Elon Musk Cited Nextbigfuture in a Tweet

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Elon Musk was having a discussion on X with Warren Redlich. They were talking about Boring Company. Elon Musk talked about subways and public trams and surface trains surface trains costing $1 billion per mile.

It was a deep cut to a 2018 nextbigfuture article. Subways and light rail cost two to seven times more to build in the USA than Europe or Japan.

In 2023, the Second Avenue Subway in New York City is projected cost is now close to $4 billion per mile, which is more than 11 times the global average. In my old 2018, the NY Times was talking about $2.6 billion per mile.

My observations about Elon referring to this nextbigfuture article.
1. Elon Musk must read nextbigfuture a little bit and must have done some google searches on nextbigfuture. I do not think this appear in a search if this was not the case.
2. One current Boring Company tunneling machine at one mile of tunnel per week can beat the US subway tunneling at 20 miles over all of the last twenty years.
3. US Subway and tunneling costs continue to spiral even higher. Boring company only needs about forty next generation Prufrock-3 machines to dig 10,000 miles per year. If Boring company makes $10-20 million per mile this would be $100-200 billion per year in revenue.

Warren Redlich talked about Boring Company having an IPO by 2028 and reaching $1 trillion of market value by 2030. Ten thousand miles of tunnel by 2030.

The current iteration of Prufrock, called Prufrock-2, is designed to mine at up to 1 mile/week, meaning a tunnel the length of the Las Vegas strip (approximately 4 miles) can be completed in a month.

Prufrock-3 is designed to be even faster, with the medium term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day.

In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity.

As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.

Boring Company making one Prufrock-3 machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 4200 miles/year of capacity. Forty Prufrock-3 machines build by 2028 would enable 10,000 miles of tunnel per year even with some machine downtime.

In 2018, Brian M. Rosenthal of the New York Times listed the causes of the $2.6 billion per mile New York Second Avenue subway construction. Excessive staffing, little competition, generous contracts and archaic rules dramatically inflate capital costs for transit in New York. In 2023, New York’s Second Avenue Subway is now costing about $4 billion per mile. The NY Times article documented poor contracting practices, bad management, and union featherbedding.

There are many other high cost subway, tunnel and rail projects:
The Central Subway in San Francisco cost $920 million per mile
The Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile
The U-Link in Seattle cost $600 million per mile
The London Crossrail cost £1.3 billion per mile

Alon Levy at Citylab showed underground rail construction costs in continental Europe and Japan between $100 million per mile and $1 billion. Most subway lines cluster in the range of $200 million to $500 million per mile.The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.

Union contracts and costs are a problem, which also can have criminal involvement. This was dramatized and explained in the Sopranos. Those who control the project get to make a markup on every worker, they get to select subcontracting companies, they get to charge a profit on materials. The Sopranos could bill a lot of extra unworked hours as well. They would get bribed by subcontractors to be on the approved vendor lists.

The Crazy Thing is Mob or No Mob – All of the Projects Are Run the Same Way to a Greater or Lesser Extent

A company can submit a low bid to win a contract. However, actual project costs can be double or triple the original bid. This can be corruption or incompetence.


The fictional show, The Sapranos, had a storyline about inflating the costs of a highway construction project (The Esplanade).

22 thoughts on “Elon Musk Cited Nextbigfuture in a Tweet”

  1. Is that $1 billion per mile figure inclusive or exclusive of station costs? Stations are now very expensive, for assorted reasons.

  4. It doesn’t surprise me he has found this site. I mainly, but not exclusively, hang out of the SpaceX/Tesla/BC/Neuralink/Elon stuff.

  5. This is the Tweet I left for Musk’s thread:
    Utterly ridiculous: To date, Boring company can only bore 12′ diameter tunnels, barely enough for a single track but NYC subways can be up to 50′ 4-tracks: https://nycsubway.org/wiki/Chapter_14:_Engineering_Features_of_the_New_York_Subway & car tunnels can NEVER replace all subway tunnels @6m
    riders/day.
    Musk is a retro-technologist in many ways. He celebrates the single family suburban home, commuting to work by car. Neither of these solutions is currently sustainable. Suburbs can’t make enough revenue to pay for all the stretched out utilities and services & no amount of individual car tunnels will ever be enough (and this is before factoring in the very real problems of different substrates – much of the delay of Boston’s Big Dig was due to loose dirt that had to be shored up before digging could resume). He is being dishonest about the scale involved – surely he must know these figures.
    The Las Vegas tunnel is a retro-disco ride, driven by a paid driver, covering just 1.7 miles, costing $10/ride in a Tesla (only). This is an expensive advertisement for Teslas, nothing more.
    Tunnels also have to be maintained. In NYC, pumps run constantly to keep underground rivers from flooding tunnels. No one could afford that maintenance at the scale necessary for Musk’s scheme, even in relatively spread out cities like L.A.

    • TBC (The Boring Company) machines plan to install support rings directly in place while continuing to dig, so there shouldn’t be an issue of collapsing dirt.

    • NYC is not digging a 50′ diameter hole. Several parallel narrower holes can be created to get width needed for multiple adjacent lines. Can also just keep going 3D… go deeper and make another line so transportation is 3D, not 2D.

      • Here are the top 10 boring machines in terms of size: https://youtu.be/MU5-XqMyLzo?si=SylrqcHCro_rwEn4
        The smallest is 7.1 meters in diameter or 23.29 feet, already about twice Musk’s current largest boring tunnel. The largest is 17.6 meters in diameter, is over 100 meters long and weighs 1,000s of tons. Literally no one but Musk is drilling single lane car tunnels. Think what would happen if a car got stuck at any kind of speed, or there was a fire – which would be a death trap even if in a relatively less flammable ICE car. There’s a good reason only very carefully selected drivers are allowed to drive very slowly at very spaced out distances in the Las Vegas tunnel.
        It took an average of 3-5 minutes to complete the current station to station tunnel trip, according to Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/12/early-data-from-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-shows-a-slower-yet-popular-service/ but this is a vast underestimate since it only includes actual travel time, not the time spent going from street to station, waiting for a car, getting into the car with up to (3? 4?) people at a time, and reversing the whole thing at the other end. Even the glossy inescapable Boring company promos and press releases that displace any real – or recent – actual tests in any Bing search (I didn’t try Google) can’t obscure that: https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc.
        In this test, the car went 40mph: https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a38195296/a-ride-in-the-tesla-tunnel-under-las-vegas/ One commenter said a Tesla once broke down and had to be manually pushed out of the tunnel. Seriously? If true, this is far from ready for mass use and dangerous too.
        And this won’t get any better, like the promised 2-minute travel time, with more stations; it will probably get worse, and an accident is inevitable if it’s sped up. A train, even a small one of a single car barely wider than a Tesla model X with seat along the walls, would be FAR safer since the track would keep everything in place. Musk has chosen not to do that since the tunnel opened in 2021.
        No one drills multiple narrow tunnels to make one larger one. Underground is far too unstable, and all tunnel boring machines lay concrete slabs as they progress, typically at 20-30 meters per day. This is why tunnel borers tend to be around 100 meters long. I don’t see anything that indicates a scaled up Boring company borer could do any better.
        Frankly, Musk is WAY over-extended and his competitors offer better products in every category except cars and spaceships, for now, and with spaceships, none of them can get out of Earth orbit without refueling there. With cars, most of the world has access to microcars for $10k-20k.

    • Las Vegas Loop will be 68 miles with 93 stations. Rides are “free” but perhaps you’re amortizing the public funds spending over the # of riders. Not sure how you came up with $10. Regardless, it will be cheaper when Vegas officials approve driverless vehicles… The government is the delay, not Tesla and Boring capabilities.

  6. Brian, there is a youtu e channel questioning how insane much dirt actually needs to be moved out of the tunnel if they are tunneling 7 miles per week.

    Could you comment on that?

  8. Nice for Brian to get a little hat tip from Musk. I’ve been coming to this site for too many years to count, because Brian thinks like me, I love future tech.

  11. I am not 100% sure, but i think nextbigfuture was my entry point in Elon’s vision and plans for the future. Which in turn convinced me to invest in Tesla. So I love Brian both for bringing exciting technology news and guiding me to the good stuff. Thx Brian!

    • your welcome. I am glad you did well with Tesla. BTW. I think that the noise and fluctations in price now from market manipulations will all fade away next year and maybe Q4 when some worldchanging things around FSD and energy start happening.

  16. Does anyone else have the problem that when you go to NBF it gives a search for some odd term rather than show the latest posts?

    Brian can you fix this?

    • Happens to me randomly, too. I think it’s somehow confusing users with each other, like the way it occasionally autofills the name and email with somebody else’s information.

      Brian has always had a fondness for bleeding edge web design, this has led to the site bleeding out and having to be resurrected several times already. There’s a lot to be said for stodgy and just works, when it comes to web platforms.

      At least the recent instances of this search bug have cleared when I reloaded the site.

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