Elon Musk's Not-A-Flamethrower Now In Customer's Hands

Earlier this year, KFC let us know that Elon Musk had plans to sell a $500 flame thrower, and the news left many of us thinking,

1) Huh. Cool – shooting fire from a gunnish thing.
2) But… why?
3) Eh, I don’t really care about the ‘why’ part; I’ll be able to use my trigger finger to roast hotdogs.

Welp, this past Saturday that time finally arrived.

In terms of what’s more painful:

Getting bedazzled pleather pants seared into your taint with a flamethrower < Reading tweets where Elon Musk tries to be funny

The device really is named Not-A-Flamethrower for loophole purposes, and hundreds showed up to what doubled as The Boring Company‘s debut at SpaceX HQ to pick theirs up.

According to a great article by a writer who went & got herself one, Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge said,

Last December, Elon Musk tweeted “After 50k hats, we’ll start selling The Boring Company Flamethrower.” Musk often says things that sound like jokes but are not — especially on Twitter. On Christmas Eve, he’d evidently sold enough $20 hats, bringing in about $1 million for the company.

The flamethrower went up for sale on January 27 (though some alert Redditors found the order page earlier), and I immediately bought it. By February 1, the flamethrowers were sold out. Twenty thousand flamethrowers at $500 a pop meant about $10 million in revenue in about 100 hours. In April, the company raised $112.5 million in equity, 90 percent from Musk and the rest from 31 others.

Ultimately, the hat fundraiser & Not-A-Flamethrower have little to do with the real mission of The Boring Company (TBC), but this bizarre approach served the purpose of bringing web traffic to a project that’s trying to get rid of road traffic… TBC really only has one mission:

The Boring Company is proposing a project on the East Coast to build Loop, a high-speed underground public transportation system. The DC-Maryland Loop would consist of the construction of a set of parallel, twin underground tunnels. This transportation system would create a significant public benefit due to decreased commute times, decreased urban congestion, decreased public transportation trip times, decreased transportation costs/fares, and decreased greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s a map of the proposed high-speed line, which I added fire to, because I’m good at it, and also because I’m assuming that’s how the boonies of Maryland will be once more people get their hands on more of these things.