As you surely know, last week Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter. But the Twitter acquisition wasn’t Musk’s only major business move from the past few weeks. Elon Musk’s other company, the other, has raised funds with a big new valuation. Not Tesla. Not SpaceX. Boring Company.
The Boring Company (that’s boring as in “boring tunnels,” the company’s specialty) has just undergone another round of new funding. Boring raised $675 million with a new total valuation of $5.7 billion in the process.
Founders Fund, headed by Peter Thiel, was among the investors participating in the funding round, as were Vy Capital, Sequoia Capital, and several other investors.
The Boring Company’s current project is a 29-mile loop under Las Vegas, which is supposed to eventually carry 57,000 passengers per hour in cars driving along the tunnel, with 51 stops along the way. The company also wants to expand the network and eventually connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles through these underground tunnels.
Robin Beck/AFP via Getty Images
This is a fundamentally unproven project yet, but Musk has plenty of money to keep the experiment going, and it looks like growing numbers of investors are seeing some potential in it. The last time the company raised money was in 2019, when it took in $120 million in new investments, against a valuation of $920 million, which means the company has seen significant growth over the past three years.
It’s also not the only new transit idea being put forward by Musk, who is also a proponent of so-called “hyperloop” transportation, which includes specialized high-speed capsules that can theoretically carry passengers from place to place at speeds of up to 600 miles per hour. Several companies (including Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop) are said to be developing hyperloop technology, which is still in the early planning stages.
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