Elon Musk has claimed that his company could build a transatlantic tunnel between New York and London for one thousand times less money than current estimates.
The tech mogul made the claim on X, a platform he runs, in response to a post estimating that such a project would cost $20 trillion (£15.7 trillion).
The post said: “Proposed $20 Trillion tunnel would get you from New York to London in 54 minutes.”
Musk replied: “The boring company could do it for 1000X less money.”
If correct, that would put the cost of building such a revolutionary infrastructure at a mere £15.7 billion.
Such a figure would be cheaper than the cost of the world’s current longest underwater tunnel, the 31-mile Channel Tunnel linking London and Paris, which cost £9 billion in 1984, approximately £18 billion in today’s money.
According to Forbes, the idea of a tunnel running between London and New York was first conceived by American researchers at MIT Ernst Frankel and Frank Davidson, who proposed a maglev vacuum train line that would cross the 3,500-mile distance between the metropolises and allow for speeds of up to 1,200 miles per hour.
If built, the tunnel would be one hundred times longer than the Channel Tunnel, revolutionising trade and relations between the two countries.
Musk has previously discussed his desire to build “supersonic” lines called hyperloops. In 2013, he proposed building a line between the California cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco that would carry small carriages at 700 miles per hour.
Since then, other firms have tried to build similar loops with varying degrees of success, including British billionaire Richard Branson, whose transportation company Virgin Hyperloop travelled 500 meters in a BIG-designed pod and reached speeds of 100 miles per hour in 2020.
The longest hyperloop journey in the world was carried out this year in Switzerland, where a team of scientists ran a pod for 11.8 kilometres at a top speed of 25 miles per hour.
Musk founded the Boring Company in 2016 to carry out some of his many infrastructure concepts.
In 2022, he announced a plan to build a tunnel for Teslas to drive underground and bypass traffic in Miami, but no movement has been observed regarding this plan.
A Wall Street Journal report claimed that Musk and The Boring Company had “backed out” on multiple cities to whom Musk’s company sent proposals.
In 2022, the New York Times cast doubt on the viability of these projects. The main problems continue to be funding and integration questions into the existing infrastructure systems.
“Some industry observers believe that regulatory, financial and political hurdles may doom hyperloop as a viable high-speed alternative to air travel,” said the New York Times.