Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC) is now worth up to $5.7 billion after a funding round that saw it raise $675 million, TechCrunch reported. The company plans to use the funds to “significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations and production to build and scale Loop projects,” it wrote in a press release.
TBC believes it could mine 600 miles of tunnels per year in the near term using its current Prufrock-2 machines that can dig up to a mile of tunnels per week. That would increase significantly with Prufrock-3, a next-gen machine that will supposedly be able to handle 7 miles per day. “As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years,” the company noted.
It will also use the money to “build and scale Loop projects, including Vegas Loop and others,” though it didn’t list any other projects by name. The company is targeting “throughput of up to 57,000 passengers per hour” on the 29-mile, 51 station Vegas Loop, calling it the “largest subsurface transportation project in the United States.”
That’s still far in the future, though, and TBC has a list of announced projects that never went anywhere. In 2017, Elon Musk tweeted that the company had a permit in Washington DC, but officials said no such thing had been issued. A preliminary digging permit was issued later, but the Boring Company no longer lists the project on its website. Others in Chicago and Los Angeles were quietly cancelled or also removed from TBC’s website.
