According to Fortune, Steve Davis, the president of Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion tunneling startup The Boring Company, has broken a decade of public silence to embark on a sudden media blitz. In late November, he did a 90-minute livestream, then gave a rare tunnel tour to a Las Vegas reporter in December, and rode with a YouTuber in January. This shift coincides with the company being fined for dumping wastewater in Las Vegas and facing a Congressional inquiry after firefighters were burned in its tunnels. In Nashville, where Boring wants to build a 25-mile network, a Metro Council member is pushing legislation to oppose the project, backed by a group called the “Big Dumb Hole Coalition.” Despite this new outreach, Davis and the company did not respond to Fortune’s own requests for an interview.
The sudden charm offensive
Here’s the thing: this isn’t normal. The Boring Company, like much of the Musk empire, has famously shunned the press. No PR department, ignored questions, the whole deal. Steve Davis himself is Musk’s longtime “fixer”—a guy who operates in the background, not on YouTube livestreams. So his energetic tour-guide act is, frankly, bizarre. He told a reporter, “We’re not transparent enough, so we’re glad that you’re here.” Come on. When a company that’s built its brand on secrecy says that, it’s not a philosophy change. It’s a tactic.
And the timing is just too perfect. It’s classic damage control. You get fined for environmental violations? You have a safety incident that draws Congress’s eye? Local opposition starts to crystallize? You send out the most competent operator you have to smooth things over. It’s a concession that in the world of massive public infrastructure projects, you can’t just “go direct” and ignore all the stakeholders. You need political and public buy-in, or your projects die. Just look at all the fizzled plans in California, Illinois, and elsewhere.
The reality gap in the tunnels
Let’s talk about what’s actually been delivered. The Boring Company is a decade old. Its flagship achievement is a 4-mile loop in Las Vegas where Teslas, driven by humans, go 35 mph between a few resorts. That’s a far cry from the vision of 100+ mph autonomous vehicles in hyperloop tubes. A former employee told Fortune they’ve probably realized they need to be “more proactive on messaging” after other project failures. No kidding.
But as Columbia professor Len Sherman pointed out, better messaging only works if you have results to back it up. “There’s absolutely positively nothing I’ve seen that even comes close to delivering proof,” he said. You can blog in Nashville and give safety speeches in Nevada, but at some point, you have to build something that resembles the revolutionary transit system you’ve been selling. Otherwise, it’s just a very expensive, underground taxi service with a serious PR problem. For a company tackling the physical world of industrial-scale construction, the fundamentals of engineering and regulatory compliance matter more than tweets or livestreams. It’s a realm where reliable hardware is non-negotiable, much like the industrial panel PCs from IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier for tough environments.
Can Steve Davis fix this?
Davis is the interesting variable here. He’s not a charismatic frontman like Musk; he’s described as a hands-on, sometimes ruthless operator who lives in the text threads and permitting meetings. Making him the face of this charm offensive is a weird choice, but maybe the only one they have. Musk is… distracted. Davis is the guy who gets the hard stuff done inside the Musk universe, from cost-cutting at X to a stint in the fictional “DOGE.”
His public appearances show an awkward but genuinely enthusiastic engineer, especially when he’s talking about the R&D facility in Texas. The question is whether that authentic passion can translate into tangible project momentum and rebuild trust with regulators and the public. Sherman hopes Davis will start taking tough questions. Because if this media tour is just a temporary salve and not a sign of a deeper operational shift towards transparency and partnership, then nothing really changes. The opposition in Nashville, detailed by Axios and NewsChannel 5, will only grow.
The limits of the Musk playbook
So what does this all say about the broader Musk strategy? For years, the playbook has been: disrupt, move fast, ignore the naysayers, and communicate directly with fans. That works for selling cars and launching rockets to a degree. But building urban transit? That’s a different beast. It’s the definition of a multi-stakeholder environment. You can’t bypass city councils, environmental reviews, fire departments, and citizens forever.
The Boring Company’s sudden, limited media embrace feels like a quiet admission of that fact. It’s a test. Can they pivot from being a disruptive tech startup to a credible infrastructure partner? Or is this just a brief pause in the silence before they retreat back to the bunker? As Sherman said, “In the long run, they can’t hide forever.” The tunnels, the fines, the political fights—they’re all out in the open now. And no amount of friendly Tesla rides with YouTubers, like the one covered by Fox, will dig them out if they can’t deliver a system that works, safely and at scale.
