Elon Musk

"Exciting progress on the tunnel front," Musk tweeted. "Plan to start digging in a month or so."............"Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging," he tweeted at the time, adding, "it shall be called 'The Boring Company.'"

"Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has broken ground on an underground tunnel he plans to burrow beneath the city of Los Angeles to spare himself from having to sit in traffic.

He’s also about to purchase a large earth drilling machine to continue the tunnel, which was started on his companies’ properties in Hawthorne, CA, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Elon Musk is chief executive of the space transportation company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla Motors, which are located on sprawling adjacent properties in Hawthorne......."

"Improving tunneling speed while maintaining safety is Musk's ambition with this project. Speaking at the Hyperloop competition, he said: "We're just trying to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000% is I think possible. If you apply a limit-of-physics approach we'll see how far we can get."

But the project is in the very early stages of development. Musk added: "We're just sort of muddling along, we've no idea what we are doing, we want to be clear about that... [but] I'm actually quite optimistic that tunneling can be improved by at least fivefold, maybe tenfold, and that's really key to a lot of technologies: road tunnels, Hyperloop tunnels, train tunnels."...

With Tillerson, Musk has clearly found a person who can pressure Trump on a carbon tax, something that Musk called for in late 2015, during a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris.

"We have to fix the unpriced externality," he said, pointing out that pollution is classic negative externality in economic terms that causes harm to all, but cost to none. He called it a "hidden carbon subsidy of $5.3 trillion per year."

Tillerson supported a revenue-neutral carbon tax when he was at ExxonMobil as the best way to de-incentivize carbon generation. Economist and policymakers often agree, but some also think a carbon market would be a more effective means to halting global warming.

So with Musk, in the first order, we have a connect-the-dots between his reversal of sorts on Trump and his enthusiasm for Tillerson.