After dealing with U.S President Donald Trump at the advisory council meeting, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is planning to retire for the weekend. And what does a legendary innovator like him do on a weekend? Play some Minecraft, of course! In real life, though!
Musk doesn’t plan on grabbing an Xbox controller and resting on a couch for the whole day. Calling it Minecraft, he is playfully referring to his latest ambition of curbing the problem of traffic jams by building tunnels. The Tesla founder has today shared the picture of what could be the very first tunnel boring machine via his Twitter. This is ‘exciting progress’ for the company, which people believed was non-existent. They saw it more as a joke but Musk seems genuinely serious about his efforts.
Let’s back-track about a month, that’s when the idea of digging tunnels came to this rather eccentric man. Anxious of being stuck in traffic for long, Musk decided to start a tunnel boring company to solve the traffic jam problem. And we were awestruck with the one tweet that changed the dynamics. He then tweeted out saying that he’ll be calling this operation ‘The Boring Company’ and that he was really going to do it.
A couple weeks ago, Musk shared an update on the progress of his tunnel company. He had then mentioned that we’d start seeing tunnel machines and other equipment in the coming weeks. And that did happen today, with the photo of the first digging machine prototype. It looks like Musk is sticking to his monthly plan and wants to start digging tunnels by the end of February.
Speaking about his boring plans with Wired, he said that a test trench is already under construction at the SpaceX HQ. The specifics of the same being 30 feet wide, 50 feet long, and 15 feet deep. This corroborates to the tweet where he mentioned that it will most likely connect the traffic from the 105 Freeway to Crenshaw, about 7 miles in distance. He further added,
We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent. We have no idea what we’re doing—I want to be clear about that.
Here’s the original tweet shared by the legendary innovator Elon Musk, which contained only the photo of the tunnel boring machine and a one-word caption. There was no update on the location of where the process of digging tunnels is starting off.
Minecraft pic.twitter.com/lU1YzJjLOZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2017
