Elon Musk appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Thursday [6 Sept], where he said The Boring Company started as a joke. Musk said that he couldn’t be sure the project’s ambitious plans to build a high-speed transport system under Los Angeles would be successful but that the idea was born out of “desperation.” “I don’t see any other ideas for improving the traffic,” Musk said.
In a new interview, Elon Musk described The Boring Company as a “hobby company” that first started as a joke and said there was a reasonable chance his plan to build tunnels for a transit network under Los Angeles would be unsuccessful.
On the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Thursday, Musk outlined the origins of The Boring Company, a tunnel-construction company that is trying to build high-speed transit systems under Los Angeles and, eventually, other cities. “I have this, it’s sort of a hobby company, called The Boring Company, which started out as a joke,” Musk said. “And we decided to make it real and dig a tunnel under LA. And then other people asked us to build tunnels, so we said yes in a few cases.”
Musk posted footage on his Instagram page in May from inside the tunnels, saying he wanted to open them to the public “in a few months.” The Instagram post is now deleted, along with the rest of his account, and a public opening has yet to materialize.
On the podcast, Musk joked that he couldn’t be sure the project would succeed. “I’m not saying it’s going to be successful,” he said. “It’s not, like, asserting it’s going to be successful. But so far I’ve lived in LA for 16 years and the traffic has always been terrible. And so I don’t see any other ideas for improving the traffic. “So in desperation, we are going to build a tunnel, and maybe that tunnel will be successful. And maybe it won’t.
He’s obviously not heard of congestion charging then…