‘We have consistently flirted with death’: Elon Musk wanted the Boring Co. to build a tunnel system below Las Vegas. Former employees say they feared for their lives while working there
Last May, an employee from the Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel construction startup, sent a late-night email to its then–safety manager, Wayne Merideth.
“I feel that the company as a whole has been very fortunate these past few months that there hasn’t been a fatality,” the employee from the Bastrop, Texas, worksite wrote at 1:53 a.m. in the email, which was seen by Fortune. “We have consistently flirted with death.”
The employee told Merideth in the email that, just recently, six of 12 passive articulation cylinders—the parts of the machine that would help Boring’s tunneling machine turn as it digs through the earth—failed while he was inside it, meaning that it “could have split with me inside it.” No one had warned him, he said. The employee wrote about a lack of accountability, and that he had “lost all confidence” in the company’s management to keep him safe.
“I have watched my friends get injured due to the fast pace we’ve been running,” he wrote. “I refuse to be the first fatality in this company’s history. No tunnel is worth a single person’s life.”
