ELON MUSK can seem flakily up himself. His newish tunnelling business appears to be a case in point. The project has a cute name (the Boring Company), a wacky way of raising money (an “Initial Hat Offering” raised almost $1m by selling baseball caps), a physicist-knows-best approach to a social problem (putting private cars on high-speed underground trolleys to reduce urban congestion) and a quirky, memorable goal (to produce a tunnelling machine that goes faster than a snail, in this case a snail called Gary). But it also showcases the techniques that have made Mr Musk a success.

Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, a non-profit organisation that spreads ideas, says that Mr Musk is “uniquely good at system-design thinking”. He reduces thorny problems to what he sees as their essence—typically expressed in terms of physics—and then extends his analysis to technologies, business systems, human psychology and design in an attempt to solve the issue.

In the case of tunnelling he found that current machines are much slower than physics suggested they could be. The solution, he decided, was standardisation and fixed prices, removing the option for passing extra costs up the chain. That is quite like the genesis of SpaceX, where he observed that launches were much more costly than physics required and prescribed similar solutions.

He then created a culture that emphasised experimentation, rapid learning and incremental improvements, along with a system of sticks and carrots that pushed people to squeeze out inefficiencies. Thus pushed, managers at the Boring Company have found a way to convert the muck tunnelling leaves behind into something like cinderblocks.

City planning is the field in which the idea of a “wicked problem”—one resistant to any definitive solution because of contradictory requirements—was first invented. Its practitioners are highly sceptical of technofixes. But Mr Musk’s employees are fired up, which is just the way he likes them.