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It’s another blindingly bright day in Las Vegas but I’m 30ft underground and strapped in for a rocket ride to the future. Actually, it’s a Tesla ride to the future, and not a self-driving one. And it’s pretty slow – my driver tells me the speed limit down here is 30mph. It’s also pretty short: the journey is over in a matter of minutes. In fact, the Vegas Loop is a pretty underwhelming experience: a brief trundle down a white-walled tunnel only slightly larger than the vehicle itself, lined by strips of LEDs that change colour every few seconds, in an attempt to inject some Vegas glitz. I’d been hoping to ask other Loop-riders what they made of the experience, but … there aren’t any. I’m the only person here.
This is not the futuristic transport solution Elon Musk originally promised. When he first announced this innovative technology in 2017, it was accompanied by sci-fi visuals showing a car pulling over from the street traffic on to an elevator platform, which then descended into a network of tunnels and whizzed along on an “electric skate” at 200km/h (124mph). “There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have … so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion,” Musk said. A few months earlier, with characteristic edgelordly nonchalance, Musk had announced on Twitter: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging …” Followed shortly after by: “I am actually going to do this.” He did, and he named it the Boring Company.
The Vegas Loop’s underwhelmingness will come as no surprise to seasoned Musk-watchers. The all-powerful CEO has established something of a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering when it comes to his grand initiatives, from self-driving Teslas to intelligent robots, to missions to Mars – none of which have materialised within his promised timeframes. But the Boring Company can also be seen as a stark illustration of “Muskism” in action, in terms of not only the reality not matching the fantasy, but also of how the trillionaire’s credulous admirers and political clout seem to insulate him from scrutiny, criticism and regulatory red tape, and afford him a degree of control and latitude apparently unavailable to others.
In the early days, the Boring Company also reflected Musk’s tendency to mix serious intent with juvenile trolling. In 2018, he raised $10m by selling 20,000 Boring-branded flame-throwers, plus another $1m selling Boring baseball caps. Musk fans lapped it up, and so did investors. By 2022 the Boring Company was valued at $5.7bn. It was building test tunnels in Los Angeles and at its Texas headquarters. It was said to be involved in projects in cities across the US and beyond: Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, San Jose, Miami. But one by one, these projects fizzled out. At present, the only city that has taken up the Boring proposal is Las Vegas, although this is about to change.
The first three stations of the Vegas Loop opened in 2021, connecting one end of the vast Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the other – a distance of about a mile. Between 2022 and 2025 the network extended to three nearby casino resorts: Resorts World, the Westgate and the Encore. You can’t drive your own car into the tunnels: you have to book one of the Loop’s Teslas (which are standard issue, no electric skates), then access the vehicles at what are essentially taxi ranks, above ground or beneath the resorts. Tickets are $4.25 (£3.15) for a single trip, or $12.50 (£9.30) for a day pass.
It is not really a loop, either. Some tunnels are two-way, meaning if there’s another car coming in the opposite direction, your car has to wait for it to come out before you can go in.
The system is much busier when there’s a convention happening, the drivers tell me, but today the stations beneath the LVCC are closed. At its peak, the system might have 160 Teslas in circulation, but today there are just four – which turns out to be three more than are needed.
Is this in any way a viable alternative to public transportation? “It really doesn’t have that much utility,” says Ray Delahanty, a former traffic engineer and urban planner who now broadcasts on social media as CityNerd. After his visit last year, Delahanty posted a YouTube video titled “The Vegas Loop is getting progressively more stupid”.
“Theoretically, there are times when there is enough congestion on the surface streets that an uncongested tunnel underneath could be faster,” he says, but “tourism has really dropped off in Las Vegas”, so there’s less traffic congestion anyway. In addition, he has usually had to wait 10 to 15 minutes for his ride to arrive, he says, so there was no time saving.
The Boring Company claims its operation is cheaper than traditional metro systems since its tunnels are smaller and its operation leaner, but it is hard to see how the numbers add up. Leaving aside the Loop’s claim that it will one day serve “90,000 passengers per hour”, at its current maximum capacity of six cars a minute, with four passengers a Tesla, that adds up to 2,400 passengers an hour, or 33,600 a day tops (it is only open 10am to 9pm). By comparison, London’s Elizabeth line alone carried more than 240 million passengers last year, or 665,000 a day. Added to which, the Loop requires one driver for every four passengers, whereas one Elizabeth line train, with one driver, can carry 1,500 people.
“If you were to take what should be public transportation planning and turn it into a neoliberal nightmare, this is exactly what you would get,” says Ben Leffel, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In March Leffel told legislators at a meeting of the Nevada Regional Rail Transit Advisory Working Group: “The Loop by the Boring Company is the biggest, most absurd transit scam I have ever heard of … The Boring Company has been lying to policymakers all around the world that their form, which is Teslas in tunnels, can transport more people more quickly than any kind of rail. And take it from me: that is physically impossible. So any policymaker that they’re saying this to should challenge them to provide even a shred of material evidence that that is true, but they cannot.”
Why did Las Vegas go for it? Part of the appeal to legislators, Leffel explains, is that the Loop is privately funded. “It is not paid for by tax dollars; it is paid for disproportionately by investors, and a lot of those investors are real-estate people,” he says. This means that the location of stops is determined by developers, rather than the needs of the city. “So we have diverted from a proper public rail system that moved more people and gone to a cheaper substitute, where influence over the design goes to the highest bidder.”
Private funding also enables Boring to avoid official oversight in Las Vegas and rigorous environmental analyses – which have often been why its projects have faltered elsewhere. Musk has publicly expressed his dislike of environmental regulation. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective,” he told the libertarian Cato Institute last year.
Boring has some experience in this. Last October ProPublica alleged that it had violated environmental regulations nearly 800 times in Las Vegas in the last two years, including “starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water on to city streets and spilling muck from its trucks”, as well as missing 689 inspections. A separate report by Fortune alleged that Boring “feigned compliance” after one inspection, “only to continue dumping the wastewater after a company manager ‘assumed district inspectors had departed the property’”. There have also been reports of employees and firefighters suffering chemical burns and other injuries while working on the project – penalties for which seem to have been minimal.
None of this helps mitigate the real problems faced by US cities such as Las Vegas that are heavily car-dependent and also increasingly vulnerable to extreme heat as a result of the climate crisis. The solution, as other cities have shown, is more trees and fewer cars, which means moving people around by metro or light rail networks.
“Las Vegas is the only large metropolitan city in the Mountain West region of the US that does not have a real mass public transit system,” says Minja Yan, a former real-estate professional who is running for Clark County commissioner. “But because our elected officials haven’t been prioritising public transit, the Boring Company came up with a private project and our elected officials were kind of like: ‘OK, maybe it sounds like a cool idea.’” So is light rail, she says – “but it takes work to make it happen. It takes vision, it takes coordination, it takes a lot of time.”
Work is under way to massively expand the Vegas Loop. The city has approved a network of 68 miles of tunnel and 104 stations, connecting the Strip to downtown, the airport and the 65,000-capacity Allegiant sports stadium, “cementing the Vegas Loop as a vital piece of the city’s future infrastructure”, as Boring’s website puts it.
What happens in Vegas is no longer staying in Vegas. In July 2025, Nashville, Tennessee, announced it was also committing to a Boring project: the Music City Loop. About 20 stations are planned, but its first 13-mile stage will connect the airport to the downtown convention centre and state capitol. By the time of the announcement, construction had already begun, much to the surprise of the public and many local officials.
“We were not informed about what was going to happen at any point along the way until it was a done deal,” says the state senator Heidi Campbell – “we” meaning her and her Democrat colleagues. She describes the process as “abnormally opaque. We got a special little memo sent to our mailboxes the day before the announcement was made by the governor [Trump ally Bill Lee]. And we were not invited to the ceremony or privy to the details subsequent to that. They wanted to keep us in the dark and they continue to do that.”
Campbell and others have raised similar objections to those in Las Vegas: that this is more a “tourist shuttle” than meaningful public transport; that it precludes other transport solutions; that the city’s geology and water table present risks; that if it fails, Nashville, not Musk, will be left holding the bag. “Even if this went really, really well, inevitably what you’re doing is still finding a creative way to move cars, not solving congestion problems.”
Last December there were protests against the Music City Loop outside the courthouse. Campbell believes the project’s approval is a case of politics over practicalities in the Republican-dominated state: “The guys I work with, they are so in love with Donald Trump that anybody who is adjacent to him is their friend. They feel like Elon Musk is Donald Trump-adjacent, and they are so excited to be able to do a project with him that they are not even thinking about the logistics.”
It’s telling that the only places that have taken up Musk’s Boring vision are aligned with him commercially as well as politically. Tennessee is already home to Musk’s Colossus datacentre – which provides computing power for his Grok AI, SpaceX operations and X social media platform. Located in Memphis and across the border in Mississippi, it attracted some controversy earlier this year when it was revealed to be using environmentally harmful methane gas turbines for electrical power.
Nevada, meanwhile, is the location of Tesla’s Gigafactory, near Reno, which opened in 2016 after stiff competition from rival states (Nevada reportedly offered a $1.2bn tax incentive). That deal was largely shepherded by Steve Hill, the director of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. In 2018 Hill became the CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), which promotes the city and owns the convention centre. He is credited with bringing the Boring company to the city, and “remains actively involved in expanding the system throughout the Las Vegas Valley”, according to the LVCVA’s website.
The Boring Company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
This intertwining of commercial and government interests fits a familiar pattern, says Quinn Slobodian, a co-author (with Ben Tarnoff) of Muskism, a new book that argues Musk’s business strategy is often to achieve some form of symbiosis with the state, by identifying an area where he can establish a monopoly, then benefit from public funds. The strategy has worked successfully with SpaceX, which has historically benefited from Nasa contracts (and built upon Nasa’s state-funded infrastructure), and with Tesla, where more than 40% of its revenue came from government carbon credits in the first nine months of 2024. Even as he was supposedly helping the Trump administration find $2tn in “efficiencies” (another Muskian overpromise), a report in 2025 estimated Musk’s companies had received $38bn in government funding.
“He really profits from a kind of terra nullius environment, where there’s as few regulations as possible, and he can quickly move into a relatively empty space and dominate it,” Slobodian says. Just as he achieved that with SpaceX’s rockets and Starlink’s low Earth orbit satellites, so Musk doubtless saw the underground realm as territory for the taking. Musk excels at what Slobodian and Tarnoff call “financial fabulism” – “which is the promise of not just an incrementally better product, but of a transformed future in which whole new sectors and markets that didn’t exist before will be created”. Unfortunately, the space under our cities is not as frictionless as the Boring Company might have liked, Slobodian points out, packed as it is with physical and regulatory obstacles. There is apparently another Boring project planned for Dubai, but it’s safe to say Musk’s pipe dream has not taken the world by storm.
Is Musk getting bored of Boring? It now seems like an insignificant backwater of his vast empire, overshadowed as it is by the tech titan’s inflammatory social media posting, and the much-hyped stock market listing of SpaceX last week, which valued the company at more than $2tn. SpaceX’s registration statement makes more grandiose claims: it anticipates future revenues of $28.5tn – “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”. Growth strategies include AI datacentres in space, asteroid mining and “passenger and cargo transport to the moon and Mars”. It might happen one day, just as the Boring Company might whiz you beneath Las Vegas in a driverless Tesla at 200km/h one day. In the meantime, Musk’s master plan seems to be too good to be true and yet too big to fail. It could take us to infinity and beyond, it could usher in a hypercapitalist dystopia or, like Boring, it could simply be headed nowhere, not very fast.
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