“After SpaceX, the last truly sexy private Elon company is Neuralink,” a colleague said yesterday. “He's going to make the blind see again. Make the crippled walk.”

Hard to argue with that spectacle. Brain chips. Paralyzed patients moving computer cursors with their minds. Biblical-scale stuff. Neuralink is genuinely extraordinary, and I don’t want to diminish it.

Excluding SpaceX, I think the most exciting of Musk’s private companies — the one with the most overlooked upside, the one that connects most directly to Jim Rickards’ “American birthright” investment theme — is the one with the most self-deprecating name.

The Boring Company.

The story starts with a machine called Prufrock. Named after the T.S. Eliot poem about a man paralyzed by indecision and inaction. (Which, if you know anything about Elon, is the joke.)

Prufrock is a tunnel boring machine — a TBM in the trade — and it does something no other TBM in history has done.

Rather than requiring an enormous excavated pit and a crane the size of a cathedral just to get into the ground, Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down at an angle and “porpoises” into the earth within 24–48 hours.

When it’s done, it resurfaces the same way. No pit. No crane. No mess.

While traditional TBMs stop every five feet to install tunnel liner segments, Prufrock installs the liner while it’s moving — simultaneously mining and lining.

Prufrock requires zero people inside the tunnel during operation. It’s all-electric and targets speeds of more than one mile per week — roughly six times faster than The Boring Company’s previous-generation machine.

And this is no longer theoretical.

In March 2026, Prufrock-2 completed The Boring Company’s longest tunnel drive yet beneath Las Vegas. Nashville approved its Music City Loop shortly afterward. Dubai is now planning its own Loop system connecting its financial district and the Burj Khalifa district.

Now here’s where I’m going to connect some dots the mainstream press has missed entirely…

Your Rundown for Friday, May 15, 2026...

This Was Never Just About Transportation

I think The Boring Company — which purportedly exists to build underground transit tunnels — is ultimately a means to a very different strategic end.

Think about what Tesla needs to scale further. Lithium. Cobalt. Copper. Nickel. Rare earth elements.

Elon himself has gone on record: “As we scale battery production to very high levels, we have to look further down the supply chain. We might get into the mining business.”

Let’s not forget Elon grew up in South Africa — a country whose entire modern history was built on what comes out of the ground. Aside from the 1867 diamond rush, South Africa has produced nearly half of all the gold ever mined on Earth.

The minerals that power the so-called green economy, in the meantime, are overwhelmingly controlled by actors who are not America’s friends.

You know the rest of the story. The American Birthright thesis, as Jim Rickards has articulated it, recognizes that whoever controls minerals, controls the future.

It’s why MP Materials (MP) — the only scaled rare earth mine in the Western Hemisphere — became one of Paradigm’s most consequential stock picks of the past year.

The U.S. government agrees: The Department of Defense invested $400 million in MP Materials and guaranteed minimum pricing for MP’s rare earth output for the next decade — a clear sign Washington now sees strategic minerals as a national priority.

So where does Boring fit?

I’m not suggesting Prufrock suddenly replaces traditional mining methods. Ore bodies are complex, geology is unpredictable and hard-rock extraction is an entirely different discipline from tunneling beneath Las Vegas.

But underground mining still depends on one thing above all else: access.

And that’s where I think investors may be underestimating what Musk is building.

Prufrock’s real breakthrough may not be mineral extraction itself, but the ability to develop underground infrastructure faster, cheaper and with far less labor than conventional systems allow.

The “porpoising” technology that lets Prufrock deploy rapidly and cheaply is not just useful for building commuter tunnels under casinos.

Combined with automation and continuous tunneling, it could eventually speed up the underground infrastructure required for future mining development.

And if you think that sounds too ambitious, recall that Musk has already talked openly about using mining and tunneling robots for an industrial buildout.

On Mars.

The same systems designed to build underground infrastructure on Earth could matter even more in environments where labor is scarce and access to raw materials becomes existential.

In that context, The Boring Company starts looking a lot less like a quirky transit startup and a lot more like a platform technology for the next resource era.

In its last formal funding round, Boring was valued around $5.7 billion with some secondary-market indicators suggesting a valuation as high as $7–9 billion.

That’s a bargain if the company’s tunneling technology eventually becomes part of the infrastructure backbone behind America’s industrial and resource revival.

Will Neuralink help the paralyzed walk again? Maybe.

But if my Boring thesis plays out, it won’t just reshape urban transportation.

It could reshape America’s ability to access the resources that power the modern economy.

That's a sexy company.

Market Rundown for Friday, May 15, 2026

S&P 500 futures are down 1.20% to 7,430.

Oil’s up over 3% to $104.45 for a barrel of WTI.

Gold is down 2.75% to $4,555.

And Bitcoin’s down 1.30% to $80,400.