The Boring Company

Stripe

The Boring Company

The Boring Company's business model is infrastructure contracting — they bid on tunnel construction projects and get paid by the clients (usually government agencies or private venues). Revenue comes from construction contracts for building the tunnels and from operating the transit systems within them.

The core economic thesis is that tunnel boring is absurdly expensive — typically $100 million to $1 billion per mile — because the technology hasn't meaningfully improved in decades. The Boring Company claims they can reduce costs by 10x through smaller tunnel diameters, continuous boring (no stopping to install tunnel walls), electric machines instead of diesel, and autonomous operation.

The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop was built for $47 million — about 1.3 miles of twin tunnels. That's roughly $18 million per lane-mile, which is genuinely cheap compared to traditional subway construction.

Whether that cost advantage holds at scale on larger, more complex projects remains unproven.

Stripe

Stripe charges a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's it.

No setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden charges. The simplicity is the product.

When a customer pays on a website using Stripe, Stripe handles everything — fraud detection, currency conversion, bank transfers, tax calculation, compliance. The merchant just sees money arrive in their account.

On top of the core payments, Stripe has built an entire financial infrastructure stack. Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplace payments, Atlas for incorporating a company, Issuing for creating virtual cards, Treasury for banking-as-a-service, and Radar for fraud prevention.

They're basically building the financial plumbing for the entire internet.

The Boring Company

The Boring Company started, quite literally, with a tweet. In December 2016, Elon Musk was stuck in LA traffic and tweeted "Traffic is driving me nuts.

Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." Most people assumed he was joking. He wasn't.

Within weeks, Musk had a team digging a test trench in the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne, California. The initial concept was ambitious: a network of underground tunnels where cars would be loaded onto electric sleds and whisked through tubes at 150 mph.

Think the Hyperloop but underground and for individual vehicles.

The company was formally incorporated in late 2016 as a subsidiary of SpaceX. The name was classic Musk — a pun on both tunnel boring and the company's supposed boringness compared to rockets and electric cars.

Early funding came from Musk personally and from a surprisingly successful merchandise operation: The Boring Company sold 20,000 branded flamethrowers (rebranded as "Not-a-Flamethrower" for legal reasons) for $500 each in 2018, generating $10 million in revenue before they built a single tunnel.

Stripe

Patrick Collison was 19. His brother John was 17.

They had already built and sold a company — Auctomatic, an eBay auction tool — for $5 million while still teenagers in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick went to MIT, John went to Harvard, and they both dropped out because they had a better idea.

The idea was embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. In 2010, accepting payments on the internet was a nightmare.

You had to get a merchant account, negotiate with a payment processor, deal with a gateway provider, handle PCI compliance, and write thousands of lines of code. It took weeks or months.

The Collisons thought it should take five minutes.

They built a simple API — seven lines of code — that let any developer start accepting credit card payments immediately. No merchant account.

No paperwork. No phone calls with banks.

Just paste seven lines of code and you're in business. They originally called it /dev/payments, then changed it to Stripe in 2011.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the PayPal mafia — were among the first investors. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz piled in soon after.

The Collisons had built exactly what every developer on Earth had been wishing for.

The Boring Company

The strategy is to prove the concept in Las Vegas and then replicate it in cities worldwide. The Vegas Loop is the showcase project — a real, operating system that city officials and transportation planners can visit and experience.

Las Vegas was a strategic choice. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was a willing early customer.

Nevada has friendlier regulations than most states. The flat desert geology is easier to bore through than urban bedrock.

And tourism means high passenger volume to demonstrate utilization.

The plan is to expand from convention center shuttle to city-wide transit system. Clark County approved the full 68-mile Vegas Loop expansion.

If it works — moving tens of thousands of passengers daily, reliably, at low cost — it becomes the proof point for selling Loop systems to other cities.

Stripe

Stripe grew almost entirely through developer love. They didn't hire a sales team for years.

They didn't run ads. They just built the best developer documentation anyone had ever seen and let word of mouth do the rest.

The developer-first strategy was deliberate. The Collisons realized that in a startup, the developer usually decides which payment provider to use.

If you make the developer happy, you win the company. Stripe's API documentation became legendary — clear, beautiful, with working code examples in every language.

They also grew by growing with their customers. Early Stripe customers included tiny startups that later became giants — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify.

As those companies scaled to billions in revenue, Stripe's processing volume scaled with them. Stripe didn't need to acquire new customers because its existing ones kept getting bigger.

The international expansion was methodical. Instead of launching everywhere at once like Uber, Stripe carefully added country after country, making sure each one worked perfectly with local payment methods, currencies, and regulations.

By 2024 they were processing payments in 195 countries.

The Boring Company

The core criticism is that The Boring Company has essentially built a taxi tunnel, not a transit system. Traditional subways move thousands of people per hour in high-capacity trains.

The Vegas Loop moves people in individual Teslas — one car at a time. Critics argue this is fundamentally less efficient and will never match the throughput of real mass transit.

Scaling beyond Las Vegas is unproven. Urban tunneling in cities with existing underground infrastructure — sewers, subway lines, utility conduits, building foundations — is exponentially harder than boring through Nevada desert.

The cost advantages may not hold in complex geology.

The autonomous driving requirement is another dependency. The long-term vision requires fully autonomous vehicles navigating tunnels at high speed.

Currently, the Vegas Loop uses human drivers in Teslas going 35 mph. Removing human drivers and increasing speed are both necessary for the economics to work at scale, and both depend on Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology actually becoming fully autonomous.

Stripe

Valuation whiplash. In 2021, Stripe hit a peak valuation of $95 billion during the fintech boom.

By 2023, they had to mark it down to $50 billion during the tech correction — a 47% drop that made headlines everywhere. Employees who had been paper millionaires suddenly weren't.

The valuation has since recovered to $91 billion after a secondary share sale in 2025, but those two years were rough for morale.

Competition is relentless. Adyen, the Dutch payments company, has been eating into Stripe's enterprise market.

Square (now Block) competes on the small business side. PayPal is everywhere.

New fintech players pop up constantly. The payments business has razor-thin margins and everyone is fighting for the same 2.9%.

Going public is the elephant in the room. Stripe has been expected to IPO for years.

Investors, employees, and the media keep asking when. The Collisons have consistently said they're in no rush, but with $8.7 billion raised and thousands of employees holding stock options, the pressure to provide liquidity is enormous.

As of 2025, they've opted for secondary sales instead of a public offering.

The Boring Company

Prufrock — the next-generation tunnel boring machine designed to bore at over 1 mile per week, compared to the industry standard of roughly 300 feet per week. The name comes from T.S.

Eliot's poem. Vegas Loop — the operational system under Las Vegas with 93 stations planned across the Strip, downtown, and the airport.

When complete, it would be a 68-mile network. Loop Transit System — the overall concept of small-diameter tunnels with autonomous electric vehicles providing point-to-point underground transportation.

Not-a-Flamethrower — technically a roofing torch in a Nerf gun shell. Sold 20,000 units at $500 each.

Not really a product anymore but too iconic to leave out.

Stripe

Stripe Payments is the core — accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 135+ payment methods in 195 countries. Stripe Connect lets marketplaces and platforms pay out to sellers (Shopify, Lyft, DoorDash all use it).

Stripe Billing handles subscription and recurring billing. Stripe Atlas lets you incorporate a US company from anywhere in the world — fill out a form, get a Delaware C-corp, bank account, and tax ID in days.

Stripe Radar uses machine learning to block fraud in real time. Stripe Treasury lets platforms offer banking services to their customers.

Stripe Tax automatically calculates and collects sales tax in every jurisdiction.

The Boring Company

Elon Musk funded the company initially from personal wealth. Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Craft Ventures, DFJ Growth, and 8VC participated in the $675 million Series C in 2022 that valued the company at $5.7 billion.

Vy Capital and Brookfield also invested. The investor base is heavily Musk-aligned — many of the same funds that back SpaceX and Tesla.

Stripe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, GV (Google Ventures), Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford