Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has sold 35,000 hats promoting his tunneling business, The Boring Company. He’s had a 5,000-figure jump in cap sales in just the past two days. At $20 per cap, that means Musk has raised $700,000 to date.
The Boring Company, first drummed up by Musk last December after a particularly soul-crushing bout with L.A. traffic, was founded to find a quick and cost-effective way to dig networks of tunnels for vehicles and high-speed trains. By February, a giant hole meant to be a demonstration project appeared on the SpaceX campus in Hawthorne, Calif., the details of which were reported by Bloomberg.
Musk, who founded and now runs SpaceX and Tesla, introduced the branded baseball hat in March. Since then, Musk has provided periodic updates on hat sales via Twitter. The progress reports have ramped up in recent months as Musk decided to “cap” sales at 50,000 caps.
Every 5000th buyer of our boringly boring hat will get a free hat signed by the delivery guy https://t.co/11TYEUSG4M
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2017
It’s not totally clear what Musk will use the money for. In one tweet, he said, presumably in jest, “gonna build that tunnel one hat at a time.”
Gonna build that tunnel one hat at a time
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 18, 2017
If Musk sells all 50,000 caps—and it’s a safe bet that he will—the entrepreneur will have raised $1 million. And then, apparently, it’s onto the next piece of Boring Company swag: a flamethrower.
After 50k hats, we will start selling The Boring Company flamethrower
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2017