Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big worker safety problems

Elon Musk has big dreams.

He wants to be the first man to die on Mars via his rocket company SpaceX. He wants to dominate the electrical vehicle market with Tesla. And with The Boring Company, a tunnel construction startup, he says he wants to fix the scourge of “soul-crushing” traffic by allowing people to travel more easily underground.

But former employees of the Boring Company, which has raised $795 million in capital and is valued at around $5.6 billion, told Fortune’s Jessica Mathews that those lofty goals, coupled with rigid deadlines from top managers, led to a dangerous environment for the workers tasked with actually building the tunnels.

Employees say they were exposed to chemicals that could cause serious burns, and additional requests for PPE were rejected. They say that they would go for extended periods without water in a hot underground environment, and that long work hours sometimes led to human error. In one particular middle-of-the-night email last year, an employee in Texas wrote to the company’s former safety manager Wayne Merideth: “I feel that the company as a whole has been very fortunate these past few months that there hasn’t been a fatality…We have consistently flirted with death.”

Merideth told Fortune he tried to address safety concerns, but felt that he was undercut and isolated by the company’s president and senior management. “The conditions they were told to work in were honestly almost unbearable…I couldn’t fix any of the things that were wrong,” he said.

Meredith was fired for what the company says was underperformance, after which he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Records from the agency show 36 injuries on Boring Company job sites within a six-month period during 2023, and an OSHA investigation found that working conditions in Boring’s tunnels exposed employees to the possibility of serious injury and, in some cases, even death.

The Boring Company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment, and has denied OSHA’s findings.

The City of Las Vegas has given the Boring Company initial approvals to build a 68-mile underground public transit system. Thus far, Boring has only finished 2.4 miles of operational tunnels since it began.

Check out more of Fortune’s reporting on the Boring Company and worker safety here.

Azure Gilman
azure.gilman@fortune.com

Today's edition was curated by Emma Burleigh.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com