Elon Gets $30 Billion to Stick Around, Boring is Largely Stuck

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Aug 5, 2025

Missy Cummings, Director of Mason's Autonomy and Robotics Center, dives into Tesla's recent legal challenges, highlighting the implications of the jury's ruling that found the company partly responsible for a fatal crash linked to its self-driving technology. She warns that this verdict poses a significant setback for autonomous vehicles. The conversation also explores Elon Musk's staggering $30 billion stock payout to remain focused on Tesla amid these turmoil, and the struggles of The Boring Company, which continues to face mounting operational challenges despite recent contracts.

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INSIGHT

Tesla Liability in 2019 Crash

A 2019 Tesla autopilot crash case found Tesla 33% liable and imposed punitive damages due to data cover-up.
The case highlights Tesla's inadequate safety-critical technology and testing processes for self-driving features.

INSIGHT

Limited Progress on Full Self-Driving

Tesla has not made a dramatic leap in full self-driving capability since 2019.
Their procedures lack robustness needed for safety-critical autonomous driving technology.

INSIGHT

Supervised Full Self-Driving Reality

Tesla's full self-driving requires constant human and remote operator supervision today.
Reliance on a single sensor stream makes it unsafe and unlikely to succeed as fully autonomous.

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It was an expensive week for Tesla. On Friday, a jury in Miami found the electric car company 33% to blame for a deadly 2019 crash involving its full self-driving feature, ordering it to pay a total of $242.5 million in damages. A few days later, the company’s board said it would dole out a $30 billion stock payoff to co-founder Elon Musk in order to keep him focused on the company, which has been bouncing from crisis to crisis.

In this episode of Elon, Inc., host David Papadopoulos is joined by Bloomberg Elon Musk reporter Dana Hull, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Max Chafkin as well as Missy Cummings, an academic and former senior adviser for safety at the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who was called as an expert witness during the trial. Together, they discuss the possible consequences for the company flowing from the verdict, with Cummings warning it’s yet another roadblock for fully self-driving cars. Papadopoulos, Hull and Chafkin also discuss that monster payout to Musk.

Later, Papadopoulos, Chafkin and Bloomberg News reporter Kiel Porter discuss Porter’s latest story on The Boring Company, Musk’s largely stalled endeavor to build underground “hyperloops.” Although the tunnel-digging venture recently scored a contract to build a loop connecting Nashville’s airport with its downtown, Porter’s paints a picture of a struggling company that—in true Muskian fashion—promises more than it can deliver.

And the challenges are mounting. All the company has to show for its labors is a small loop that takes people to and from the Las Vegas Convention Center. When asked by Papadopoulos about the company’s falling valuation—now hovering at around $6.4 billion, down from a high of $8.6 billion in July 2023—Porter is direct.

“They were supposed to have 68 miles dug in Vegas. It was supposed to be this huge interconnected lattice, and instead you got less than four operational miles,” he says. “It doesn’t take a genius to look at that and go, ‘why am I investing in this?’”

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