Tesla Founder Elon Musk Targets Another Market With Brick-Making Business

Elon Musk is famous for being a business magnate, inventor, engineer and for being the founder of Tesla and SpaceX. And now it appears the South African-born visionary is looking to penetrate another market by starting his own brick-making business.

Musk may have been busy preparing for and attending the Met Gala on Monday, but he clearly wasn’t too preoccupied to not plan about his next career move. The 46-year-old billionaire found time to tweet about his new side venture that targets to alleviate the country’s housing crisis.

“The Boring Company will be using dirt from tunnel digging to create bricks for low-cost housing,” Musk wrote on Twitter. Following his tweet, Bloomberg was able to quickly confirm that the businessman is serious about his new venture.

A company spokesman revealed that Musk’s brick-making business will use “excavated muck” from Boring Co.’s tunnels to create the bricks. The spokesman also shared that “there will be an insane amount of bricks.” Musk is planning to sell the bricks, but no pricing information was disclosed.

The spokesman also revealed that future Boring Co. offices will be built using the company’s own bricks, perhaps to show how durable they are. The spokesman added that Musk plans to use all excavated mud from all Boring Co. tunnels and not just the one that’s still under construction in Hawthorne, California.

On Boring Co.’s website, it is stated there that the company is also thinking of replacing concrete in a portion of its tunnels’ linings with bricks. The company says doing so would help the environment because concrete production actually produces significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Musk’s planned brick-making business could face challenges though. For instance, the land under Los Angeles has been contaminated with chemicals, so it’s possible that the excavated muck could complicate Musk’s efforts to turn the material into bricks. Another issue has to do with how bricks tend to be expensive than other construction materials. Lastly, bricks don’t stand up well to earthquakes.