Elaine Ou, Columnist

Elon Musk's Next Frontier Is Underground

The man who started Tesla and SpaceX wants to make tunnels exciting.

February 15, 2017 at 12:00 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Dig this.
Photographer: Jamie Rector/Bloomberg

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Elon Musk wants to dig tunnels. Without them, he says, “we will all be in traffic hell forever.” It’s a well-timed ambition, given President Trump’s plan to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure projects. Let’s hope he can figure out what he’s doing.

Musk has already started burrowing near the offices of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in Los Angeles -- a counterintuitive direction at a time when other companies are taking to the skies. Amazon.com Inc. is working on drone delivery, Uber Technologies Inc. has promised electric hovercraft, and Airbus Group SE has revealed plans for autonomous personal flying cars. Nobody wants to go underground. That’s where earthworms and mole-rats live.