Musk's Boring Company Raises $3 Billion at $23 Billion Valuation, Led by the UAE

Elon Musk's tunneling company just got a lot more valuable, and the money came from a government.

The Boring Company announced Wednesday, September 9, that it closed a $3 billion Series D funding round, pushing its valuation to $23 billion. That's roughly four times the $5.7 billion valuation the company carried after a $675 million raise in 2022, according to Reuters.

The round was led by the United Arab Emirates and its affiliated investment entities. Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Temasek, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Human Capital, Shamal Holding, and Baron Capital also participated, per the company's own announcement.

Where the Money Is Going

The headline commitment is more than 150 kilometers, about 93 miles, of tunnel across the UAE. That builds on the Dubai Loop project, where The Boring Company and Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority signed a definitive agreement at the World Governments Summit 2026, according to Quartz.

The first phase is a 4-mile pilot with four stations connecting the Dubai International Financial Centre and Dubai Mall, estimated at $154 million. The full build would stretch to 14 miles and 19 stations at an estimated $545 million. Precast tunnel segments are in production now, but active tunneling isn't expected to begin until later in 2026, the company said.

The country leading the funding round is also the customer for the biggest project that funding pays for.

The cash will also fund hiring in engineering, production, and operations, expand the Vegas Loop and Nashville's Music City Loop, and continue development of the company's Prufrock tunnel-boring machines. Musk marked the raise on X with a familiar line: "Defeating traffic is the ultimate boss battle. Even the most powerful humans in the world cannot defeat traffic."

What Actually Exists

Las Vegas remains the only place The Boring Company moves paying passengers. Electrek reports the Vegas Loop has carried more than four million riders, and Clark County has approved a 123-station network after signing off on 19 additional stations. The company recently started boring its 14th tunnel in the city, its 25th overall.

In Nashville, state regulators granted the Music City Loop its permit on February 25, 2026, and tunneling began the same day. By August 2026, two Prufrock machines were mining simultaneously, with a third nearing final assembly in Texas.

The engineering is genuinely improving. Newer Prufrock machines launch and retrieve directly from a transporter, cutting out the launch pit and crane work that normally precedes a tunnel. By August, ring-building was fully autonomous, placing six roughly 3,750-pound concrete segments to millimeter precision in under a minute, monitored from a control center in Texas.

Electrek's own count puts roughly a dozen announced city projects on the books since 2017, and Vegas is the only one carrying riders. The Chicago O'Hare Express, unveiled in 2018 with a roughly $1 billion price tag Boring said it would cover, never secured financing or a signed contract and was dead within a year. A 2017 Washington-to-Baltimore Loop got conditional state permits and then quietly vanished from the company's website. An Ontario, California, airport connector priced at $45 million reportedly ballooned toward $500 million before falling apart.

The Term Sheet Nobody Put in the Press Release

The Wall Street Journal reported on September 4 that investors joining this round were told they'd need to help recruit employees or assist with business development, including introductions to city officials where the company wants to dig, and that The Boring Company reserved the right to buy back shares from investors who didn't deliver. Musk confirmed the arrangement on X with a single word: "True."

The Next Web argued the two documents explain each other. The funding announcement is about digging speed, and the term sheet is about getting permission to dig. In tunneling, permits, not machines, are usually the bottleneck.

No regulator has opened an investigation and no source has alleged anything illegal. The Journal reported the arrangement and Musk confirmed it rather than denying it, and TNW's own piece explicitly states nothing improper has been shown to have occurred. Whether tying investor equity to lobbying access for city officials is good governance, standard startup hustle, or something regulators should look at is an open question none of these outlets answered.

The UAE deal makes The Boring Company's biggest customer and biggest financial backer the same government, a structure common in Gulf infrastructure deals but one that leaves the actual traffic-relief case unproven. No independent study cited in these reports shows the Vegas Loop, in operation for years now, actually reduces congestion compared to conventional transit. That test still hasn't been run, and the UAE's 150-kilometer commitment gives Musk's company its biggest chance yet to run it.