The Boring Company raised $3 billion from the United Arab Emirates. The company now claims a $23 billion valuation. These are the same people who spent years promising to solve Los Angeles traffic by building a tunnel that fits one Tesla at a time.
The UAE looked at a company that digs holes and said yes, this is worth more than the entire GDP of Monaco. They wired $3 billion to a firm whose biggest accomplishment is a 1.7-mile loop under Las Vegas that moves 4,400 passengers per hour. For context, a single subway line moves ten times that in the same timeframe. But sure, let's call it innovation.
Retail traders will see this headline and think it's their signal to buy tunnel-adjacent microcaps. They'll scroll past the part where the valuation is completely made up by the people writing the check. Private valuations work like this: someone agrees to pay a price, then everyone pretends that price applies to all shares, including the ones that can't be sold, won't be sold, and exist only to keep the founder's ego inflated.
The Middle East has spent decades turning oil money into the world's most expensive disappointments. They built islands shaped like palm trees that are sinking. They built a city in the desert that requires air-conditioned sidewalks. Now they're funding a tunnel company run by a man who tweets through SEC investigations. This checks every box on the sovereign wealth fund bingo card.
The best part? The Boring Company's technology is literally just digging. Humans have been digging for thousands of years. We're very good at it. But slap a billionaire's name on a hole in the ground and suddenly it's worth $23 billion. The Suez Canal cost $8 billion in today's money and actually changed global trade. The Boring Company made a tunnel for Teslas in Vegas.
Dubai's gonna need that tunnel when the sea level rises and their palm islands are fully underwater.
Photo by on Unsplash
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