After a decade of silence, Elon Musk’s tunneling startup and its reclusive president, are hitting the media circuit

It was the end of November when Steve Davis, president of Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion tunneling startup Boring Company, got on X for a livestream discussion with a former news broadcaster to chat about the tunnel project Boring Company is trying to begin in Nashville.

The 90-minute discussion that followed was extraordinary—not for anything specific that Davis said, but simply for the fact that he was saying something. The Boring Co., like Musk’s other companies, prides itself on shunning the mainstream media. It ignores questions from journalists. It doesn’t even have a public relations department. Davis, a close ally and longtime “fixer” for Musk, has a reputation for avoiding speaking engagements, and rarely surfaces in public.

And yet, here he was sitting down for a live conversation with an ex-TV reporter; Weeks later, Davis personally escorted a Las Vegas Review Journal reporter on a rare tour of the tunnels Boring Co. is constructing under the city; he also rode in a Tesla with a YouTuber in January, enthusiastically pointing out items of interest as they travelled through the completed section of tunnel known as the Las Vegas Loop. 

Davis’ sudden zeal for the publicity circuit, after a decade of silence, is as...