The Wall Street Journal had a big reported story on Monday about Elon Musks Boring Companyspecifically, about its habit of making extravagant mass-transit proposals and/or commitments to cities and municipalities, and then delivering nothing. The story is great and you should read it. A particular passage from the article has been making the rounds on (Elon Musks) Twitter since then, thanks to an almost too-perfect irony concerning the name of a drilling machine:
That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to get ready for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.
An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the companys then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Becketts play about a man who never shows up.
The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later.
All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.
Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.
That is indeed delightful. But for my money the key word, the crystallizing detail, in the above passage isnt Godot, but rather secondhand. You could miss that on your first pass. Godot is so squarely on the nose, such a perfect encapsulation of Musks and the broader tech startup industrys half-literacy and incomprehension of metaphor, as to be nearly inebriating. And then theres the perfect centrist-politics image of great big worthless shitbag Larry Hogan rehearsing his touchdown dance from the opposite two-yard line because he got a sneering billionaire sociopath to make him an unenforceable promise backed by nothing. But secondhand is what really cracks the whole thing open.
The whole entire premise of the Boring Company is that it offers a revolutionized large-scale drilling process: It famously launched with Musks boast that, fed up with traffic, he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. Its drilling technology would be faster, profoundly faster, than what came before it; it would be able to do things previous drills could not do that would make the process dramatically faster and cheaper and thus available to more municipalities looking to solve their traffic problems. That pitch happens to be bullshit
Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.
Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.
but nevertheless is whats behind all the fawning media coverage and thirsty appeals from sweaty elected officials. It is the basis for tantalizingly low-cost project estimates that persuaded the leaders of, for example, San Bernardino County, to abandon their light-rail plans in favor of Hyperloop. And here we are: Even if the Boring Company ever had actually showed up to dig the tunnel for, in this case, its much-publicized east-coast Hyperloop, it was going to be with some other companys drill.