Elon Musk is a man of many, many interests. Lately, to go along with cars, space, and AI, he has added mass transit to the pile. After launching the Boring Company last year (via a Twitter musing about terrible Los Angeles traffic), the Tesla and SpaceX CEO began digging an experimental tunnel in his own backyard, the parking lot of SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

He plans, he says, to construct networks of tunnels throughout cities with faster, more efficient boring technology. The tunnels could carry individual cars or eight- to sixteen-passenger "pods" on electric skates, traveling up to 150 mph. (Longer tunnels, between cities, would be perfect for hyperloop, another interest.)

Less than a year after its founding, the Boring Company is already talking about taking its mass transit solution to real, live cities. In July, Musk announced that he had “verbal government approval” to build a hyperloop between Washington, DC and New York City, which could carry commuters between the two in less than 30 minutes. (A White House official later suggested that he had, perhaps, given Musk the wrong idea, and that the project had not been approved, verbally or otherwise.) In November, Musk said the company would bid on a project to build a new, faster rail link between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport. And in early December, the Boring Company released a map showing a proposed tunnel network in Los Angeles, which could transport both private cars and shared pods between Long Beach Airport in the south, Santa Monica in the west, Dodger Stadium in the east, and Sherman Oaks in the north.

All of which casts a curious light on the fact that last week, Musk revealed he's no great fan of mass transit. The whole sharing space with other humans thing? It's kind of icky.

“There is this premise that good things must be somehow painful,” he said onstage at a Tesla event on the sidelines of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference in Long Beach, California, in response to an audience question about his take on public transit and urban sprawl. “I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.” The CEO reiterated his preference for individual transportation, ie, private cars. Preferably, a private Tesla. (Tesla offered those attending Musk's talk the chance to test drive a Model S.)