Elon Musk Raised $3 Billion – and Asked Investors for Something Money Can’t Buy
The Boring Company’s unusual funding round reveals the people, permits, and suppliers that still constrain Musk’s empire
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Elon Musk just raised $3 billion – while giving his investors some unusual homework.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the tunneling company told certain investors they would also need to help recruit employees or assist with business development. That could mean introducing The Boring Company to government officials in places where it wants to build new tunnels.
In some cases, failing to produce viable job candidates could give the company the right to repurchase part of an investor’s stake.
Elon Musk responded to the report with just one word: “True.”
Then, on Sept. 9, The Boring Company announced a $3 billion Series D funding round that valued the business at $23 billion. That is roughly four times its $5.7 billion valuation from 2022.
The money will help expand the company’s engineering, production, and operations teams, support projects in Las Vegas, Nashville, and Dubai, and fund more than 150 kilometers of planned underground infrastructure across the UAE.
At first glance, this looks like another story about investors lining up to hand Musk billions.
Look closer, and it’s a story about what money alone can’t buy him.
The Boring Company is borrowing its investors’ networks to recruit engineers and open doors with local officials. Across Musk’s other businesses, outside suppliers provide the industrial equivalent: factories, components, power, and expertise he cannot create on demand.
Those outside networks are where Musk’s spending becomes other companies’ revenue.
Why The Boring Company Asked Investors for More Than Money
The Boring Company’s latest round included some of the largest and best-connected investors in the world.
Sequoia Capital. Andreessen Horowitz. Temasek. Baron Capital. UAE-backed entities.
These firms have plenty of money – and The Boring Company appears to want something more.
It wants hiring pipelines, local connections, and introductions to the people who control where projects can be built.
That makes this round look almost like a business-development network wrapped around a financing deal.
And the UAE’s involvement makes the strategy especially clear.
UAE-linked investors supplied the lead capital. The country is also where The Boring Company plans to deploy more than 150 kilometers of underground infrastructure, building on the Dubai Loop project already under contract.
The investors, customers, local institutions, and future construction sites are beginning to overlap.
That is useful when your product requires permission to tunnel underneath a major city.
Every new Loop requires a fresh set of engineering studies, utility maps, safety reviews, construction plans, local partners, and government approvals.
Dubai’s 48 Permits Show Why Capital Is Not Enough
The first phase of the Dubai Loop is expected to include roughly 6.4 kilometers of tunnel and four stations. Before digging can begin, The Boring Company says it must seek approximately 48 permits and no-objection certificates from around 10 different entities.
Musk may be able to design a faster tunneling machine – but he cannot make 10 separate agencies disappear.
The company still has to map underground utilities. It has to account for existing buildings and roads. It has to satisfy environmental, transportation, and public-safety standards and coordinate with officials who may never have approved a system like this before.
An introduction to the right government official may be worth more than another check. One experienced tunneling engineer may do more to keep a project on schedule than another glossy investor presentation.
The Boring Company is borrowing a human network because relationships, local knowledge, and specialized talent take years to build.
The same pattern extends beyond tunneling.
Across Musk’s Empire, Capital Is Only the Starting Point
SpaceX (SPCX) can build more powerful rockets. It still needs launch approvals, manufacturing capacity, specialty materials, advanced electronics, and thousands of highly trained workers.
SpaceXAI can build enormous computing clusters. Those systems still need power, grid connections, cooling equipment, networking, chips, and physical sites capable of supporting them.
Tesla (TSLA) can develop robotaxis, humanoid robots, and next-generation factories. Turning those products into large businesses still requires regulators, fleet operations, charging and service infrastructure, sensors, semiconductors, and manufacturing partners.
Musk has spent decades attacking slow, expensive industries with better engineering. But better engineering does not eliminate the world surrounding the machine.
A tunnel still passes under public land. A rocket still needs permission to launch. A data center still needs electricity. A robot still needs thousands of components that have to work together reliably.
As the projects get larger, those surrounding constraints become more important.
And increasingly, capital is not the scarcest input.
Money Moves Fast. Infrastructure Doesn’t.
The Boring Company has moved beyond just pitching tunnels. Las Vegas is operating. Nashville is under construction. Dubai is under contract. And Tesla already uses one of its tunnels to move finished Cybertrucks beneath a Texas highway.
But digging beneath public land comes with a different kind of challenge.
Nevada lawmakers have scrutinized the Vegas Loop following workplace-safety complaints, alleged environmental violations, and nearly $600,000 in fines. The company has pointed to its inspections and employee training in response.
Now the homework starts to make sense: when your biggest obstacles are permits, inspections, and unfamiliar regulators, the most valuable thing an investor can hand you isn’t another check.
Investors supply the human network, and outside vendors supply the physical one.
Musk can bring some of that work in-house. He can write large checks and push teams to move faster.
But trusted relationships, qualified factories, scarce capacity, and years of specialized know-how still sit outside his companies.
Musk’s companies get the headlines. The companies that turn the money into working infrastructure get the orders.
The Investment Clue Is What Musk Cannot Build Himself
The Boring Company needs people and institutions capable of turning capital into tunnels.
Across Musk’s broader empire, that list expands to factories with qualified capacity, utilities with power available now, suppliers whose components have survived years of testing, and specialists who know how to navigate complex approvals.
Those resources take years to assemble – and many still sit outside Musk’s companies.
That is where investors should look.
The direct Musk businesses may capture the upside from rockets, robots, AI campuses, and underground transportation. But every expansion sends money into the smaller companies supplying the physical capabilities his empire still leans on.
I have spent months mapping those dependencies across all of Musk’s companies.
And in a first-of-its-kind InvestorPlace workshop, I map Musk’s empire on screen and trace the money from his companies into the outside suppliers they still cannot operate without.
We zero in on the hardest bottlenecks and the companies positioned to fill them as his spending accelerates.
Musk can raise billions in a day. Turning those billions into working machines takes a supply chain he cannot build overnight.
See the companies sitting between Musk’s money and his ambitions right here.
