Before the world knew Elon Musk as the tech visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX, before Neuralink and The Boring Company dominated headlines, there was a tunnel — a small, dusty, half-forgotten experiment buried beneath a quiet property in Pretoria, South Africa.According to recently resurfaced interviews and unconfirmed engineering sketches from the late 1980s, Elon Musk, at just 17 years old, may have secretly developed a rudimentary underground transportation prototype—a crude but ambitious early version of what we now recognize as the Hyperloop.
While the project never reached public knowledge at the time, those close to Musk say it represented the first tangible step in his lifelong obsession with high-speed, efficient transit—an obsession that would eventually give birth to The Boring Company decades later.The story begins in the dry, red earth of Pretoria, where Musk spent most of his teenage years. Long before he became a global icon, he was known as a quiet, intensely curious teenager with a fascination for science fiction and engineering.
He taught himself programming at age 12, built his own video game, and according to one former classmate, “talked more about Mars than about girls.”But while most remember Musk for his early coding prowess, few knew that beneath a friend’s private property on the outskirts of the city, he was also digging — literally.
A close childhood friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, described how the two spent several weekends building what they referred to as the “vac tube”: a 40-meter-long steel pipe partially buried underground, equipped with an old industrial fan system and a mock capsule that could be pushed manually or air-blasted down the tube. “It was like a science project from the future,” the friend recalls.
“Elon said it was a test — that one day people would travel through tubes, not on roads.”According to Musk’s own later writings and public comments, the idea of the Hyperloop — a vacuum-based, low-friction, high-speed transport system — was something he had been mulling for years before formally publishing the concept in 2013.What these new reports suggest is that he wasn’t just thinking about it. He was building it.
Old notes, recovered from a garage clean-out and authenticated by handwriting experts, include rudimentary blueprints showing a “capsule chamber,” “vacuum pressure system,” and even “dynamic magnetic resistance testing” — though the technology to achieve such tests was far beyond teenage reach at the time.Even so, the intent was clear. Musk was not just dreaming. He was prototyping. “If trains move above ground, why not let them fly underground?” reads a scribbled note dated 1988.So why did this early project never come to light?
