Elon Musk, CEO Of SpaceX, Tesla, And Boring Company, is a very one-of-a-kind guy. It’s not his nerd looks or his strange charisma, it’s because sometimes the guy is just batshit insane.
Take for instance his latest laugh riot with Boring Company, a venture currently trying to dig tunnels under Los Angeles. It began selling branded hats for $20 last year and, in December, Musk tweeted that once 50,000 hats were sold, the next item on the menu would be a Boring Company flamethrower. On Christmas Eve, the company sold 50K hats. Cue January, and there’s actually a flamethrower.
Score one more for truth stranger than fiction in the world of Musk.
Earlier this week, Redditors in a few Musk-related threads noticed that the URL boringcompany.com/flamethrower was active, and redirecting to a page with a password lock. At least one of those keen observers guessed the original password as “flame” (it’s since been changed), and he was through to a Boring Company shopping page.
But instead of a $20 hat here, there was a $600 flamethrower ready for pre-order. “Prototype pictured above. Final production flamethrower will be better,” the description read. And far from being a photoshop gag, that unholy beast may actually exist. As Teslarati reports, a writer named DA Wallach did recently post a photo from the Boring Company test tunnel at SpaceX HQ. he was holding the gun, which appears to be an Airsoft rifle modified to shoot flames instead.
According to Reddit, the Boring Company page indicated the flamethrower would ship in April. That “shipping date” could be April 1, but then again this is Elon Musk we’re talking about. If there’s any big time CEO that’s likely to do something impulsive, controversial, and just a little bit eccentric, it’s him.