Tech billionaire Elon Musk has concocted another grandiose stunt.
On social media platform X, which he owns, Musk last week teased plans by his Boring Co. to build an 80-mile-long “hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio.
“Boring Company is working on a simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio,” Musk said, adding that the transit line would travel at speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour.
The news took many by surprise, apparently including officials at Boring Co., which he founded to create underground tunnels and other digging-intensive projects.
“TBC would be excited and honored to build this massive infrastructure project,” The Boring Company wrote in response to Musk’s tweet. “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no immediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in ~ 30 min. As long as they both have Loop stations.”
Musk’s announcement also stunned San Antonio city officials, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai’s office and the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority — all of whom told the Current that neither Musk nor Boring Co. officials had contacted them as of press time.
The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, created to oversee transportation projects in Travis and Williamson counties, last week told the Austin American-Statesman that neither Musk nor his company had reached out.
That shouldn’t be surprising, though, considering the previous record of Musk and the Boring Co. communicating with San Antonio city officials.
Last year, Musk and the company reportedly ghosted the Alamo RMA after the organization unanimously voted to move forward on a $250 million-plus tunnel project between San Antonio International Airport and downtown’s Henry B. González Convention Center.
Given the vagaries of Musk’s tweet and Boring Co.’s past track record, is his San Antonio-to-Austin plan real or an underground pipe dream?
At this point it’s tough to tell.
But Alex Gibney, the director behind the critically acclaimed, four-hour-long documentary Musk, gave some insight into what the billionaire is all about in a sit-down interview with the Los Angeles Times this month.
“I think he’s gone from being a liar, somebody who has to keep track of the truth, to becoming what [author] Sam Harris calls a ‘bullshitter,’ where you just make stuff up, and through the force of confidence of your personality, you make it so,” Gibney said.
Hole to nowhere
In March 2022, the Alamo RMA, desperate for revenue in a county with no toll roads, unanimously approved a feasibility study for a proposal from Boring Co. to build a subterranean “public transit” tunnel from the airport to downtown.
Despite countless other bids from companies proposing more conventional forms of transit, including trains and a rapid transit bus route, RMA board member Michael Lynd Jr. and Bexar County Director of Public Works Renee Green maintained that Boring Co.’s proposal — a nine-mile underground tunnel that would transport passengers in Teslas from the airport to the Pearl and downtown — was by far the most feasible option among the bids.
Years later, no such tunnel exists.
“They just kind of ghosted us,” Alamo RMA operations engineer Reggie Fountain told the San Antonio Report last year of Musk and Boring Co. “So, we essentially just assumed that it was dead and didn’t move forward with it.”
To get another indication whether Musk’s company is capable of delivering on an 80-mile underground tunnel connecting two major urban areas, it’s also instructive to look at the company’s Las Vegas hyperloop.
Smoke and mirrors
When Musk proposed his project beneath Sin City, he prognosticated that a public transit system based on autonomous electric vehicles would hold 16 passengers each and whisk people around on a track system at speeds of 155 miles per hour.
What Boring Co. ultimately developed was something more attuned to a tourist-friendly gimmick that fits right in on the Vegas Strip. Teslas, driven by human chauffeurs, ferried visitors on a roughly five-mile long asphalt track in a tunnel between hotels and the convention center.
That’s par for the course when you analyze most of Musk’s ventures, Gibney told the LA Times.
“I read this book called Ludicrous by a guy named Ed Niedermeyer,” Gibney said. “Basically, he posited that there was a car called a Tesla, but the difference between what it was and what [Musk] promised was ludicrous, and that along the way he had confected all of these stunts to fake people out and make people think that the company was something that it wasn’t in order to get where he needed to go.”
When Musk touted self-driving Teslas in 2019, he released a video set to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” that showed one of his driverless electric cars zooming around the streets of Silicon Valley.
“There was a kid literally in the trunk with a computer driving the car,” Gibney said. “He couldn’t even tell the difference between a red light or a green light, and it crashed into the fence at the Tesla company headquarters.”
Even Tesla’s origin story has been carefully crafted to align with Musk’s vision of self-grandiosity, according to critics.
The billionaire is widely described as Tesla’s founder. However, he got that title not by inventing cars, but through a legal fight.
Indeed, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were Tesla’s real founders. Musk was simply an investor looking to park his PayPal money into the next big thing.
As part of a corporate takeover, Musk threw Eberhard out of the company, leading Eberhard to sue, according to Gibney’s retelling of events to the LA Times. As part of the lawsuit’s settlement, Eberhard agreed to say Musk was the founder, the director said.
“So, here’s a guy who’s literally trying to take reality and turn it into a fiction that benefits him,” Gibney said. “Because if he’s this all-knowing, sort of Leonardo da Vinci-like character, then over time presto changeo, you don’t have to invest in the economic fundamentals of the company, just invest in him.”
Survival
Even if Musk’s latest tunneling tale turns out to be true, it’s likely to face the same challenges as his proposed — and presumably scrapped — San Antonio hyperloop, said Evelynn Mitchell, a professor of environmental science at St. Mary’s University.
Although Mitchell declined to comment on the engineering behind the tunneling, she said that, depending on the route Musk’s Central Texas project takes, it could encounter serious problems with the numerous underground freshwater springs found in San Antonio and the Hill Country.
“The route east of I-35 would likely have less impact on water resources, but not being familiar with the work and what depth they would need to drill a tunnel and all those things, I would suggest the U.S. Geology Survey review those plans,” Mitchell said.
Indeed, some of the strongest pushback Musk received for his original San Antonio tunnel proposal came from environmental groups worried about the effect it would have on the Edwards Aquifer and San Antonio’s drinking water.
However, according to Gibney’s characterization of the billionaire, it seems unlikely that such environmental concerns are high on his list. Musk and fellow “broligarchs” such as Peter Thiel subscribe to an ideology called “longtermism,” the documentarian explained.
“It values lives in the future far more greatly than lives in the present, and out of that came this notion, which Musk publicly proclaimed, that he felt that it was a virtual certainty that we were living in a simulation, played by either aliens or AI of the future,” Gibney said.
Clearly, the jury is still out on whether we’re living out the reality of The Matrix.
What is concerning, though, is that Musk’s idea of “longtermism” largely derives from science fiction novels, as chronicled in a recent Atlantic investigation of the billionaire.
Among Musk’s favorites is one he read when he was 12 or 13: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In an early warning about the limits of artificial intelligence, the book discusses the Magrathean people, who build a supercomputer they can ask the meaning of life.
Spoiler: the computer’s answer was “42,” which left the Magratheans upset.
Musk took a very different life lesson from the novel, though.
“A lot of times the question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part,” Musk told the Atlantic.
Musk’s science fiction-derived outlook that he and only he is capable of leading humanity to the future – and that some may perish along the way for the greater good — explains his politics, University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus told the Current.
It also explains Musk’s willingness to announce his San Antonio-Austin hyperloop before discussions with local officials in both metros, the professor said.
“His MO as an entrepreneur is to be able to get the impossible done, and he can make these promises in a way that’s consistent with his ability to motivate the world around him,” Rottinghaus said.
“It’s a marketing ploy as much as it is a political ploy. He can basically promote the capabilities of his programs to governments or developers or potential investors. The fact that he has a political profile and a big microphone lets him talk about these projects in a way that other competitors can’t.”
Although Rottinghaus’s explanation makes sense from a macro perspective, Gibney told the LA Times that Musk’s political dalliances, including his alliance with President Donald Trump, are more about political survival.
“At the end of the day, [Musk] jumps in for Trump because he knows that if Trump doesn’t win, he might go to jail,” Gibney said. “A tremendous number of agencies of the federal government were investigating his companies for all sorts of civil violations, and there was a Department of Justice criminal investigation into fraud at Tesla.”
Texas politics is a mess. We make it a readable mess.
Sign up for San Antonio Current’s new “Texas Politics This Week” newsletter.
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
Elon Musk has spent more than $6 million backing Ken Paxton’s Senate race over recent weeks
Elon Musk’s super PAC starts spending to boost Ken Paxton in Texas
Activists call foul over SpaceX’s secretive and rushed land deal with Brownsville city leaders
