Elon Musk Offers Working Flamethrowers to “Liven Up the Party”

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has announced the pre-launch availability of its $500 flamethrowers, which are “Guaranteed to liven up any party!”

Musk’s latest gag follows his successful effort to fund the vaporware concept of “The Boring Company” drilling pneumatic tubes under cities to relieve traffic jams. Earlier, Musk quickly sold 50,000 company hats on the Internet for $20 each. He then licensed and sold “The Boring Company” clothing online.

Musk’s latest fundraiser offers the “world’s safest flamethrower.” The product is advertised with “[f]ire extinguisher sold separately (for exorbitant amounts of money)” and a warning that flamethrowers, “[m]ay not be used on Boring Company decorative lacquered hay bales or Boring Company dockside munitions warehouses.”

Musk moved to the U.S. at age 24 to earn a Ph.D. in applied physics and materials sciences at Stanford, but he dropped out to pursue entrepreneurial aspirations in the areas of the Internet, renewable energy, and outer space. He has stayed true to his dream as a founder of PayPal, Tesla, Hyperloop, SpaceX, and the Gigafactory.

Breitbart News reported in October that “The Boring Company” had completed its first demonstration tunnel under the SpaceX rocket factory in Hawthorne, California as Musk’s proof-of-concept for how he expects to use his companies to solve urban congestion.

Musk envisions a system of robotic transporter sleds that will lower vehicles to underground Hyperloop tunnels, and then whisk them to their destinations at 130 miles per hour. He predicts his invention will slash cross-town travel time for a trip from downtown Los Angeles to Westwood from 40 minutes to under six minutes.

The concept of pneumatically-propelled cylindrical containers through networks of tubes in a partial vacuum was patented in 1854 and first installed at the London Stock Exchange as a way of conveying letters or parcels throughout the multi-story building. Pneumatic tube communication systems operated in tens of thousands of buildings over the next 150 years, until the concept withered due to instant messaging and e-mail solutions.

But in a back-to-the-future move, Musk is taking pneumatic tubes to the 21st Century as Hyperloop transportation tunnels. Musk sees the approval of “autonomous vehicles” (driverless cars) within the next four years as kicking off a highly competitive trillion-dollar market-share grab from existing unicorn-valued ride-hailing companies, like Uber.

According to analysts at RethinkX, the coming disruptively low transportation per mile costs will force private and public transportation mergers to capture huge revenues from advertising, entertainment, and product sales. With prices trending toward cost, ReThinkX predicts the new environment will be dominated by integrated automakers, like Tesla.