An Imperative for Elon Musk and the Politicians from the People of Las Vegas: Close the Loop

Start with what the Loop actually does. After years of tunneling, it runs barely 2.2 miles — single Teslas carrying one to four people at a time, shuttling Strip tourists between convention halls. Its best-ever demonstrated throughput was about 1,355 passengers an hour, less than a third of the 4,400 an hour your own contract promised. It does not serve Henderson. It does not serve Summerlin. It does not serve North Las Vegas. It does not serve the people who actually need transit.

The real problem — moving people around the Strip and across the valley — is real and worth solving. A tram, a light rail line, a genuine subway could carry a city. But that takes study, and a solution designed for the public rather than for a brand. What you’ve built instead is a strange vanity project with no clear use for the people who live here. A wrong solution, looking for a problem to justify it.

This is where it stops being a curiosity and becomes a harm. In 2023 alone, your company reported 42 worker injuries to OSHA — chemical burns and rashes from the tunneling accelerant MasterRoc AGA 41S, the caustic muck that pools as deep as fifteen inches and keeps flowing even when the boring machine sits idle.

In December 2024, on the second day of a Clark County Fire Department rescue drill, that muck filled firefighters' boots. Two were hospitalized with chemical burns. The scars are permanent. One of your workers had his pelvis crushed. Another was shocked by an electrical panel. Your own former safety manager wrote that the company had "consistently flirted with death."

These are not statistics to the families involved. They are people you sent underground without the protection the job demanded.

A private company is poisoning public ground. Regulators have cited The Boring Company for nearly 800 environmental violations. The Clark County Water Reclamation District fined you nearly half a million dollars for pumping toxic drilling fluids straight into public manholes without pretreatment — then, in their words, "feigning compliance" and doing it again. They called the conduct knowing and intentional.

Those fluids don’t stay where you put them. Green ponds, slurry pooling on tunnel floors, chemicals working their way toward a desert city’s water supply. This is the most precious thing we have out here, and you are treating it as your drainage.

Here is what convinces us this will not fix itself. Nevada OSHA issued three "willful" violations — its most serious classification — and more than $425,000 in penalties over the firefighter burns. One day later, your company president called the Governor’s office. The citations were withdrawn before a hastily convened meeting had even formally begun. A document in the case file was later found altered to hide that the meeting happened.

When the richest man in the world is fined in Nevada, the fine disappears. That is not enforcement. That is a private plaything, handed to a billionaire by politicians who answer to him instead of to us — with no input from the people who have to live above the tunnels.

Stop the Loop. Now.

We are not naïve about why this has gone on so long.

Regulatory capture. The Governor’s own infrastructure point person is a former seven-year Tesla employee. The OSHA citations were pulled before the meeting that withdrew them had officially started.

Light-touch oversight. 689 missed mandatory inspections. Excavation begun before the permits were finalized. No independent environmental manager hired, though the rules require one.

Political prestige. Local officials want Las Vegas to look "tech-forward," so they defer to you and your tunnels rather than to their constituents.

A "cowboy" safety culture — your own current and former employees' word — where speed comes first and the people doing the digging come last.

None of that is a reason to keep going. All of it is a reason to stop.

Mr. Musk, you like to talk about closing loops — finishing the job, completing the circuit. So finish this one. Close the Vegas Loop. Clean up what you put down there. And close the loop on accountability you’ve spent years routing around.

The ground under this city belongs to the people of this city. Give it back to us whole.