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Pablo Escobar’s brother wants $100 million in Tesla shares for Not-a-Flamethrower dispute
Elon Musk is no stranger to taking on powerful forces that stand in the way of his Earth-changing missions, but drug lord families still seem like an odd addition to the list. Despite the improbability, infamous cartel founder and cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar has recently been linked to the serial entrepreneur over The Boring Company’s Not-a-Flamethrower, specifically through Escobar’s brother. Roberto Escobar claims Musk stole the Flamethrower design from him and plans to sue over it – unless Musk agrees to hand over $100 million dollars in either cash or Tesla shares, that is.
“Elon we both know you stole from me, I am OK to settle this right now for $100 million. Tesla shares is OK or cash. I will win in court, and you will lose more than $100 million,” Escobar said in a statement to The Next Web. “Maybe I will make myself new Tesla CEO with the courts?… Let’s settle this like gentleman. Send me the Tesla Shares to Escobar Inc.”
Someone associated with Musk’s business activities reportedly spent time with Escobar (the living brother, not the deceased drug lord) in the summer of 2017 wherein an Escobar Inc. toy flamethrower concept was discussed, according to a report originally published by TMZ. The Boring Company’s Flamethrower, announced in January 2018, apparently was a dead ringer for Escobar’s idea design-wise, leading cartel leader’s brother to angrily conclude that his idea had been stolen. Musk later responded to TMZ‘s report on Twitter, saying “It’s Not a Flamethrower, Mr Escobar.”
The dispute is interesting and unusual, to say the least, but we can be sure there’s one thing Boring clearly did not get from Escobar Inc. – the flamethrower’s purpose.
“I want the people to be able to burn money, like me and Pablo used to do. I burned probably a couple of billion dollars over the years. Literally burning the money. For many reasons,” Escobar was quoted as saying about the device.
Escobar is now weighing his legal options against Musk, although it’s not clear what options are exactly available.
Prior to 2013, if an inventor could demonstrate their invention predated someone else’s patented invention for the same thing, they could sue and work out a financially retroactive deal to be compensated for their work (more or less). However, with the enactment of the America Invents Act, the United States now has a “first to file” system that only gives inventors one year from public disclosure of their invention to file for patent protection. In Escobar’s case, he’s basically too late to file for a patent where it would matter most to Musk – in the United States. The only other legal workaround would seem to be a lawsuit over a non-disclosure agreement, which doesn’t appear to have happened here. It’s not enough that there were witnesses to the discussion, and it also doesn’t seem like there was even a handshake-type understanding over any claims to the design.
Another thing worth mentioning is that if The Boring Company has already filed for patent protection of its Not-a-Flamethrower design, it doesn’t appear to have published yet based on patent database searches. Since the idea was disclosed in January 2018 (or even 2017, based on Escobar’s claims), it’s now considered ‘prior art’ and renders any other highly similar patent filings ineligible for protection. It would appear that Escobar’s best bet for legal protection would have been to file for a patent right after Musk’s flamethrower was announced so both devices would have been in that muddy one-year window and open to a court fight. Alas, it’s all water under the bridge now.
The Boring Company had a few options to pursue here, actually. First, the tunneling venture could have filed for a design patent which only protects what their flamethrower looks like. These types of patent applications usually issue to full patents quickly unless the patent examiner objects to it based on similar designs. If Boring went this route, we should see a patent show up shortly if one was filed around the time of the product announcement in January 2018.
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A second option The Boring Company could have taken was to file for a utility patent, meaning there was some sort of technical merit to the Not-a-Flamethrower’s design. These publish 18 months after filing unless non-publication is specifically requested. If Boring went this route, well, there are so many timelines that could have been taken, it’s hard to say whether we’ll see anything until a patent issues, assuming one issues at all. Regardless, the patent route was Escobar’s only real route for lawsuit-driven compensation, and he seems out of luck.
Perhaps in response to recent publicity, the Escobar Inc. Flamethrower just went on sale for $250, and according to its company website’s History page, 20,000 units will be produced. This, of course, is the exact amount the Boring Company sold at the original price of $500. Among other interesting news items, one of the gems from that same History page reads, “2004 – Roberto de Jesus Escobar Gaviria is freed from Itagui Prison based on excellent behavior.” This important moment in the Escobar Inc. chronicles is surely only matched by the successful launch of Escobar Inc.’s Flamethrower for burning cold hard cash in cocaine kingpin fashion.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
