At a meeting that Friday morning, he asked how long it would take to begin digging a tunnel in the lot next to the Hyperloop experiment tube. About two weeks, he was told. “Get started today,” he ordered. “I want as big of a hole as we can by Sunday.” His assistant Elissa Butterfield scrambled to get Tesla workers to move their cars out of the lot, and within three hours the two tunneling machines Davis had bought were digging away. By Sunday, there was a gaping fifty-foot-wide hole leading down to the beginning of a tunnel.
