The part that shocks me is they were told to stop, pretended to stop, and then restarted again. I was under the impression that usually the system comes down quite hard on people who show that level of intentionality.

Maybe things find it so easy to get worse because so many people would rather virtue signal being above having an explicit stance than choose one that's unpopular or be accused of being partisan.

This is a valid take, but I also wonder if there’s anything to be gained by chastising those who complain about the musk company. Nobody does a thing about any company being shitty, a company is singled out by the mob for critique in a way that may (?) lead to some kind of consequence, and my thinking is you may as well join in to get something rather than nothing done. The real issue is that public outrage does absolutely nothing most of the time.

If this was one thing in isolation, I'd easily believe that many/most other companies are just as bad, and get slapped with small fines like this that they treat as a cost of doing business (and ends up being cheaper than the cost of doing the right thing in the first place).

But it looks like they were, in total, fined for 800 or so environmental violations, which feels like a lot of violations: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies, or does it just seem that way as a casual news reader because it is more worthwhile for outlets to publish a story when it happens?

He's contemptuous of regulators, doesn't care about his or his company's reputation (or at least negative publicity doesn't seem to change his behavior, although he whines when people criticize him), has an extreme tolerance for risk, knows that he has unlimited resources to fight off lawsuits and regulators, has donated vast sums of money to the current president, and at least at Twitter, got rid of all the people who were working on safety issues.

So it's not a surprise that there are more ethics violations then at a company where the executives still go by the "don't do anything that would get your name in The New York Times" rule.

> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies

This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations.

I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership.

I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad.

If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid.

If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.

What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)?

It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out.

> Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary.

They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever.

> The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing.

They can, regulations just don’t allow it yet. Coming soon (tm)

It's rare for even blatant misconduct of this kind by a company to result in criminal charges.

Which is stupid, obviously. If it's intentional/willful breaking of the law, send them to jail the same way you would for an individual.

To be fair it's over 3 times the amount of damage they caused, so that is a pretty big profit margin on cleaning up the mess.

ProPublica's reporting has been dogging Boring's heels in Las Vegas on this, I've been reading them religiously. It appears that the city views this project as Cool™ and opts either to not fine or fine pittances for constant violations.

This was their big expose back in January: https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...

Fines start small, then get big.

Do you know who runs that company???

Corporations are never held accountable in America

Some? This is basically how we let society work now. If you have money, you can do really abhorrent things and just get away with it with almost zero consequence.

We have the law and the police setup to protect the rich from any real rebuttal to this status quo so we're locked in.