Elon Musk’s Boring Company Gets Bite at Major Amtrak Contract

Elon Musk just might be able to catch the midnight train connecting Baltimore to Virginia, via the nation’s capital. The US government has tapped the billionaire’s Boring Company as a potential candidate to help build an $8.5 billion tunnel on the busy route, according to The New York Times. 

The Federal Railroad Administration, the agency that oversees US railroads, asked Musk’s company to check in on the progress of the 1.4-mile Frederick Douglass tunnel, which will replace an existing one that’s more than 150 years old. The project, which Amtrak has called its “single largest infrastructure effort,” has struggled with missed deadlines and ballooning costs. 

The Boring Company, which is competing with other firms for the contract, told Amtrak it can help build the tunnel cheaper and more efficiently.

Train to Nowhere

Elon Musk has a complicated history with Amtrak. He has publicly criticized the service and other transportation projects, saying rail travel should be privatized. Amtrak responded that it’s on track to turn a profit for the first time in its history. 

At the same time, Musk has promoted his own ideas about the future of getting from point A to B — rockets from SpaceX and cars from Tesla, along with tunnels from the Boring Company. But so far, the Boring Company has lived up to its name more than to Musk’s dreams:

• The Las Vegas car tunnel it completed the first phase of last year has been called pointless and impractical and scrutinized for potentially skirting labor and safety regulations. 
• Other ambitious projects have quietly been scrapped or delayed, including the East Coast hyperloop Musk said he got a verbal greenlight to build in 2017. A loop between Baltimore and Washington was supposed to be finished in 2021, but the project was removed from the company’s website that year instead.

Crossed Tracks: If the Boring Company wins this contract, it could be a conflict of interest for Musk, who has a long LinkedIn resume. In addition to owning or running six companies, he led the Department of Government Efficiency to cut more than 280,000 government jobs this year, Challenger found. Several of Musk’s companies do business with government agencies that could be wary of DOGE’s bite — or just aware that Musk is Trump’s BFF. Last month, the White House installed SpaceX’s Starlink internet service and hosted a Tesla-only car show on the lawn.