Come On Musky, Light My Fire

Elon Musk promises a lot of things. Speed-of-light space travel, self-driving cars, implantable braincomputer interfaces, self-driving taxis. The list goes on.

The Boring Company was founded in 2016 by Musk after finding trouble with the LA traffic. Who’d blame him? Route 101 gets wild in rush-hour! “Traffic is driving me nuts,” he tweeted on the 18th of December, 2016. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” And he did just that.

Less than two years later, he has thought up a hell of a lot more than just tunnels. The brain behind SpaceX seems to post new, whacky, out-of-this-world ideas online nearly every day for The Boring Company to chew over, so it’s not surprising his latest project is out of this world. Musk has a reputation to follow through with his word.

To really get the public excited for the company’s new release, Elon Musk sold branded ‘The Boring Company’ hats to fund this $1 million Not-A-Flamethrower operation. The selling of the plain black hat with the logo emblazoned on the front, was ‘capped’ at 50,000 units. Musk, who had earlier, presumably in jest, promised to start selling company-branded flamethrowers once 50,000 hats were purchased, tweeted when he hit that number: “Hats sold out, flamethrowers soon!”

Then the product – aptly titled (for legal reasons, I’m guessing) racked in 1,000 pre-orders even before it hit the shelves. The flamethrower launched on January 27 this year and they’re already on their third restock.

In reality, the flamethrower looks like a sawn-off shotgun of sorts with an under-the-arm control and a butt-tonne of power. Though it isn’t as scary as you may originally think, Not-A Flamethrower isn’t a destroying-machine. It’s like a bigger version of a BBQ’s blow-torch. In essence, the Not-A-Flamethrower is just a bit of fun for the user and a bit of publicity for The Boring Company. You can grab a flamethrower for yourself for an affordable $500 (plus a $30 fire extinguisher).

THE VERY MINUTE A THOUGHT IS THREATENED WITH PUBLICITY IT SEEMS TO SHRINK TOWARDS MEDIOCRITY. ”
– OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES