Elon Musk, who dreams constantly of being the internet’s biggest and best boy, made a few characteristically dumb announcements recently. First, and perhaps most consequential, was his pledge to give "around $45 million" a month to the Trump campaign. Musk is committing the money as part of the America PAC, which also includes the Winklevoss twins. Second, following California Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing of a state law prohibiting schools from outing students who change their gender identity without wanting to tell their parents, Musk announced he would be moving the X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas. Gender-related issues are a special concern of Musk’s, who has previously called pronouns an “aesthetic nightmare” and whose trans daughter cut ties with him in 2022.
Annoyingly, it’s impossible to make Elon Musk go away. The embraces of fascism and anti-civil rights tantrums come at regular intervals and always grab headlines, but even those moments can undersell just how deeply involved Musk is in the country's downward trajectory. Musk's destructive tendencies are altogether harder to avoid in a place like Las Vegas, where I live, and where his influence is more dug in.
Back in February, reports from Bloomberg and Fortune detailed how Musk’s Boring Company, previously responsible for the Tesla-only conveyance tunnel beneath the Vegas Convention Center, had racked up dozens of job-site injuries here in Vegas and in Bastrop, Texas, where the Boring Company is now based. Currently, Boring has been frantically trying to make good on its push to construct as many as 96 additional stations beneath Las Vegas. For those who are blessedly ignorant of how stupid this idea is, these are tunnels constructed for the sole purpose of allowing one car at a time to drive through a neon-lit passageway at no faster than 30 mph. The Teslas can’t be driverless for safety reasons. You’re just in a slow taxi underground.
According to Fortune’s investigation, workers constructing more of these tunnels have been burned, suffered heat exhaustion, had limbs crushed, and received contusions in part due to Boring’s rushed construction schedule. Which is where the toxic chemicals comes in. A cement mixture used as grouting for a given tunnel’s structural integrity is sprayed in between rings that secure the tunnel walls to the ground. Within this mixture is a chemical accelerant used to harden and set the cement. OSHA’s investigations into Boring’s job sites illustrate, through written testimony, photos, and video, that this sludge of cement and accelerant, which can cause severe burns after direct exposure, would simply collect in knee-deep puddles on the tunnel floor. Two workers reported being sprayed directly in the face while changing the hose. Requests by workers for PPE were rejected. Some crews claimed to be working 12-hour days for six or seven days a week.
In the recent past, the good cities of Baltimore, Chicago, L.A., and San Jose had been smart enough to drop announced Boring projects. But few places have as much status anxiety as Vegas. Especially now, when the city is trying its hardest to become a new American sports hub, it has been seized by renovations, corporate acquisitions, and never-ending building projects—the forthcoming Athletics stadium that the public doesn’t want to pay for, the Mirage transforming into the Hard Rock, major highway construction pinching traffic to and from the airport, the endless suburban sprawl. It’s typical for Vegas to be in the midst of some radical shift, and to be at war with various corporate mercenaries looking to exploit the city and its labor force. In short, it's the perfect place for an opportunistic slug like Musk.
Vegas is no stranger to crusading startup wunderkinds. Back when former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh had the bright idea of building the Downtown Project (DTP) in 2012 as a means of revitalizing the old Vegas corridor around Fremont, the city welcomed the condescending benevolence of tech money like a lifeboat and the media followed suit. Countless articles celebrating Hsieh’s ingenuity, always single-handedly, always inspirationally, papered over the fact that DTP spent a lot of money to displace the unhoused, fund businesses that never lasted, and buy up plots of land that still sit unused. Hsieh died from smoke inhalation suffered during shed fire in Connecticut in 2020 after seemingly abandoning DTP to be stripped for parts.
Even compared to Hsieh’s tattered legacy, Boring’s endeavors are uniquely wasteful and, crucially, extremely lame. There is no shortage of carnival tricks, idiotic or merely ridiculous, that Vegas has tried out in order to remain in the cultural conversation, a desperation for relevance at odds with how culturally ubiquitous the city continues to be. Some things get built for the sake of it and often it seems that this is the ethos of Vegas. I remember when the High Roller was being built at the Linq, proudly advertised as the world’s tallest Ferris wheel. Why it mattered or whether the experience of riding it was worth the price of admission came secondary to its very existence. This continues to play out time and time again, most recently with the Sphere and now continuing with Boring’s Vegas Loop. It’s particularly embarrassing to see the city countenance such an ill-advised project when so much of its public infrastructure is crumbling around it. Now that Vegas has Musk, city officials seem to feel they have no choice but to place their full confidence in his capacity to drum up public interest and private investment.
Meanwhile, after announcing the Boring Company in 2016, raising nearly $1 billion in capital, and pledging to take high speed transit into the future, Musk has little to show for his efforts. There is one Vegas tunnel, a lot of rubble, and a fair amount of blood. Despite its many OSHA violations and the world’s least convincing official denial of responsibility—Boring attorney Dale Kuykendall wrote, "TBC contests all of the citations’ classifications, required abatement, abatement deadlines, proposed penalties, and every other matter subject to contest," in a statement to Bloomberg—Boring is still drilling away, with nothing more than a fine.
Perhaps it’s symptomatic of a collective lack of enthusiasm to engage with anything having to do with Musk that the story hasn’t gained much traction. I’d only heard about this most recent circus act thanks to local criminal defense lawyer, Dayvid Figler, who also hosts the Vegas arm of the CityCast podcast.
Musk does and says too many outlandish, ridiculous, and potentially dangerous things at too great a clip to really grasp what each one might mean. It all works out for him in the end, because if he is skilled at one thing, it’s earning the kind of constant attention that can abstract his deeds from his image. It's the skill that has kept the stock price of his modestly successful electric car company in the stratosphere even as sales lag and recalls continue, and what makes a historically gullible city like Vegas easy prey. But underneath all the worries about what those millions of dollars pledged to Donald Trump might buy him, and far away from his childish, public feud with Newsom, is the suffering of laborers building tunnels to nowhere in a city that's been had. That's where Musk's bluster always seems to end up, in pain and disappointment, suffered quietly by everyone but him.
Correction: A previous version of this post said that Tony Hsieh died in Park City, Utah.
