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Elon Musk’s Boring Company gets stern dismissal from tunneling veteran: ‘Something like that doesn’t work’
Elon Musk’s companies have a pretty strong tendency to attract their own fair share of critics, including those in notable positions in their respective industries. This was the case with Tesla and its electric vehicles, and the same was true with SpaceX and its reusable orbital-class rockets. The Boring Company, another one of Elon Musk’s ventures, is now gathering its own skeptics as well, with Martin Herrenknecht, the founder of Herrenknecht AG, one of the world’s premier tunnel boring machine (TBM) makers, recently expressing his doubts about the tunneling startup.
German business publication Manager Magazin recently interviewed Herrenknecht. When asked about Elon Musk’s tunneling aspirations with The Boring Company, the Herrenknecht AG founder was dismissive, noting that he believes the Tesla and SpaceX CEO is overrated, at least when it comes to tunnel construction. The executive added that his company’s TBMs are far more advanced than the Boring Company’s tunneling machines today.
“For my industry, I see Musk above all as a skillful whisker. He claims that he can build tunnels faster and cheaper than others and is causing a stir. On his reference project in Las Vegas, Musk drilled 20 meters in one week. We can do the same route in one day,” he said. (Despite Herrenknecht’s statement, Teslarati has been informed that The Boring Company has already managed to dig 40 meters in a 24-hour period using its first machine, Godot.)
Explaining further, Herrenknecht noted that it would be very challenging for Elon Musk to become competent in the tunneling industry. The executive noted that he believes The Boring Company will not reach the same heights as Musk’s other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX in the next ten years or so due to the complexity of the tunneling segment. “I think the degree of difficulty and complexity in tunneling are higher,” Herrenknecht remarked.
Interestingly enough, the executive also shared a personal anecdote about Elon Musk himself. As per Herrenknecht, Musk actually approached Herrenknecht AG for the potential purchase of a tunnel boring machine for The Boring Company in the past. However, during the negotiations, Elon Musk reportedly exhibited “strange business behavior,” leaving the room for long periods and suggesting numerous ideas. Musk was also adamant in reducing the price of TBMs from $10 million to just $2 million.
“It was pretty chaotic because he left the room several times for a long time and kept coming up with different ideas… Something like that doesn’t work,” Herrenknecht said.
Needless to say, The Boring Company did not purchase a TBM from Herrenknecht AG. The tunneling startup did manage to purchase its tunneling machines from another company, the first of which was used to complete a test tunnel in Hawthorne, CA. Elon Musk has also announced that The Boring Company is working on developing an all-electric TBM called Prufrock, which has the potential to dig tunnels significantly faster than the industry’s best today.
Elon Musk’s ill-fated meeting with Herrenknecht AG echoes some elements of the Tesla CEO’s meeting with the Russians in 2001. Back then, Musk was aiming to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles that could be used to launch some payloads to space. The discussions ultimately broke down because of the missiles’ cost, and on the trip back to the United States, Musk figured that building rockets would be feasible. SpaceX was founded the year later, and the rest is history.
It remains to be seen if The Boring Company would be the disruptor that Elon Musk plans it to be. That being said, skeptics of the tunneling startup today seem to be following the same patterns as Tesla and SpaceX’s critics, most of whom have been proven wrong over the years. If any, Herrenknecht’s references to the Tesla CEO’s aggressive cost-cutting demands and out-of-the-box ideas are classic Elon Musk. And just like critics before him, the executive reacted adversely to the CEO.
It would then be interesting to see if The Boring Company, at least in the coming years, could rise enough to challenge the titans of the TBM industry, just like its fellow Elon Musk-led companies Tesla and SpaceX. At least for now, history seems to favor Elon Musk and his bold companies, all of which are noted and respected for their unorthodox nature and aggressive strategies.
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
