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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least.

Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.

The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper than anyone else, but so he's failed to demonstrate he can create even one useful tunnel. The only reason he's doing this is because he hates traffic and thinks that driving in a private tunnel will make it easier to get to work on time."

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> Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant.

20 years ago you could have said much the same thing about Elon Musk and rocketry.

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

It’s actually a fairly common trap to fall into - having expertise in one area and assuming you can jump into a completely different field and revolutionise it.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...

The difference is that Elon had no experiance in cars or rockets. So he has shown the ability to go into a different field and change it.

SpaceX was also not really novel. Their engine, construction method and most things were pretty standard and not very impressive.

I'm a fan of Elon but he did not bootstrap the first electric car company. Electric cars have been around since the 1800s with a resurgence in the late 1900s. Musk got into electric cars in the 2000s.

I think if we're being charitable, it's pretty clear that they meant no major electric car companies. And there were no major car companies on the scale of early Ford before early Ford.

I guess if we're being pedantic, he also didn't bootstrap Tesla.

because gas was cheap and batteries back then couldn't go 400 miles and charge in 5 mins. had the economics been flipped, and there were stations on the side of the road with charged batteries for swapping, maybe elon would be forming a petrol sports car company about now.

Strapping a motor into some wheels is not "electric car company". Designing a high-volume, easily produced, long range, beautiful, profitable(!) business out of it, meaning something people actually use - that's bootstrapping an electric car company. We live in a real world, not in some imaginary "that was technically an electric car in 1800"-fairy tale.

He bought the title of founder in title in a way that the original founders couldn't use it so saying he bootstrapped it is a bit much same with saying it's the first electric car company.

He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand.

He's also great at extracting government funds.

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