Elon Musk Does a Donald Trump, Starts Fundraising by Selling Hats

Announcements from Elon Musk—famous for pioneering electric cars and revolutionizing space rockets—are often greeted with a frenzied hysteria. His latest announcement was no different—even if it was just a hat.

Musk took to Twitter on Wednesday, October 18, to reveal "the world's most boring hat," the first piece of merchandise for The Boring Company, his tunnel-digging company. Within hours, the tweet was 'favorited' almost 10 thousand times.

When asked by one Twitter user if the $20 hat was being used as a fundraising mechanism for The Boring Company, Musk responded: "Gonna build that tunnel one hat at a time."

The Boring Company joins Musk's other business ventures, which include electric car company Tesla, space firm SpaceX, artificial intelligence research non-profit OpenAI and brain-computer interface startup Neuralink.

"To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels," The Boring Company's website states. "Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on your head.

"A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The key to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of 10 or more—this is the goal of The Boring Company."

Musk already has a history of drastically reducing the cost of travel through major innovations, such as being the first to develop a reusable rocket through his SpaceX company.

"It's just as fundamental in rocketry as it is in other forms of transport, such as cars or planes or bicycles," Musk said in a post-launch briefing last year of his company's Falcon 9 rocket.

To reduce the cost of tunneling, The Boring Company says it will reduce the diameter of a one-lane tunnel from approximately 28 feet to under 14 feet. To make this safe for vehicles to travel in, cars would be placed on a "stabilized electric skate" and propelled through the tunnels by an electric motor.

A video released by the company shows how this futuristic concept might work, with the electric skates travelling at around 125 mph.

The Boring Company's website is now listing job openings for designers, engineers and technicians, as well as a "California Professional Geologist."

Beyond transporting cars and other vehicles, tunnels dug by The Boring Company would also make Musk's vision for a Hyperloop transportation system viable.

The 760 mph vacuum tube transportation—first envisioned by Musk in 2013—has attracted interest from the likes of Richard Branson and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Reports last year suggested the Russian leader may be planning a 21st Century Silk Road using a Hyperloop network to connect Russia with China.