What does a billionaire, hats, tunnels and flamethrowers have in common? In this case, one boring company. The Boring Company is one to recently hit headlines for its recent products. If you’re thinking it’s flamethrowers, you’re correct. Elon Musk, a billionaire business magnate, investor, engineer, and inventor, is not only the founder of The Boring Company, but is also heavily involved with companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, Paypal, and Neuralink. Elon Musk’s current net worth as of February sixth is twenty point four billion dollars.

        Elon Musk Previous goals with companies such as Tesla and SpaceX were to revolutionize transportation in two ways. One is through the research and development of green vehicles such as the Tesla car, which is currently on the market in its first iterations. The second is by breaking barriers in transportation such as making recreational space flight a reality and breaking open new markets based off those breakthroughs. SpaceX has currently done this by recently launching the most powerful rocket to date, the Falcon Heavy.

While companies such as these receive a lot of press for their achievements in spaceflight and green energy, there is still a lot about The Boring Company people don’t know. Let’s take our own campus, for example.

Students such as Jesse Embrey, a freshman and newcomer to the Tabor School of Business, said he “didn’t know anything about The Boring Company, but knew that Elon Musk wanted to achieve recreational spaceflight.” Once he discovered what The Boring Company was, he felt strongly that its goal was something exceptional if it could be pulled off.

“I feel exceptionalism is something we have lost in America past the 1990’s and it’s good to see an American trying to cultivate something exceptional in this country.” said Embrey.

What makes The Boring Company different from Musk’s other ventures is the hybridization of his vision of green energy and advanced transportation paired with a nonstandard funding model that works based off people’s interest in crazy items. The Boring Company started with selling hats that were limited to only 50,000 being produced and sold. It has currently brought in seven hundred thousand dollars in funding for The Boring Company. To keep people interested, Elon Musk set a goal that if enough hats were sold he would move on to, and you guessed it: flamethrowers.

In only four days, flamethrower sales have brought in ten million dollars and are still being sold. When international customs agencies were refusing to ship anything with the name “flamethrower,” the “Boring” solution was to rename it to “Not a flamethrower” with not a in red scribbles on top of the box.

What does The Boring Company do with this money and is their wacky products what makes them exceptional?

That’s for you to decide, but they are currently putting that money into the tunneling research and development to achieve their clearly stated goal, “To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won’t fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The key to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of 10 or more – this is the goal of The Boring Company. Fast to dig, low cost tunnels would also make Hyperloop adoption viable and enable rapid transit across densely populated regions, enabling travel from New York to Washington DC in less than 30 minutes.”

With that goal in mind, The Boring Company has a lot of ground to cover. The current cost to tunnel one mile is normally in the one-billion dollar range and they want to reduce that to ten percent of the current cost.

Their next big obstacles are implementing the idea of a green hyperloop and tunneling industry, a project all in its own, and allowing widespread tunneling in the U.S. They have already had the beginning of success with multiple cities including Los-Angeles, Chicago, and the beginnings of a New York to DC route.  Time will tell if this project becomes the exceptionalism Jesse hoped for, or if The Boring Company lives up to their name.