> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://bareeconomy.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 🚨 JUST IN: A 200-MPH TUNNEL NEITHER CITY HAS HEARD ABOUT - URL: https://bareeconomy.ghost.io/just-in-a-200-mph-tunnel-neither-city-has-heard-about/ - Published: 2026-09-28T15:31:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-28T15:31:39.000Z - Description: Soaring interest rates, 50% insurance spikes, and rent control caps are freezing out individual housing investors while politicians claim to solve affordability. - Author: Brook Vance - Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1785857905698, #Import 2026-08-04 15:39 Musk says a Hyperloop is coming to the I-35 corridor. The transit agencies at both ends found out from the internet, same as you. --- πŸ—ΊοΈ **Current Dispatch:** San Marcos, Texas β›½ **Local Diesel:** $6.11/gal β˜• **Diner Coffee Index:** $2.30 β€” Strong, fast, poured by somebody watching the frontage road back up. 7/10. --- #### THE ANNOUNCEMENT WAS A REPLY TO A CARTOON I-35 between here and San Antonio was stopped dead at four this afternoon, which is normal. Eighty miles, and the drive can run two and a half hours when the trucks stack up through New Braunfels. Sunday night Elon Musk posted that The Boring Company is working on "a simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel between Austin and San Antonio (>200 mph)", and would cut that trip to under thirty minutes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/09/bare-economy-the-proposal.png) The post was a reply to an AI-generated video about human colonies on other planets. That is not a snide detail. It is the context the announcement was made in. --- ## Watch this self-driving footage before Elon makes his announcement (AD) [![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/09/img-1---2026-09-28T172738.789.jpg)](https://clkgrid.com/6a214fef877037506f2818af?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PBRTH603&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) I just watched footage of a Tesla driving itself down a public highway. No one is at the wheel. Then I looked up the one company without which none of it works. Almost nobody knows it exists. [**Click here to see what I found β†’**](https://clkgrid.com/6a214fef877037506f2818af?email=not%5Ftracked&domain=327TBEG&type=SA&product=PBRTH603&ref=bareeconomy.ghost.io) --- ## THE BREAKDOWN: WHAT EXISTS AND WHAT DOESN'T **1\. Nobody at either end was told.** Transportation and government officials in Austin and San Antonio said they had not heard from Musk or the company before the post. A Bexar County spokesperson said neither the county nor the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority had been contacted. You cannot tunnel eighty miles under Texas without talking to those people first. The sequence tells you what stage this is at. **2\. The word "precursor" is doing enormous work.** A true hyperloop runs pods through a near-vacuum tube. Nobody has built one that carries paying passengers, anywhere, ever. If this one got built it would be the world's first. What the Boring Company actually operates is the Las Vegas Loop, which moves people in Tesla cars through tunnels at surface-street speeds. The gap between that and 200 mph is not an engineering refinement. It is a different machine. **3\. The list of announced-and-vanished is long.** Chicago. Los Angeles. New York to Washington. And a San Antonio airport-to-downtown tunnel the company pitched earlier that has gone quiet. Electrek counted this as roughly the fourth or fifth time Musk has floated a hyperloop, in some cases in this same part of Texas. Hyperloop One, the best-funded independent attempt, burned through hundreds of millions and shut down in December 2023 without carrying one paying passenger. **4\. What is real: Bastrop.** The company has operations in Bastrop, east of Austin, and is finishing a test tunnel there. That is a physical thing with equipment in the ground. A test tunnel in Bastrop is not eighty miles of bored corridor under the Balcones Escarpment. But it is not nothing, and it is the only part of this you can go look at. --- ## THE FRICTION: THIS IS A CAPITAL STORY, NOT A TRANSIT STORY Follow the money and the announcement makes more sense. The Boring Company just raised $3 billion at a $23 billion valuation, in a round led by the United Arab Emirates. That is sovereign money paying a venture multiple for a tunneling contractor. A tunneling contractor is worth a construction multiple. A company that is going to reinvent intercity transport is worth something else entirely. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cd/fb/cdfb58c0-652d-463c-a766-e899e4b817ba/content/images/2026/09/bare-economy-announcement-value.png) None of this means the corridor problem is fake. Austin to San Antonio is one of the fastest-growing stretches in America and I-35 is genuinely broken. Something should get built. The honest counter is that Musk ships things other people call impossible, repeatedly, and the Bastrop tunnel is real work. But hyperloop specifically is the one idea he has pitched for thirteen years and never delivered. Until there is a signed agreement with the state and a machine in the ground, this is a promise, not a project. --- ## THE MACRO EXTRACTION Price the difference between an announcement and a permit application. That is the only discipline that matters with this company, and it applies to every pre-revenue infrastructure story you will be sold this cycle. The tells are cheap to check and nobody checks them. Has a route been filed. Has right-of-way been acquired. Has the state transportation department been in the room. Is there an environmental review docket with a number on it. Four questions, all public record, and this project currently answers none of them. If you own land along this corridor, understand that the announcement itself moves your price before a shovel does, and that speculative bid can leave as fast as it came. Somebody will try to sell you acreage near a station that does not have a location yet. The broader point is the one running through this whole month. Capital is chasing stories with very long payoffs and very thin collateral, whether that is chips depreciating in a data center or a tunnel that exists as a sentence. The corridor deserves a fix. Sixty billion dollars of Texas commuting says so. Just make somebody show you the permit before you believe the tunnel. Keep your capital guarded, hold your ground, and stay sharp out there. β€” Brook *The Bare Economy. From the road. For the road.* --- [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)