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In December 2016, Elon Musk spent $300 million to dig a massive underground tunnel. Wall Street called it a publicity stunt, but it's now worth over $100 billion.Here's the incredible story of The Boring Company, Musk's underground solution to solving traffic congestion forever, and that cities around the world want to buy.It all started with a tweet. In December 2016, Musk was stuck in traffic in Los Angeles and, frustrated, wrote: "Traffic is driving me crazy. I'm going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging..." Many thought it was a joke, but Musk wasn't kidding: Two weeks later, The Boring Company was born. Its mission was to build a network of underground tunnels to solve traffic congestion.Wall Street analysts laughed. "It's a distraction," they said. "A publicity stunt." But Musk saw something others didn’t: The tunneling industry hadn’t innovated in decades; the machines were slow and expensive. Musk believed he could revolutionize the technology, making tunnel construction cheaper and faster.The first step was to buy an old tunneling machine and start experimenting. In 2017, The Boring Company raised $112.5 million, with Musk’s $100 million coming from him. The rest? From selling 20,000 flamethrowers at $500 each. Yes, flamethrowers. Wall Street thought Musk was crazy, but he was just getting started.In 2018, The Boring Company completed its first test tunnel in Hawthorne, California, at a cost of $10 million per mile. Conventional tunnels? $1 billion per mile. Musk managed to reduce costs by 99% by narrowing the diameter of the tunnels and developing continuous-boring technology.In 2019, The Boring Company won its first major contract: a $48.7 million project to build a transportation system beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. Completed in 2021, it proved that The Boring Company was more than just words; it could deliver real, working projects.2021 marked a turning point for the company.Daily Factfinder