Musk Says Boring Company Is Working on a Simpler Hyperloop for Austin to San Antonio
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on "a simple precursor Hyperloop" between Austin and San Antonio, Texas. He posted the statements on September 20, 2026, and they were reported that day by Bloomberg and TechCrunch.
The proposal is described as a tunnel connecting the two cities. Musk put the journey time at less than 30 minutes, according to that TechCrunch report. A separate report described the plan as a 200-mph hyperloop in Texas, per Seeking Alpha.
The comments came as a reply to an AI-generated video showing a science-fiction future with human colonies on other worlds. Musk re-posted the video and wrote, "This is the future we shall bring into being."
The Boring Company shared Musk's Hyperloop statement on X. The company said it "would be excited and honored to build this massive infrastructure project."
As described by the company, The Boring Company creates transportation, utility and freight tunnels. It designs and makes a tunnel boring machine named Prufrock, essentially a large automated drill for digging tunnels. It builds and operates a transportation system called Loop, tunnels where vehicles drive point to point. Its stated mission is to solve traffic, enable rapid point-to-point transportation and transform cities.
In Las Vegas, the company runs a system combining tunnels and surface routes. It recently raised a $3 billion funding round led by the United Arab Emirates.
The Austin-San Antonio idea is not new. On August 21, 2022, Musk wrote it would be cool to do a much simplified Hyperloop demo tunnel between maybe Austin and San Antonio. In a follow-up post that day, he said Boring tunnels for such a demo could pair with FSD, Tesla's driver-assistance software, to operate driverlessly in the tunnel. Texas political interest also predates the current statement. On December 20, 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted on X that he expected a hyperloop connecting Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.
A prior Boring Company tunnel plan in San Antonio fizzled, according to an October 3, 2025 report in the San Antonio Business Journal. After that plan fizzled, the company eyed a new underground tunnel near Austin, the same report said.
The broader context here is the gap between a posted intent and a permitted, financed build. What is verifiable now is the claim of work on a precursor system, a target travel time, a speed figure in secondary reporting, and a company willing to take the job. What is not verifiable from these facts is route, tunnel length, station locations, environmental review, funding for this specific project, or schedule.
In my view, the technical wording matters. Precursor and much simplified point away from a full Hyperloop, pods in a near-vacuum tube, and toward Loop-style tunnels run at higher speed. The 2022 reference to FSD in the tunnel points the same way, driverless operation in a constrained, mapped corridor rather than open-road driving. The Las Vegas precedent and the in-house Prufrock machine are worth watching, since cost and throughput usually decide if intercity tunnels move forward. For now this is a plan described on X, not construction. Filings, rights-of-way, and any formal agreement with the cities or state will matter more than further posts, and sub-30-minute service could change commuting and freight if frequency and price allow.
