Company Profile

The Boring Company

The Boring Company's name is a pun and a mission statement at once: it digs tunnels ("boring" as in drilling) to solve traffic, which most people find, well, boring to think about — right up until they're stuck in it. The idea is simple: cities are already built out at street level, but there's a lot of unused space underground.

See the Boring Company timeline: every tunnel, machine, and Hyperloop milestone →

It started in LA, not Vegas

Before Vegas, The Boring Company actually tried to launch its first real tunnel in Los Angeles — a proposed route under the 405 and Sepulveda Boulevard on the west side, plus pitches to Chicago and Maryland. All of them ran into the same wall: environmental review lawsuits and local political opposition. LA's tunnel got tied up in court after neighborhood groups sued over a skipped environmental review, and by 2018 the company had abandoned it.

Las Vegas is where it actually worked, because the gaming and tourism industry threw its weight behind the project instead of fighting it. That support is the whole reason the Vegas Loop exists instead of an LA Loop.

The Vegas Loop

The company's flagship project is the Vegas Loop, a growing network of underground tunnels in Las Vegas where autonomous and human-driven Tesla vehicles ferry passengers point-to-point, bypassing surface traffic entirely. It started under the Las Vegas Convention Center and has been expanding toward the Strip and the airport since.

You can ride it today (and most visitors don't know it's there)

The Vegas Loop isn't a prototype or a concept video. It's running right now, and it had carried more than 4 million passengers by April 2026 across 11 stations: five on the Las Vegas Convention Center campus and six out along the Strip corridor, including Encore, Resorts World, and Westgate. Limited rides to Harry Reid International Airport started at the end of 2025, running partly on surface streets until the airport tunnel is finished. You walk down to the station, hop in a Tesla, and ride through a lit tunnel under the city traffic.

What it costs: rides between the five convention center stations are free. Trips to the Strip stations run about $4.25 one way or $7 round trip, and the airport run is about $14 per person (prices as of September 2026). Check the station before you go, since hours and stops keep changing as it grows.

Coming next: just over 2 miles of twin tunnels under Paradise Road, from Westgate south to a new station at 4744 Paradise Road, with stops at Virgin Hotels and the former Gordon Biersch site. As of mid-September 2026, the convention authority expected the first section to open in October, in stages, with the goal of finishing before the November Formula 1 race. Schedules could still shift.

If you're headed to Vegas, it's one of the cheapest "you have to try this" rides in town, and it's a real look at a Musk company working quietly in the background while most of the news goes to rockets and robots.

Loop vs. Hyperloop: easy to mix up. The Vegas Loop is regular Teslas driving through tunnels at city speeds. Hyperloop is the much faster idea from 2013 (see below). The Texas plan is a "precursor" that sits somewhere in between, and Vegas is the proof that the tunnel part already works.

Cheaper, faster tunneling

Traditional tunnel boring is famously slow and expensive. The Boring Company's whole bet is that with the right engineering — smaller tunnel diameters, continuous boring instead of stop-and-start, in-house machine design — tunneling can be done at a fraction of the traditional cost and timeline. If it works at scale, it changes the math on whether a city can afford to build its way out of traffic.

Liner Truck 3: reused Tesla parts underground

One of the clearer examples of how these companies borrow from each other: Liner Truck 3, unveiled August 2026, hauls the 22,000+ lb precast concrete segments that form a tunnel's inner wall from the surface down to the boring machine — built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units instead of custom-built industrial parts. It's fully electric, remotely piloted from The Boring Company's operations center in Texas, and part of their "Zero-People-In-Tunnel" approach — nobody has to actually be underground to run it. An earlier prototype version was reportedly flown by an employee using a PlayStation controller before the remote-ops system was built out.

Where it's headed: a $3 billion bet on tunnels

On September 10, 2026, The Boring Company announced a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing the company at $23 billion. That's about four times its $5.7 billion valuation in 2022. Other backers in the round include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital.

The money goes to building, not just planning: more than 150 kilometers of tunnel across the UAE beyond the Dubai Loop it has already been awarded, continued expansion in Las Vegas, a project in Nashville, and Prufrock, the company's own tunnel-boring machine. When people ask whether the company can actually take on something like a Texas Hyperloop, this is a big part of the answer.

Hyperloop: the idea comes back underground

Hyperloop goes back to August 2013, when Musk published a 57-page white paper called Hyperloop Alpha: passenger pods riding through a low-pressure tube at airliner speeds, pitched as a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco trip in about 35 minutes. He didn't build it himself. He open-sourced the idea and invited anyone to try. SpaceX then ran the Hyperloop Pod Competition from 2015 to 2019 on a roughly one-mile test tube next to its Hawthorne headquarters, where university teams from around the world raced their pods. The Technical University of Munich's team set the record at about 288 mph in 2019.

Plenty of startups took the idea and ran, and most of them ran out of money. Hyperloop One, the best funded of them, shut down at the end of 2023 without ever carrying a passenger.

On September 20, 2026, Musk announced that The Boring Company is working on a "simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel" between Austin and San Antonio, at more than 200 mph. That drive is about 80 miles down I-35, and he noted traffic can stretch it to 2.5 hours. The tunnel's goal is a consistent trip of under 30 minutes. "Precursor" is the key word: this is a first step toward Hyperloop, not the full vacuum-tube version from the 2013 paper, and engineering details and a timeline haven't been published yet. What makes it different from 2013 is that the company that would build it already digs tunnels for a living, and Texas is already home to Tesla, SpaceX's Starbase, and The Boring Company's own headquarters.

The Boring Company followed up with the practical pitch: because Loop and Hyperloop are express, with no stops in between, you could go from a parking lot in Austin to a favorite restaurant in San Antonio in about 30 minutes, as long as both have Loop stations. To be fair, it's only an announcement for now. No route, cost, or construction date has been announced, transportation officials in both cities said they hadn't heard from the company before the post, and earlier Boring Company proposals for Chicago, Los Angeles, and the East Coast never got built. Vegas is the one that did.