Before the world knew Elon Musk as the tech visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX, before Neuralink and The Boring Company dominated headlines, there was a tunnel — a small, dusty, half-forgotten experiment buried beneath a quiet property in Pretoria, South Africa.
According to recently resurfaced interviews and unconfirmed engineering sketches from the late 1980s, Elon Musk, at just 17 years old, may have secretly developed a rudimentary underground transportation prototype—a crude but ambitious early version of what we now recognize as the Hyperloop.
While the project never reached public knowledge at the time, those close to Musk say it represented the first tangible step in his lifelong obsession with high-speed, efficient transit—an obsession that would eventually give birth to The Boring Company decades later.
The story begins in the dry, red earth of Pretoria, where Musk spent most of his teenage years. Long before he became a global icon, he was known as a quiet, intensely curious teenager with a fascination for science fiction and engineering.
He taught himself programming at age 12, built his own video game, and according to one former classmate, “talked more about Mars than about girls.”
But while most remember Musk for his early coding prowess, few knew that beneath a friend’s private property on the outskirts of the city, he was also digging — literally.
A close childhood friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, described how the two spent several weekends building what they referred to as the “vac tube”: a 40-meter-long steel pipe partially buried underground, equipped with an old industrial fan system and a mock capsule that could be pushed manually or air-blasted down the tube. “It was like a science project from the future,” the friend recalls. “Elon said it was a test — that one day people would travel through tubes, not on roads.”
According to Musk’s own later writings and public comments, the idea of the Hyperloop — a vacuum-based, low-friction, high-speed transport system — was something he had been mulling for years before formally publishing the concept in 2013.
What these new reports suggest is that he wasn’t just thinking about it. He was building it.
Old notes, recovered from a garage clean-out and authenticated by handwriting experts, include rudimentary blueprints showing a “capsule chamber,” “vacuum pressure system,” and even “dynamic magnetic resistance testing” — though the technology to achieve such tests was far beyond teenage reach at the time.
Even so, the intent was clear. Musk was not just dreaming. He was prototyping. “If trains move above ground, why not let them fly underground?” reads a scribbled note dated 1988.
So why did this early project never come to light?
Friends and mentors of Musk at the time suggest two reasons. First, the project was extremely primitive, built from scrap metal, secondhand piping, and hardware-store equipment. While conceptually futuristic, the execution was “more backyard than breakthrough.”
Second, and perhaps more importantly, no one believed it mattered. Musk’s teachers reportedly dismissed his ideas as “hyperactive imagination,” and even his friends saw the tube as just another one of “Elon’s experiments.” “He had so many ideas, we couldn’t keep track,” said one classmate. “This one involved a tunnel, so we figured he was just digging another escape route to Mars.”
Still, Musk reportedly kept refining the concept for years — until real-world engineering, funding, and scale caught up with his teenage mind.
Fast forward to 2016: Musk launches The Boring Company, with a mission to revolutionize urban transportation through underground tunnels. The Loop system, as it's called, proposes autonomous electric vehicles navigating through high-speed transit tunnels, offering a low-cost, scalable alternative to traditional subway systems.
To most, it felt like a sudden leap from cars and rockets to dirt and drills. But to those who knew Musk back in Pretoria, it was simply the next chapter. “It’s the same idea,” says the anonymous friend. “Only now, he has the budget.”
Indeed, technical documents for the early Boring Company test tunnels — including those in Hawthorne, Las Vegas, and eventually Los Angeles — bear striking conceptual similarities to the crude mockups Musk made as a teen. The focus on speed, efficiency, minimal friction, and bypassing surface congestion are consistent themes that link the Pretoria tunnel to today’s Hyperloop efforts.
Even the shape of the early “vac tube” capsule Musk tested — reportedly modeled from an old car battery casing — resembles the aerodynamic pods envisioned in current Hyperloop designs.
Musk has often described himself as someone who “goes deep on things” — someone who picks an idea and explores it from every angle until it becomes reality.
The Pretoria tunnel isn’t just a fun anecdote. It’s a glimpse into how Musk approaches innovation: by starting early, staying quiet, and digging (sometimes literally) until the world catches up.
This is a man who, in his teens, drew spacecraft designs in the margins of his math homework. Who wrote essays on energy storage and economic collapse before he had a driver’s license. Who, apparently, dug a tunnel in his spare time to test how fast a vacuum capsule could move underground. “He doesn’t chase ideas. He builds them, buries them, and lets them grow,” said a former Tesla engineer. “The rest of us just eventually notice.”
In a time when most teenagers are fighting for likes and streaming hours, Musk’s early tunnel project serves as a reminder: world-changing ideas often begin in places no one is looking.
It also reaffirms a growing mythos around Elon Musk — not just as a billionaire or innovator, but as a modern Prometheus who has been shaping the future since before he had the means to fund it.
Whether this origin story becomes part of the official narrative or remains a tantalizing rumor, it adds depth to our understanding of how long and how deeply Musk has been pursuing the transportation revolution.
And it raises a simple but powerful question: What else has he already built — and buried — while we weren’t watching?
