On 17 December 2016, stuck in Los Angeles traffic, Elon Musk sent a short run of tweets. Traffic, he wrote, was driving him nuts. He would build a tunnel-boring machine and just start digging. Then, in the last of the four: I am actually going to do this.
What almost nobody connects to that moment is where the man came from. Musk grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, in a family that was wealthy during his youth. After his parents divorced in 1979 he chose, at about nine, to live with his father, and he has said he later regretted it. At a boys' wilderness school he described as a paramilitary Lord of the Flies, he was, by his account, thrown down concrete steps and beaten badly enough to be hospitalised. He has said his father berated him after he came home. His father denies it. Nothing ties that boy to a tunnel company, but it is the person behind the tweets.
What almost nobody connects to that moment is where the man came from.
He arrived in Canada alone in June 1989, stayed with a second cousin in Saskatchewan and worked odd jobs, including on a farm and at a lumber mill. Then Queen's University, then the University of Pennsylvania. When he co-founded Zip2 in 1995 he coded at night, seven days a week, in his own words.
The tunnel idea came with a name within an hour, and the company was registered in January 2017. It was born inside SpaceX and started digging where it did for a plain reason: SpaceX owned the land, so no permits were needed. The first test trench was 30 feet wide, 50 feet long and 15 feet deep. Initial funding of about $113 million came mostly from Musk.
The real fight came later. Los Angeles never let the idea in, and the plan was dropped. A graveyard followed: Chicago, Washington to Baltimore, San Jose, Fort Lauderdale, Miami. In 2018 the company sold about 20,000 blowtorches branded as flamethrowers and 50,000 hats to raise money from fans. Then Las Vegas wanted a shuttle rather than a subway; the contract came in May 2019 and the Convention Center loop opened in 2021.
Critics never stopped questioning cost, speed and safety. In 2022 Texas regulators cited the company for five environmental violations. A $675 million round that April valued it at about $5.7 billion. A $3 billion round at $23 billion was reported for September 2026, but that figure is unconfirmed.
The lesson is small and practical. A man who learned young that nobody was coming to help started by digging on land he already owned, where no one could say no. What kept it alive afterwards was one customer who wanted the small version of the dream.