musk is a genuine representative of the culture of providential man and of what could be defined as the syndrome of executive impatience. In essence, Musk tends to think that what he doesn't do, no one will do, because contemporary capitalism suffers from a worrying shortage of disruptive leadership worthy of the name. The changes that our societies demand are happening at an exasperatingly slow pace due to a lack of ambition, competition and, very often, financial muscle. Almost everything that he does not lead seems to him doomed to failure or, worse, irrelevance.
Hence, as entrepreneurship expert Sid Mohasseb says, Musk is becoming obsessed with giving himself the superpowers of a James Bond movie villain. Boosted by a fortune that continues to be around 200,000 million euros despite the significant decline it has suffered in the last year, the Pretoria-born tycoon “can manipulate entire markets with a single tweet” or embark on cyclopean projects such as “programming minds” and take the absolute elite on a trip through outer space.
Mohasseb denounced, already in 2022, the omnipresence, in very diverse areas, of this self-proclaimed “technological savior” willing to promote the electrical revolution with Tesla, implant microchips in human brains with Neurolink, conquer space and destroy asteroids that approach the Earth with SpaceX, deal the final blow to cash with PayPal or guarantee the supply of Internet to the last corner of the planet with Starlink. All this before he proposed to monopolize the public debate through an “alternative” channel (Twitter, today X) or take artificial intelligence to another level with Grok.
Although some of these projects may be considered “noble” and worthy of praise, more typical of a philanthropist of a scale unprecedented to date than of a Darth Vader or a Montgomery Burns, Mohasseb recalled that even the Joker intended to “make the world smile,” that it is not very sensible for all the eggs of technological disruption to be in the same basket and that, as Lord Acton once said, absolute power “absolutely corrupts.”
For Mohasseb, the recipe against this one-man monopoly of large transformative projects is not to clip Musk's wings, but to create a breeding ground that promotes free competition much more resolutely. As much as money attracts money, other entrepreneurs deserve the opportunity to enjoy the generous grants and strong corporate support that Musk has received since his name began to become synonymous with capitalism.
Other analysts have also supported the thesis that Musk is the supervillain of our time. Jim Lepore, from
The New Yorker
,
concludes that self-proclaimed superheroes slide down the slope of evil as soon as they begin to put their powers at the service of their own agenda, something that would have already happened to Bill Gates. Stephen Colbert even asked the billionaire on his
late show
, with corrosive irony, if he really aspires to save the world. And Liam Gaughan, from
The Dallas Observer
,
even compares him to Joffrey Baratheon from
Game of Thrones,
an autocrat who invites his subjects to express themselves in order to identify dissidents and purge them, as Mao Zedong did in his day.
Ultimately, as Alice Kelly states in
Your Tango
,
there are at least 16 “valid” reasons to hate Elon Musk, from his very significant contribution to global change to his arrogant contempt for the diver who rescued a group of Thai schoolchildren passing by. his dalliances with the anti-vaccine movement or his treacherous manipulation of the cryptocurrency market. Seen this way, the fact that his plan to decongest traffic in Las Vegas ended up submerged in a puddle of toxic mud with the consistency of creamy ice cream does not seem, by any means, the worst of all.
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