Bloomberg was able to get their hands on a copy of a pitch and reported the details of the tunnels within it. The freight tunnels will be 21-foot in diameter, which is almost twice the size of the company’s previous tunnels.

The pitch also shows three images showing how cargo can be transported. The first being an 8 ft tall container inside the 12-foot tunnel, the next one shows the same container in the 21-foot tunnel, and then one of two containers side by side in the same tunnel. They will be able to hold two shipping containers. These containers will be placed on “battery-powered freight carriers.” The carriers would be like shelves on wheels.

By expanding their business, The Boring Company was able to get their first known client. Engadget writes that San Bernardino County is interested in creating a “Inland Port” to reduce traffic in the area, which is the company’s main goal.

Founded in 2016, The Boring Company’s focus is to “solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic” by creating underground transportation. The Loop underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center is among the first of these transport tunnels.

The Loop may not be the only tunnel giving rides. Back in February, Miami Mayor, Francis Suarez, shared via Twitter that a 2-mile tunnel is coming. Normally, a project like this would be close to $1 billion dollars, but Suarez was told that it would only be $30 million.

By adding freight tunnels, it could convince other highly populated cities, like Las Vegas and Miami, to add transportation tunnels that would allow people to travel more freely within the city and possibly to other ones.

In a video posted via Twitter, he explains that Elon Musk wanted the tunnel to have maximum utility for the most affordable price. He also told him that the tunnel could take about 6 months.

During the video, Suarez shares what he thinks of the tunnel’s potential:

“I think we have a unique opportunity to create a signature project not just for Miami but for the world that will bring from across the world to see this solution and allow it to scale to more transportation solutions throughout the city and more throughout the world.”

Just had my call w/ @elonmusk regarding @boringcompany tunnels coming to MIA

DETAILS BELOW?? pic.twitter.com/NsJFYcvGeQ

— Mayor Francis Suarez (@FrancisSuarez) February 5, 2021

The ball for this idea started rolling in January. Elon Musk tweeted that Boring Company tunnels would solve traffic in Miami and for the rest of the world.

Cars & trucks stuck in traffic generate megatons of toxic gases & particulate, but @boringcompany road tunnels under Miami would solve traffic & be an example to the world.

Spoke with @RonDeSantisFL about tunnels last week. If Governor & Mayor want this done, we will do it.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2021

So what’s the catch? Well, according to the Miami Herald, the construction of the tunnel could lead to some big problems. Firstly, South Florida is composed of porous limestone bedrock. This kind of limestone has holes in it that allow water to pass through. This means that a high sea level can cause water to l go over the coast as well as underground. This would make the tunneling process a nightmare with constant water filling up the tunneling site. The Miami Herald did report that this issue was brought up during the 30-minute phone call, but it was not clear as to how much the topic was discussed.

Secondly, Conrad Felice, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Florida informed CBS Miami that the 4,200 foot Port Miami tunnel that runs 120 feet down was completed earlier this decade. That tunnel cost $668.5 million. So it’s safe to say that tunnels are not cheap in Miami.

But, he also brings up that there is a safe way for the Boring Company to complete the project. Tunnels that have a larger diameter are possible if measures are taken to ensure safety.

With all of this in mind, it will be interesting to see how the Boring Company could deal with saltwater intrusion and the possible inflation of cost.

The news of this expansion was first released by @VitalVegas, which tweeted that the Company “is confident it will expand underground transportation system to include tunnels between airport and downtown Las Vegas, in addition to proposed stops at Wynn and Resorts World.”

Per well-placed sources, @ElonMusk‘s Boring Company is confident it will expand underground transportation system to include tunnels between airport and downtown Las Vegas, in addition to proposed stops at Wynn and Resorts World.

— Vital Vegas (@VitalVegas) June 15, 2020

Elon Musk backed up this statement saying that it is likely this expansion will take place after the first two tunnels of the transportation system are up and running.

It’s safe to say that The Boring Company is now high in demand with two resorts in Las Vegas having recently contacted the company for inclusion in the Las Vegas Convention Center loop. These resorts are Encore At Wynn and Resorts World Las Vegas, two casinos that are close to the convention center.

A draft proposal for the Vegas Loop was created by the Company taking into consideration all the locations it might be connecting. If the plan is finalized, the loop would stretch all across the city, connecting locations in the northern part of Vegas Strip- such as the Wynn and Resorts World- as well as those in the southern part of the Strip- such as the McCarran Airport and downtown Las Vegas landmarks including the Mandalay Bay Hotel and MGM Grand.

Although it’s not confirmed, these hotels and more may be a part of the loop. The CEO of LVCC, Steve Hill, said that this would help build community, “This is a great step to take this from the Convention Center campus out into the community. We’re talking to resorts throughout the community. It’s more than two that want to do this. These are the first two that make sense.”

The Company has even greater ambitions for the loop as it is planning on constructing an 8.9-mile tunnel from the McCarran Airport to the Fremont Street Experience. This system would be underground with Tesla cars as vehicles. The company is even developing a 12-passenger van specifically for this project.

What is more exciting is that this system may even extend to cities outside of Vegas, such as Los Angeles, California, making the tunnel a whopping 268.9 miles in length.

The Company completed construction of the first two tunnels, which connect the two ends of the convention center, on May 14th. The city officials said that it would take less than two minutes for passengers to travel from the Wynn to the LVCC. The entire Vegas Loop could be completed by as early as January 2021.

The news about the tunneling system connecting a Las Vegas convention center came out last year, when The Boring Company announced that it had submitted its proposal for review.

It was the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) who contacted the Company in May 2019 to build a transport system that is more cost-effective and efficient than traditional alternatives.

This was because the city was planning on adding a new segment, set to open in 2021, in the complex that is already so massive. Hence, it was necessary to have a transportation system that would allow visitors to move around with ease.

With the $50 million incentive given by the LVCVA, the Company was bound to accept the project.

As you would expect from a company run by Elon Musk, The Boring Company is not slow in making progress. It had already finished digging for the tunnels last month.

It seems that this is just the first step. Las Vegas citizens will likely see the Company’s futuristic tunnels connecting the entire city- a goal that it had always had in mind. Earlier in June of this year, Encore At Wynn- the casino and the luxury hotels chain- announced that it will also be a part of the loop, as it is the closest casino on the ride to the center. And now, with the Resorts World Las Vegas as the Company’s new customers, it’s closer to achieving its goal.

Resorts World Las Vegas is a newly-built casino resort that is set to open next year. After being contacted by the casino, The Boring Company submitted a proposal to the Las Vegas authorities consisting of an application for using real estate and designs for the tunnel and station. It hasn’t yet been approved by the Board of County Commissioners.

This is what the casino said in its announcement:

“On June 1, Resorts World Las Vegas, the US$4.3 billion resort scheduled to open in summer 2021, submitted plans for a proposed passenger station and tunnel that would connect to the Las Vegas Convention Center campus via Elon Musk’s innovative transportation system. This new tunnel project would swiftly transport passengers between the city’s newest integrated resort and the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) via underground tunnels in all-electric Tesla vehicles in under just two minutes.”

This casino is also close to the convention center, like the Encore At Wynn. The President of the casino, Scott Sibella, commented on how beneficial this development would be for tourists:

“The proposed Resorts World Las Vegas passenger station would provide convention guests and visitors with a rapid and seamless experience between the Las Vegas Convention Center and Resorts World Las Vegas. Convention guests would no longer have to worry about long walks or gridlock traffic around the convention center – they could take the transportation system to Resorts World Las Vegas for lunch, meetings, or personal appointments, and be back to their conference or expo in minutes. This innovative transportation system is a perfect match for Resorts World Las Vegas as we design our resort to be at the forefront of progressive technology.”

Assuming that the proposal will be approved, construction is expected to start in late 2020.

The fact that The Boring Company has attracted yet another customer (alongside being a candidate for the Ontario International Airport) is exciting. We will finally get to see Musk’s vision for a next-generation, high-speed tunneling system play out in reality.

The tunnel will be about 2.8 miles in length, with a 14-feet diameter and 35-feet underground depth. The plan, at least as for now, is to use rubber-tired electric vehicles that can travel up to 127 mph to travel across locations.

Moreover, electric vans developed by Musk’s other company, Tesla, are also being considered. They have a total seating capacity of 12 people along with their luggage. Over the course of a day, they can improve the seating capacity of the entire system by nearly 1,200, assuming there will be that many users. And over the course of a year, about 10 million more people can use it. These might be the vans that the company was planning on using when it was running for the role of building transportation infrastructure for the Chicago Airport.

The transportation authorities are in support of The Boring Company’s system. San Bernardino County Transportation Authority’s Board of Directors, for instance, has unanimously voted for the company and deferred a high-profile study meant to investigate alternative airport-railway connections.

As San Bernardino’s County Supervisor Curt Hagman puts it, the Company’s transportation system is much better compared to the conventional options because of its affordability and efficiency. It also takes less time to be constructed.

You can take his word on it. He has experienced the technology first-hand when he visited the Company’s site in Hawthorne and took a test drive in the tunnel. He said, “It gets us thinking in a new way. This is something that can be done relatively quickly and inexpensively.”

The project will cost around $45 to $60 million. However, this estimate doesn’t take into account all the administrative aspects that are necessary for the tunnel’s functioning. Including the cost of creating and running the operations and management departments (the main cost being the salary paid to workers), the cost reaches up to $75 million.

Of course, this is nothing compared to the $1 to $1.5 billion that the company was planning on shelling out for a railway extension project. Carrie Schindler, SBCTA director of transit and rail, agrees with Hagman that it is highly cost-effective, acknowledging that some external funding will be required. Moreover, the Ontario Airport Loop will be completed in around four years, as opposed to ten years for the railway extension project.

Prior to the Ontario Airport Loop project, The Boring Company was contacted for building a loop for the Las Vegas Convention Center. This would be especially useful in attracting tourists to the location by reducing the cost as well as the time of traveling from one point to another within the complex. The company was able to make swift progress on this, having completed the digging of the tunnels.

For those who don’t know, the Boring Company tunnels, according to The Boring Company FAQ, are weatherproof tunnels that go underground. They can help with city congestion and traffic. The tunnel is supposed to transport 4,000 people per hour in a Model X or Y Tesla and take passengers 40 feet underground while going up to 155 miles per hour. The ride will take two minutes compared to a 15 minute walk.

According to Steven Hill, the president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the “Loop” is supposed to be used for the convention center. But this $52.5 million dollar project will have to be shown off later. The “Loop” was supposed to be available to the public during the Consumer Electronics show, but due to the pandemic the show could be canceled or set to another date. Hill stated that they will wait until another trade show comes along for them to open up the tunnel. Though, The Boring Company will use this time to test out the technology and will figure out how they can transport people in Las Vegas in the meantime.

One consistent thing, though, between these two stories is whatever story you try to tell, you’d have to leave some things out. No matter if he is a villain or a hero in your story, they both are going to state same facts. For supporting them, you’re going to need to emphasize some things and kind of blur out other things. Anytime you want to accuse someone writing about Musk in a big-picture way of cherry-picking, you’d be right every time.

There is a big gap between “genius” and “villain” narrative and you may wonder why. Saying he is a genius or a villain is probably the simplest way to describe him. There is a constant newsflow about him and no matter which article or news source you pick, you will always find something that supports your narrative. For example, if you think he is a hero, well, so does Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Science Guy. And, if you think he is a villain, there are a number of lawsuits to choose from.

Just by checking out the happenings in the last two weeks, you can’t assemble any kind of coherent narrative without leaving something out or thinking that Musk is either being persecuted by haters or protected by weak regulators.

• SpaceX: NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered reviews of SpaceX and Boeing. Apparently this was planned before the whiskey-and-weed bull session on The Joe Rogan Experience. “I will tell you, he is as committed to safety as anybody, and he understands that that was not appropriate behavior, and you won’t be seeing that again,” Bridenstine told Marina Koren of The Atlantic.
• SpaceX: Musk has sort of renamed the BFR to Starship. The spaceship and upper stage are Starship; the rocket booster used to leave Earth will be known as the Super Heavy.
• SpaceX: The Crew Dragon, for shuttling astronauts to the International Space Station, will get its first test launch on January 7th. People will not be on board.
• SpaceX: Looks like SpaceX has raised $250 million in loans, which is $500 million less than the loan it initially sought, Bloomberg reports. Buried in the last paragraph of the story is this lil’ nugget regarding SpaceX’s financial situation:

Disclosures to potential lenders showed the company had positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of around $270 million for the twelve months through September, people with knowledge of the matter have said earlier. But that’s because it included amounts that customers had prepaid and because it excluded costs related to non-core research and development. Without those adjustments, earnings for the period were negative, the people said.

• Tesla: Musk also tweeted that he’s interested in working with Daimler / Mercedes on an electric version of the Sprinter van. An electric version of the Sprinter is already in the works — suggesting that Musk’s insight about it being a “great van” isn’t off base. Tesla and Daimler have collaborated before: “Tesla supplied the electric powertrains for the first generation electric Smart cars and electric Mercedes-Benz B-Class,” and Daimler has suggested it’s open to working with Musk again, notes Electrek. So this might just be Musk having ideas on Twitter before he checks them out — or it might be the opening for a discussion about future collaboration.
• Tesla: Musk told Axios that Tesla was “single-digit weeks” away from death during the Model 3 ramp-up. The admission is striking, since Musk was publicly adamantly confident about Tesla’s prospects at the time. Lora Kolodny of CNBC has suggested Tesla might benefit from being more open about these moments, since it’s unlikely Musk’s fans and Tesla shareholders will abandon him.
• Tesla: More senior departures, this time a senior securities lawyer — the kind that might perhaps oversee Musk’s Twitter use — and the head of physical security, gone after less than a year.
• Tesla: The Model 3s may not perform so well in winter! Specifically, the windows and charging plug sometimes get stuck. A new software update is coming to fix these issues.
• Tesla: Mexican authorities have problems with the Teslaquila trademark. Musk tweeted that he intended to “fight Big Tequila.” As it happens, I was just in Tequila — it is a place in Mexico just outside Guadalajara — and it is quite small. (Also, Guadalajara has a bunch of absolutely bangin’ José Clemente Orozco murals if you are into that kind of thing!)
• Tesla: New Easter eggs for the S, 3, and X cars.
• Boring Company: Musk made a Mb opening.
• Boring Company: After a lawsuit, the Boring Company has abandoned its plan to dig under Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Hopefully this is all of it. Just by looking at all this news, it’s obvious that it’s rather hard to keep up with Musk.

The reason why him being just a rich guy is not as popular is because it paints rich people a certain way. Money has a huge impact on someone’s life and personality. When you have a lot of money, it’s less likely for people to reject you because you can afford all the resources required to go after your weird dreams and because you don’t spend much time people who aren’t as wealthy and forget how it is for simple commoners. However, this narrative isn’t as simple as the other two.

Painting him as a hero or a villain is a primal, basic description of someone and it allows you have a righteous battle against someone who disagrees. These simple narratives kind of give our brains a rest and they are a way to keep up with all the crazy speed of news regarding Elon Musk. Brains are generally lazy because thinking requires working. So, by picking a simple narrative that doesn’t require much thinking is basically how you get things done in real life and complexity can be boring.

The more news that come out about Elon Musk and his companies, the easier it will be for anyone who is reading the news to join one camp or another to decrease cognitive load. That means if Tesla suddenly files for bankruptcy or Neuralink has allowed someone to use their legs again, it won’t make a dent in the biased accounts people already use to understand all the news that is coming in.

Attendees have ridden the carriage and they described it as rather ‘’bumpy’’ and CNN reported it only traveled 35 mph. Musk has described it as, “like a highway system underground, basically”. The cars moving at speeds much faster than they are originally allowed on public roads, including the small ‘’offramps’’ which bring them back to street, it could actually solve traffic congestion problems.

Musk has said that his contraption is capable of driving at the speed of 150 mph which would make it feel like teleporting through the city. It’s also capable of carrying more than just Teslas and he said it applies to any autonomous, electric car available. Even though that description may only fit Teslas at this point, the vision is that the electric cars will drive alongside the tracks of high speed together with cars for pedestrians and cyclists.

Musk is expecting to connect the “Loops” to Hyperloops with capsules of high-speed but he decided to discuss that another time.

The tall and a forcing structure has its underlying foundations from one of Elon Musk’s progressively lively Twitter sessions. A month ago, Musk delicately declared on Twitter that The Boring Company would develop a watchtower made of Boring Bricks on its Los Angeles site, where an individual wearing knight-like clothes would be entrusted to “yell insults at people in a French accent” to people who would walk by. An occupation posting for a “Watchtower Guard” was posted in The Boring Company’s authentic site before long. An image including a few knight-clad people applying for the post was shared by the burrowing startup on Twitter also.

Photographs that were taken not long ago by Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin uncovered that the underlying periods of the watchtower’s development were in progress. The pictures, which were gone up against December 4, demonstrated that the structure’s metal system was almost entirely finished. No Boring Bricks overlaid on the multi-story structure, meanwhile. When she came back to the site this Friday, Pauline has discovered that The Boring Company is presently laying a few blocks on the watchtower — and it is doing as such in an amazingly smart way.

The Boring Company is laying substantial pre-made areas of Boring Bricks on the watchtower’s metal system. Utilizing this framework, the burrowing startup can cover expansive segments of the watchtower structure rapidly and proficiently. With such a framework set up, it would not be astonishing if The Boring Company really completes its watchtower on schedule for the startup’s Hawthorne tryout burrow opening gathering on the upcoming Dec 18.

The entire development of a brick watchtower is because Musk absolutely loves the pop culture. Musk has told us all about his adoration for Monty Python and the Holy Grail (comedy from 1975) and that movie is still considered as one the cleverest movies at any point in time worldwide. At one of point during that movie, a belittling and expressive French guard John Cheese, brutally provoked King Arthur by insulting him in very much creative ways from the highest point of the castle wall.

Elon Musk has conceded that he is actually truly a nerd deep down and he even expressed his adoration for role-playing games and even, Japanese anime. Because he truly loves everything that has to do with pop culture, his nerdy tendencies are very much apparent in his companies. For example, his electric cars are filled with features and Easter Eggs that have a lot of movie references. We have James Bond Lotus Easter Egg, Mad Max mode for Navigate on Autopilot, and This is Spinal Tap reference which is a volume that goes as far as possible to 11. So therefore, the Monty Python reference for the watchtower is something to be viewed as the good old and typical Elon Musk.

The Boring Company’s opening gathering for its Hawthorne test burrow was firstly supposed to be happening on December 10th. However, recently it has changed and Musk declared that the occasion would be moved to December 18.