Elon Musk Compares The Boring Company's Las Vegas Tunnel To ‘Fallout’ Game’s Vault 21

Tesla co-founder and maverick businessman Elon Musk has compared the Las Vegas tunnel being developed by his venture, The Boring Company, to one of the Vaults in “Fallout Shelter.”

Any fan of the free-to-play simulation game “Fallout Shelter” knows the idea behind the Vaults: players build and manage their own Vault as an Overseer, that is, the leader and coordinator of their Vault. The Vault citizens (a.k.a. dwellers) need to be kept happy by meeting their power, food, and water needs.

In the case of the Las Vegas tunnel, Curbed reports that Musk’s own Boring Company started work on an underground transportation system in November last year that will carry passengers less than a mile from one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other.

Almost a year after work began on the project initially dubbed as the “first underground people mover,” Musk has said that the first operational tunnel under Vegas is almost done. He also said on Twitter that it doubles as an underground nuclear shelter as the Vaults in “Fallout Shelter” do.

The Las Vegas tunnel is the first commercial application of what Musk has dubbed “Loop,” defined by The Boring Company’s website as a “high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported via compatible Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) at up to 155 miles per hour.”

According to documents filed last year by The Boring Company, the Vegas Loop is intended to move an expected 4,400 people per hour in 16-passenger autonomous vehicles through two 0.83-mile-long, 14-foot-wide tunnels.

Musk, the CEO and product architect of electric car maker Tesla, as well as the founder, CEO, CTO and chief designer of SpaceX, founded the American infrastructure and tunnel construction services company The Boring Company in 2016.

By December of last year, however, Musk confirmed that the tunnels being dug by the Boring Company were “road tunnels,” where the vehicles would travel on tires, not tracks. “Really, just an underground road, but limited to EVs (from all auto companies),” he tweeted.

Contradicting the initial plan for a people mover to instead be a means of transport for vehicles, Musk went against what he proposed in a TED Talk in 2017, which was an idea to eliminate the “soul-destroying traffic” he experienced on his own Los Angeles commute.

Interestingly, Musk also compared the Boring Company to Vaul-Tec, the company featured in the video game. Vault Tec is the pre-war defense corporation awarded by the government to implement a network of bunkers to protect the U.S. population from a nuclear holocaust.

By posting a tweet with an image of Vault 21 from “Fallout Shelter,” Musk may or may not be aware that the specific Vault-Tec vault that was once hidden under Las Vegas in the game has since been converted into a hotel and casino while acting as one of the sources of income of the game’s Robert House.

Unless, of course, that has been part of Musk’s plans this whole time.