A private company is worth exactly what the last person to write a check says it is worth. That is a fine system — right up until you try to use the number for anything.
The Round
Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, the Boring Company, is in talks to raise around $4 billion. The deal would value it near $20 billion, according to people familiar with the discussions. The round has not closed, and the terms could change.
For scale: Boring was valued around $5.7 billion after a 2022 round that raised $675 million from investors including Vy Capital, Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund.
The company builds tunnel boring machines it says can dig more cheaply than traditional construction firms. It spun off from SpaceX in 2018.
Its operating network runs under the Las Vegas Strip, where drivers ferry passengers in Teslas to and from the convention center.
It has pitched privately funded projects in Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles. Many never panned out. It is privately funding a new loop in Nashville, and a Dubai loop announced in February has a first four-mile phase priced at $154 million.
What a Private Mark Measures
Many private-market investors treat Musk companies as sure bets and pay premiums for access to his portfolio.
Sometimes that works. Investors in the $44 billion Twitter takeover were underwater for months, then made money after Musk rolled the company into his AI startup xAI — and later folded that into SpaceX.
SpaceX went public in June in a record-setting IPO that raised $86 billion. Its market value nearly doubled within days of the offering. Then the shares fell about 50% from their peak.
Musk’s public companies keep swinging. Tesla fell 15% in a single session — erasing $215 billion in market value — after missing earnings targets and reporting negative cash flow for the first time in two years.
So follow the logic. A private mark that more than triples in four years, while the public cousins swing by a fifth in a day, is not telling you about a tunneling business. It is telling you about the supply of late-stage capital — the money that chases companies right before they go public.
Our Rule
A private mark is not a valuation. It is a sentiment reading with a decimal point attached.
There is nothing here to trade, which is the point. The Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio does not buy pre-IPO access vehicles or the funds that promise them, and a mark-up on an unlisted infrastructure story does not change that.
When the tunnel business has audited cash flows and a public listing, it becomes a company we can have an opinion about. Until then, it is a very expensive rumor.