Elon Musk’s tunnel projects are more than an unconventional approach to transportation. They offer an interesting look at how innovation, infrastructure and economic activity can connect in ways that ultimately affect all of us.
In this episode of PIVOT, Darryl Lyons explores The Boring Company’s tunneling projects in Las Vegas, Nashville, Dubai and the potential Austin-to-San Antonio tunnel. He discusses how these projects are being developed, what makes the technology different from traditional transportation systems and how the industries supporting these projects can create broader economic activity.
You’ll learn:
● How Elon Musk’s interest in underground transportation led to The Boring Company
● How the Las Vegas tunnel system works
● What makes tunneling different in places like Las Vegas and Nashville
● How infrastructure projects create economic activity across multiple industries
● Why companies involved in construction, energy, manufacturing, technology and other industries can benefit from major infrastructure projects
● How innovation can create jobs and contribute to broader economic growth
● What the potential Austin-to-San Antonio tunnel could mean for the region
● Why thinking long term matters when considering economic innovation and investment
As Darryl emphasizes throughout the episode, innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. The economic activity surrounding new ideas and infrastructure can have an impact far beyond the project itself.
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Transcript:
Historically, what we’ve done as a country, from railroads to fiber optic cable to AI, and here, the tunnels, it spurs economic growth. For that reason, I’m excited. And it’s namely happening in the United States.
I am actually surprised so much progress has been made so far in such a short amount of time. Frankly, Elon Musk has dug more tunnels than the United States as a government in a short amount of time.
This is Darryl Lyons, CEO and co-founder of PAX Financial Group, and you’re listening to PIVOT with Darryl Lyons. We’re going to talk about wealth, life and leadership. Remember, this information is general in nature. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax or legal advice. Visit PAX Financial Group for more information. And it’s my conviction that the best money decisions happen in a conversation.
So I want to encourage you to take the information today and have a conversation with your advisor, with a friend you trust, whoever. And I am not going to do a Pondering with PAX question today. I just want to say thank you because, for some reason, I received multiple emails and texts and phone calls randomly from people that just said they appreciated me.
And you know what? The week was a hard week. Sometimes this job of managing people’s money can be exhausting. As you would imagine, there’s just a lot of emotions involved. And it’s my craft. It’s what I do. I’ve done it since 1999, so I accept it. But sometimes you have tough weeks, and it just so happened that you guys decided to reach out and randomly say thank you, and that meant the world to me.
So I just want to let you know, I really appreciate it.
So today’s conversation is triggered by Elon Musk. Don’t check out for those that hate Elon Musk, because the conversation’s worthy of consideration. But he had a tweet, or an X, whatever you want to call it, that said that he was going to build a tunnel from San Antonio to, or from Austin to San Antonio. I guess San Antonio, Austin, same thing.
That triggered questions in my mind that I’m going to unpack here in real time. And we’re going to talk about tunnels and Elon Musk today. And I’m actually going to tie it in in such a way that it’s going to address how it impacts you. And so we’ll do both. But let’s talk about this idea.
It started in 2016. Elon Musk was bored, I guess, sitting in traffic in California, and said, “There’s got to be a better way, and can we go underground?” I don’t know if Elon, I probably would have been inspired by that Kevin Bacon movie. I don’t know if you remember years ago where there were these aliens that dug these big holes in the ground, maybe or maybe not, but that would have been my inspiration.
I would have figured out, like, if I could create a machine that could do that fast, that would be a huge win. But he had a dream of digging tunnels under Los Angeles freeways, and that started something called The Boring Company. And out of The Boring Company became this tunnel business. He’s in the tunnel business.
And so he did a little test tunnel in the California area, Hawthorne. And it was a mile. So cool. Did it, learned some things, expensive, slow. But then you start to standardize things, automate, repeat, learn, get better. And then he went to Vegas. Of course, you go to Vegas in 2019, and they approved. It was the Las Vegas Convention Authority, or Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, whatever that is.
They approved him to do much more. And to prepare for this podcast, the best thing that I could do was not just read, but actually watch some videos, because you become curious about what they look like. I got to tell you, do the same. Go on YouTube and watch some of these videos, because they go and take people on a tour through these tunnels and explain it all.
It’s fascinating. First of all, I didn’t know underneath Las Vegas was all this water. So if you go down 30 or 40 feet, how do you build a tunnel through water? Well, you do it if you’re Elon Musk and you have a bunch of smart people. Because what they do is they dig and then, at the same time, simultaneously, they’re building the barriers. And they’re building these barriers as they dig, as they press through water, and they seal it and seal it.
And if it leaks, and it does leak, by the way, if you’ve watched some of these videos, it leaks. It was kind of scary. But the whoever’s facilitating the tour, the tour guide, but it’s more like an executive person, says minor leaks, you just patch. It’s no big deal. Which, I don’t know if you and I, a lot of you guys think like me, I’d be a little nervous going in these tunnels. But I’m going to do it one day because it looks really cool.
So, for example, what happens is you leave the airport, you go online, you reserve a Tesla because it’s not a high-speed underground subway. You reserve a Tesla. The Tesla is at a certain location, and in that location is like a couple parking lot spaces. A guy is the driver, but he’s not a real driver because it’s a vehicle. He’s more of a facilitator. Maybe that’ll change down the road.
You get in, and get this: the car doesn’t go somewhere. It goes down in an elevator-type fashion. Now it’s in the tunnel. Now it takes off in a fraction of the time. You avoid the traffic, a fraction of what it would cost in an Uber.
And you’re at your location in Vegas. It’s a couple miles, I believe, and there are several stops along the way. And yes, there’s emergency exits and yes, there’s emergency doors. There’s a lot of things that you would imagine in a what-if scenario, fires that are addressed very thoroughly. So no doubt. But there are tunnels under Vegas now, and I guess Vegas likes it because they want The Boring Company to do more of them.
So cool.
Now, I didn’t know this, but if you’ve been—so for those that aren’t in Texas, when you’re in San Antonio and you drive to Austin, you can take a toll road to go around Austin. And when you take that toll road, on the right is the Gigafactory, and you see it every time. What I didn’t know is the Gigafactory is also on the other side of that toll road.
I believe—I haven’t seen it myself. I just saw the videos. And so, to make manufacturing more efficient, they’ve actually created tunnels at the Gigafactory to get parts from one location to another, as you would imagine. So it’s kind of become a lab there at The Boring Company or at the Gigafactory for tunneling.
And so they want to do this, of course, in Austin down to San Antonio, which is a lot of traffic, a lot of accidents.
And it’s not—I mean, between San Antonio and Austin, it’s continuing to grow: New Braunfels and San Marcos. They talked about it a while back. It was 2022. But again, you get this talk. You get a lot of people talking, but then you’ve got to get permitting, you’ve got to get surveying, you’ve got EPA, you’ve got all kinds of things going.
So it takes a long time. But now it might be serious because if you go to The Boring Company’s website in their career pages, it actually says they’re looking for a project manager position in San Antonio. So maybe that’s a clue that they’re going from curious to serious about this tunnel from San Antonio to Austin, which would be very interesting.
Now they’ve already started it in Nashville. I didn’t know this either. Again, I just was out of the loop, which I guess, tongue in cheek, there’s actually a loop underground that they’re going to do in Nashville, you know, connect the airport to Broadway. They announced it in July of 2025.
Again, this is all privately funded. You’re like, “Hey, can I buy The Boring Company stock in my portfolio?” It is a privately held company, so no, you can’t.
But just keep in mind, and I’ll unpack this a little bit: you’ve got surveyors and engineers and salespeople, and you’ve got companies that make bearings, and you’ve got cement trucks and you’ve got cement, and then you’ve got water and you’ve got all—so all these industries interconnected with this.
So indirectly, companies are making money from just supporting these initiatives, and that is impacting your portfolio.
But the one in Nashville is interesting because that one is—and if you haven’t been in Nashville lately, Nashville’s like Vegas. It’s insane. And the growth is awesome. Wonderful people there. I’ve really enjoyed—I’ve had dear friends in Nashville to this day.
But this thing is different because now you’ve got—you learned from Vegas, but Vegas is water and Nashville’s limestone, so it’s a little different. You’ve got to cut different. And they said it’s actually easier. I don’t know that to be true. But same ideas: that you’re going to have these tunnels underground. You’re going to have elevators that bring the car in.
You’re going to have really cool lights. You’re going to have all the safety features. So many of the things are the same, but you have some variability in electricity and ventilation and hydraulics and water and navigation systems. The engineers are going to be different, or slightly, you know, maybe a little different because of the geology and geography.
Mechanics are different. Welders are different. So you have variations from city to city, but you’re learning from each one of them. And that makes sense when you think about Elon. He’s, you know, being a visionary. And part of me even thinks that he could take this to an extreme level and apply this to something, maybe even at the moon, which he’s talked about many times.
And what does it look like to have underground tunnels on the moon that, you know, you create your own atmosphere? Which is interesting, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s kind of his next chess move, so to speak.
But don’t discount for a moment the economic relationships that ultimately benefit all of us. The plastic industry, you know, hydraulic fluids, transportation, dump trucks, excavators.
And then somebody goes on break. They want a Chapa burrito. They put sour cream on it, which I think is disgusting, in the little white tubes. Helps the sour cream industry, but it also helps the dairy farmer. And all of this becomes an economic engine, not just locally, but many of these companies are publicly traded. So we get an opportunity to own them.
And then people are making money: the engineers and the welders and the electricians and the drivers and equipment operation people, the inspectors, all of it is really important. And it’s historically what we’ve done as a country, from railroads to fiber optic cable to AI. And here, the tunnels, it spurs economic growth. For that reason, I’m excited.
And it’s namely happening in the United States. Although I will say Elon Musk is also done some digging in Dubai. So in 2025, Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority signed a memorandum of understanding called the Dubai Loop. And so that’s moving forward in Dubai.
So we certainly get the benefit of the United States getting some tunnels here. I think you should—and we all ask ourselves questions about the safety and the indirect consequences. You know, you go under a road. Are these roads going to cave, or does it bother the water source? What about utilities? All that stuff is beyond the scope of this particular podcast. But if you do want to do some more digging like I did, there’s plenty of YouTube videos that address all of these.
So it’s a very thorough partnership with local authorities and the regulatory bodies. I am actually surprised so much progress has been made so far in such a short amount of time. Frankly, Elon Musk has dug more tunnels than the United States government in a short amount of time.
It’s fascinating, and I always get frustrated with the permitting process and the bureaucracy and see that people saw a vision collectively and set aside their agendas.
And I’m sure it wasn’t an easy conversation to get these projects off the ground. It’s fascinating to me because I know this project is more than just a project. I know the benefit of better transportation or connecting a rural community with a city in such a way that people can actually work in a city. I see the vision, but I also see, while the vision is being executed, jobs are being had, people are earning work and business.
And many of these companies, whether it’s construction or energy or industrial or semiconductors or infrastructure, even banking or payment processors, restaurants like Chipotle, hotels, software companies, building materials, many of these companies that are participating in these tunnels are publicly traded, and they end up in your portfolio.
And when that little portfolio goes from red to green, it’s because tunnels are being built and money’s trading hands.
And so I think we always have to take a step back and recognize that this innovation that takes place from some people that are very eclectic blesses all of us to be able to enjoy the benefits of the innovation. Again, fiber optic cable, railroads, Model T’s, tunnels. But also while these innovations are being manufactured and delivered, the economic activity that comes out of that and the jobs and the stock market participation is really how this whole thing works.
So for that reason, it’s a fascinating story and one that I look forward to seeing unfold in my backyard in San Antonio, Texas.
So thanks for listening today. Hope that’s encouraging. I want to encourage you to look at it a little bit more. And I want to remind you, and you guys know this, but I really mean this to be true. And it continues to prove itself. And every conversation I have nearly every day, I know many of you believe me, but I want to say it again:
You think different when you think long term.
Have a great day.
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