Yahoo Finance ‘We have consistently flirted with death’: Elon Musk wanted the Boring Co. to build a tunnel system below Las Vegas. Former employees say they feared for their lives while working there
Last May, an employee from the Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel construction startup, sent a late-night email to its then–safety manager, Wayne Merideth.
“I feel that the company as a whole has been very fortunate these past few months that there hasn’t been a fatality,” the employee from the Bastrop, Texas, worksite wrote at 1:53 a.m. in the email, which was seen by Fortune. “We have consistently flirted with death.”
The employee told Merideth in the email that, just recently, six of 12 passive articulation cylinders—the parts of the machine that would help Boring’s tunneling machine turn as it digs through the earth—failed while he was inside it, meaning that it “could have split with me inside it.” No one had warned him, he said. The employee wrote about a lack of accountability, and that he had “lost all confidence” in the company’s management to keep him safe.
“I have watched my friends get injured due to the fast pace we’ve been running,” he wrote. “I refuse to be the first fatality in this company’s history. No tunnel is worth a single person’s life.”
The email was one of a long stream of complaints brought to Merideth that he says he tried to address, to little avail, in his role as safety manager for the Boring Company, where he oversaw the project sites in Las Vegas and Bastrop during his time at the company from January 2022 until July 2023.
“The conditions they were told to work in were honestly almost unbearable … I couldn’t fix any of the things that were wrong,” Merideth told Fortune in an interview, saying that he felt he was repeatedly undercut and isolated from being able to do his job by Boring’s president, Steve Davis, and the company’s senior management who reported to Davis.
Over the course of six months in 2023, Boring reported 36 injuries across its job sites to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), records show. They ranged from heat exhaustion, knee or head contusions, or an elbow or hand being crushed. An OSHA investigation last summer determined that working conditions at Boring’s project site—where it was digging a tunnel from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the Wynn and Encore resort on Las Vegas Boulevard—had exposed its employees to potentially serious injuries or, in some cases, even death. The investigation was sparked by an anonymous tip sent to Nevada’s state OSHA department alleging that 15 to 20 employees had been burned with accelerant chemicals in the tunnels.
Boring—the tunneling venture started by Elon Musk in 2016 to fix what he described as “soul-crushing” traffic—is eight years into its lofty mission to transport people underground faster, cheaper, autonomously, and more efficiently. Eventually, Musk envisions a Hyperloop system that will have people traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. He has raised more than $795 million in capital, at a $5.6 billion valuation, from venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Vy Capital to make it happen.
Currently, the company is a far cry from achieving anything close to it; its only working tunnel so far is a 2.4-mile stretch of tunnel in Las Vegas that operates like a Tesla chauffeur service for Las Vegas Convention Center attendees. Since Boring president Davis received initial approvals from Las Vegas city officials for the company’s grand plans to extend its tunnels below the entire city, former employees say that Davis has applied immense pressure and difficult deadlines to move the projects forward as soon as possible.
Long hours and weekends, high expectations, and rigid deadlines are hallmarks of Elon Musk’s companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly Twitter. Boring is hardly the first of Musk’s companies to face worker injuries and draw scrutiny from regulators. Reuters reported last year that an employee had died at a SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas, after he fell off a cargo load he was transporting by truck with coworkers.
Fortune’s investigation into the Boring Company’s handling of safety underscores how Musk’s futuristic vision and high expectations—enforced by Boring president Davis—can be potentially deadly in an industry as dangerous as construction. In the case of Boring, pressure to meet Musk’s lofty goals has led to a disregard for the safety of workers who are testing and building the tunnels underground and controlling dangerous equipment, according to findings from Fortune. To report this story, Fortune conducted interviews with 10 former employees and reviewed thousands of pages of records from a freedom of information act request, which included OSHA notes and employee interviews, photographs, videos, and text and email exchanges between employees and Boring management. Several of the former employees who spoke with Fortune said they had never set foot on a more dangerous construction site until working for the Boring Company. Six of them said they had either witnessed or were aware of incidents in which Boring’s employees could have died on-site.
As Davis and Boring’s ambitions around Vegas grew bigger, so too did red flags raised by employees. Four employees, including Merideth, say they each raised numerous complaints with Davis, HR, or Boring’s general counsel since 2022 that were ultimately ignored or not taken seriously. In October, Nevada’s OSHA department ended up issuing eight citations against the company, for hazards found on the site, a lack of proper safety equipment, and a lack of information and training the agency determined were in serious violation of state labor laws. The Boring Company, its labor lawyer, and all the managers named in this story, ignored Fortune’s requests for comment. The company vehemently denied OSHA’s findings in a letter it sent to the agency in November, stating that it “contests all citations issued by Nevada OSHA … including each item and sub-item, alleged violation descriptions, and assessed penalties.”
“In addition to TBC’s belief that Nevada OSHA has failed to establish that the alleged violations occurred, TBC contests all of the citations’ classifications, required abatement, abatement deadlines, proposed penalties, and every other matter subject to contest,” wrote Boring’s attorney, Dale Kuykendall, in the letter, which was reviewed by Fortune. Boring’s head of safety and security, Nick Smith, also told OSHA in an email exchange that they were abating OSHA’s complaints including by installing a decontamination shower at all Boring work areas and reviewing and updating their training materials. There will be an upcoming hearing by the OSHA Review Board regarding Boring contesting the citations, though a date has not yet been set, according to a representative from Nevada OSHA.
Sequoia declined to comment for this story, and other investors and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority didn’t respond to Fortune’s requests for comment. A representative for the Wynn and Encore resort told Fortune that it had not been aware of the “OSHA issues” and that they “did not happen when the Boring Company was on Encore property, nor did it involve any Encore employees.”
“The Boring Company is solely responsible for financing, managing, and executing the construction of the tunnel to connect Encore and other hotels to the Las Vegas Convention Center. Although the tunnel is not a project of Encore Las Vegas, however, it is our expectation that the project should be conducted to OSHA-compliant standards,” the representative said.
Former employees say they believe that many of the injuries at the Boring Company’s project sites were a direct result of the company’s deadline-obsessed culture as well as management de-prioritizing safety across the company.
“Safety was not a priority. Getting the tunnel done was Steve’s only goal—no matter what cost,” says a former employee who worked at Boring’s research and development facility in Bastrop and estimates they raised more than a dozen complaints with management during their time at the company.
“Everybody’s running on fumes. And once everybody’s running on fumes, that makes the conditions 10 times worse,” says a former Boring employee who helped dig the Encore tunnel. The person added: “They didn’t care about the people. They just cared about the results.”
‘Then I will feel a burn’
While Boring projects from California to Illinois, Texas, Florida, and Maryland have all fizzled or been disbanded, officials in Las Vegas gave Musk’s tunneling venture a contract to dig a handful of small tunnels below the convention center, and, later, awarded the company the initial approvals it needed to start digging out an extensive underground transit system below the entire city.
After getting the green light in Las Vegas to expand the system, Davis—a top Musk lieutenant who was formerly head of advanced projects at SpaceX and a temporary implant at X—shifted all attention to making it happen, looping in his direct reports Stuart Donnelly and John Malone to help oversee the mining operation and the digging. Boring’s Las Vegas tunneling crew began working on a tunnel from the convention center to the Westgate, a hotel one block off the Las Vegas Strip. Another tunnel would go to the Wynn and Encore resort on Las Vegas Boulevard.
In spring 2023, a team of more than a dozen people from Boring’s R&D facility in Bastrop arrived in Las Vegas to start digging the Encore tunnel. Along with them was the second rendition of Boring’s proprietary tunnel-digging machine they had been piloting in Texas: the Prufrock. The enormous machine had been broken down into three different pieces, then shipped over with all the supporting equipment on 58 trucks, one former employee said.
“Safety was not a priority. Getting the tunnel done was Steve’s only goal—no matter what cost.”
—a former Boring Company employee
Davis was known among employees to be rigid with the deadlines he agreed on with hotels or agencies in Las Vegas—and employees say the timelines set for them were impossible to meet. At Encore, the team was working to both dig the tunnel and clean up the jobsite before the parking lot across from the convention center was rented out—which would trap the machine underground during the next wave of conferences if the tunnel wasn’t completed. (Davis did not return repeated requests for comment from Fortune.)
It was all hands on deck to meet the deadline. Some of the crew members working at Boring’s concurrent Westgate jobsite were pulled over to help finish the project, former employees say. And 13 of the Texas workers, who were supposed to be in town for only a couple of weeks to set up the Prufrock 2 and show the Las Vegas crew how it worked, were kept in the city several weeks longer—though they hadn’t conducted the 10-hour and 30-hour OSHA safety and supervisor courses required in Nevada to stay on the jobsite long term, according to former employees and an email seen by Fortune.
Problems surfaced immediately, according to Merideth and two other employees who worked at the site and spoke with Fortune. The tunneling machine itself had exposed conveyor belts, pinch points, and fall hazards that hadn’t been addressed before the machine was transported from Texas, according to four former employees. Photos attached to OSHA’s investigation file show open conveyor belts that carried both muck and rock running along the tunnels, with no guardrails or protections preventing debris from dropping on the heads of workers walking in and out below. One photo showed 50-pound rollers that had fallen off the conveyor belt.
Workers at the Encore site believed they weren’t allowed to stop tunneling for any reason, according to Merideth, two separate former employees who worked at the Encore jobsite, and notes from an OSHA investigator’s employee interviews.
Former employees say Donnelly, who was one of the dozen people from Bastrop, was leading the mining operation at the Encore site. “It was a freaking mess,” one of them says.
Risk comes with the territory in construction, as it is one of the most treacherous industries in America. Half of the agency’s most-issued citations are specifically related to construction, according to OSHA. Construction is “one of the most dangerous areas that OSHA is in charge of monitoring—just given the nature of the equipment that’s being used, the height that people are working at,” says Lisa Wiltshire Alstead, an employment and labor lawyer in the state of Nevada.
Tunneling, in particular, is extraordinarily dangerous owing to the risks that stem from potential air quality issues, flooding or fires, loose ground, or moving heavy equipment in an enclosed space. “Tunnel projects are inherently dangerous,” says a former executive at the Boring Company. “But I think Boring—the way they operated with a lack of safety focus, created a greater risk of serious injury or death than you would see at another construction project. But fortunately no one has died. I don’t know whether they have just gotten lucky.”
In one instance in early June, a bin made of more than a dozen 4,700-pound concrete blocks, which had been filled with a muddy substance of dirt the tunneling machine’s cutterhead is digging through, chemicals, and concrete—collapsed across from the convention center after being filled with more than three times its capacity. The muddy fluid gushed out onto the worksite in front of the convention center and above the Boring Company’s central station, the OSHA investigation found.
“The whole time this is happening, [workers] were told to keep mining,” said Merideth, who was on-site when it happened, about 100 yards away. As workers at the site rushed to clean up the mess, muck continued to be conveyed into the collapsed bin. “Nothing stops the mining,” Merideth said.
Exposure to chemicals became a repeated problem within the tunnels, according to the OSHA investigation and six employees. As the cutterhead at the front of the Prufrock cut into the ground and moved forward, workers would place the rings that made up the walls of the tunnel, then pump a cement mixture through a hose as grouting—to fill the gaps between the earth and tunnel and secure the structure in place. Each shift, workers would end up pumping between 12,000 to 15,000 liters of a cement mixture through that yellow hose, an employee estimates. The accelerant—the chemical—pumped in is what would harden the cement, and set it. Once that cement mixture and accelerant filled up the space behind the rings, it would spill out, and puddle up with groundwater and dirt at the foot of the boring machine, and employees would have to walk through it to get in and out of the tunnel. Direct exposure to the accelerant could cause rashes or, if left long enough, severe chemical burns. Particularly when mixed with water—or sweat—skin can crack or fissure when exposed.
At least two employees were sprayed directly in the face and eyes with the mixture as they were changing the yellow hose, according to OSHA, which stated it could have led to “caustic chemical burns to the face, or blindness.”
“I’ve had accelerant in my face, in my eyes, in my mouth. I’ve thrown up from it,” says one employee who worked at the Encore site. They added: “It seemed like it was constant. All the electricians at some point were burned by chemicals. Yeah, I mean, engineers, miners, you name it.”
Employees told Fortune that the burns could be serious. “It will get in deep—third-degree-burn type stuff; it’s not a joke,” one of the other employees who did work at the Encore tunnel told Fortune. “If you don’t get up in there and get it cleaned off with neutralizers, it’ll just continue to burn … Once it gets in there, it’s going to eat.”
One video included in OSHA’s investigation materials shows a worker wading through a muck puddle so deep it nearly went over their ankle boots. A photo from the investigation included a caption that said the muck puddle had reached 15 inches.
“It’s not that the crew refuses to clean. It’s that Steve refuses to clean,” one of the employees said, adding later: “That’s part of the mining operation. Mining isn’t just turning the cutterhead and driving forward. You’ve got to stop and clean and get your utilities right and fix stuff. And anytime that happens—[Steve] just screams and threatens to fire people.”
It’s unclear exactly how many employees were burned as a result of the chemical mixture. OSHA specified in its investigation that up to 15 employees had the chemical mixture soak through their clothes periodically over the course of one month, and that two people had been inadvertently sprayed in the face and eyes. The Boring Company reported six specific injuries to OSHA between February and July that were related to the accelerant specifically, according to records. Five employees said they had personally been burned by the chemicals, or were aware of others being burned, in Texas, as well.
These issues were made worse by employees not having adequate safety equipment, former employees say, noting that requests for additional PPE were rejected. The OSHA investigator documented a stream of notes from employee interviews, nearly all of which were anonymous: “The company will run out of PPE; we are required to wear dirty gloves over and over”; “there were no showers on-site to wash off chemicals”; “the pool of water is in the tunnel daily”; “the chemical goes through clothes. Then I will feel a burn.”
One employee told Fortune people were often working long stretches in the tunnels without food or water. “There would be times in the tunnel that I would request water, and we wouldn’t get water for a couple of hours,” they said, adding: “During tough situations like that, especially in the heat, your judgment is impaired. Your reaction time has slowed. You make poor decisions because you’re not thinking clearly—because you’re not operating on a normal level.”
The long, tiring hours contributed to human error or missteps, according to another former employee, who said that some men were working 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and that the crews were often shorthanded. “You’ve got to be able to look at an individual and realize that when he’s tired, he’s going to make mistakes—the increase of injury risk is high right now."
Mining isn’t just turning the cutterhead and driving forward. You’ve got to stop and clean and get your utilities right and fix stuff. And anytime that happens—[Steve] just screams and threatens to fire people.
—a former Boring Company employee
OSHA’s investigation found that Boring didn’t provide its employees with the proper safety equipment and washing stations to protect themselves. It ultimately issued eight citations against the Boring Company for lack of training, unguarded conveyor belts, and the muck bin collapse. Boring has previously been issued 13 citations in Hawthorne, Calif., according to records. Those citations primarily revolved around an accident where an employee had smashed his finger after putting it under a magnetic lift that was picking up a piece of steel, according to a person familiar with the matter.
To be sure, there are people who say that Boring Company spent adequate time on training and safety procedures and blamed some workers for disregarding explicit instructions. “The company can only teach you about the dangers you are working with. It’s on the operator to work with that knowledge,” one former employee told Fortune. “I did it by the book. I was never burned.”
‘Undercut and isolated’
On June 19, 2023, Merideth had a meeting with the Boring Company’s head of legal affairs, Ashley Steinberg, head of human resources Cayle Turpen, and head of security, who had just become his manager, Nick Smith, according to Merideth and an email seen by Fortune that he sent the next morning to senior employees, including Steinberg and Turpen. During the meeting, he laid out a series of concerns, including the safety department’s lack of credibility within the company and how construction managers had flaunted their disregard for safety.
In that email Merideth sent after the meeting, he wrote that there was a “complete disregard” for putting safety first at Boring, noting that there was a “lack of accountability” among Boring’s construction management; that he received no help addressing items that were out of compliance; his safety equipment requests had been denied; his requests to remove people from job sites due to their lack of OSHA training had been ignored.
“I have been undercut and isolated from my ability to do my job correctly,” Merideth wrote in the email. “I have tried to be accommodating and professional, to no result. I feel my job is in jeopardy because I have spoken out and pushed to do the correct things and address the root causes of all of the injuries, accidents, and failures to comply with laws, regulations, and company policy.” Two weeks later, Merideth was fired for what Boring alleged was underperformance.
Merideth filed a whistleblower complaint with OSHA after his termination, alleging that he had been terminated for participating in OSHA’s inspection. The complaint was ultimately dismissed—with OSHA citing Merideth hadn’t met the burden of proof for retaliation. Merideth credits this, in part, to him not being able to afford an attorney.
But the grievances Merideth laid out in his final letter to Boring managers echo those that seven other employees have expressed to Fortune. They say that safety was de-prioritized in the company from the top down.
As recently as last year, the budget for safety supplies and equipment at the Bastrop facility was $3,000 per month (versus $100,000 per month set aside for facility expenses), according to someone familiar with the budget. “It wasn’t even a big enough budget to cover [high-visibility vests] and stuff like that,” the person said.
Former employees assert that there was de-prioritization of safety rooted in the culture of the company as well.
“The safety department was always given the absolute minimum amount of support and development,” Merideth said.
The idea of “Safety Third” has been something Musk talks about—a nod to Mike Rowe’s mantra that safety requires personal responsibility and that people who truly wanted to be safe, wouldn’t take risks in the first place.
“There’s this saying in construction: Safety is our number one priority. People would get mad at you—specifically engineers would get mad at you—if you said that at the Boring Company,” says the former executive, who left, in part, due to their concern that someone may be killed or injured on the job.
“Safety is bottom of the totem pole,” says another former employee, who worked out of Bastrop. “Top of the totem pole is, by all means necessary, try to be maniacally urgent and get things done, even if it’s not by the book.”
Several of the former employees who spoke with Fortune repeatedly mentioned Stuart Donnelly, Boring’s lead mechanical engineer who helped lead mining operations at the Encore project site. They say he ignored safety requirements, asked workers to operate equipment without training, and threatened people’s jobs were they to stop working. Four former employees say that Donnelly would watch workers from the security cameras, and report them to their managers if they did things such as sit down in the tunnels or use their cell phones to communicate with the control room. (Donnelly did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.)
“It goes back to culture,” says another former employee who spoke with Fortune. “You want to work safely, but you get reamed out for doing things the right way. If you have to keep taking off your safety glasses because they are fogging, [you just won’t wear them, because] you get in trouble for going too slow.”
The former employee adds: “[Steve] can say it as much as he wants that safety is first, but it’s not true. Nothing he does reflects that.”
Boring has the same kind of high-pressure, high-turnover culture that Musk-run companies are known for, as Fortune has previously documented. That pressure is felt at every level. “It’s a top-down misalignment of what’s good for the people at this company,” one of the former employees said.
Many of the employees spoke enthusiastically when asked why they joined the company: They believed that Boring was doing something new and exciting—that they could dig tunnels differently and move the industry forward. Merideth says he joined Boring because he wanted to “be a part of something I really believed in and really felt was going to be the future of transportation—something that I really cared about.”
But it was that same vision that seemed to get in the way of his ability to protect the people in the tunnels—the people he was responsible for. “I think that was why I was ignored—is because what I was asking them to do was to slow down their stated goal, which was, no matter what: one more ring, one more mile,” Merideth said.
Elon Musk is one of the visionaries of this generation. He has spent his career pushing boundaries and challenging the impossible—in pursuit of the idea that technology can show us the questions we should be asking about the universe and that we can “expand the scope and scale of consciousness on earth and beyond earth.”
But the day-to-day realities faced by Boring employees prompt the question: At what cost?
In an interview at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in November, Musk shared his thoughts on unions and the rank and file at one of the companies where he spends the most time: Tesla.
“There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There [are] no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot. At GM there’s a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla,” he said. “And the thing is that I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line and I walked the line and I slept in the factory and I worked beside them. So I’m no stranger to them.”
At Boring, however, few of the rank and file appear to have ever met Musk, or even seen him, as Fortune has reported. Distracted by all of his other companies, Boring seemingly warrants little of his attention these days. Former employees say he is a stranger to most of the miners, technicians, and laborers who are digging his tunnels and trying to make something of his grand vision—though it’s these employees who will pay a price should something go awfully wrong.
Merideth isn’t convinced a handful of OSHA citations will make things all that safer for them. “There are still men and women out there putting themselves at risk every day, so I want to make sure that they’re taken care of,” he said.
Do you have an insight to share? Got a tip? Contact Jessica Mathews at jessica.mathews@fortune.com or through the secure messaging app Signal at 479-715-9553.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
