Enlarge Image Boring Company

At first, it sounded like a joke. Now we're not so sure.

Space and electric-car entrepreneur Elon Musk's tunnel-boring transportation venture, named the Boring Company, sold a ton of branded hats. Musk then promised a flamethrower would be next. Ha-ha, right? Well, there's now a flamethrower page on the Boring Company site, but there's a pesky password between us and the fiery goodness beyond.

Let's back up to the origin of all this weirdness. In December, Musk tweeted about reaching the goal of selling 50,000 Boring Company hats:

46k limited edition boring hats sold, 4K to go. Then flamethrower. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2017

The next day, he again promised us flamethrowers:

Hats sold out, flamethrowers soon! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2017

Musk is a known fan of the 1987 Mel Brooks sci-fi comedy "Spaceballs." That film includes a scene poking fun at all the merchandising that goes into the Star Wars franchise. One of the branded items is a "Spaceballs" flamethrower. "The kids love this one," says Yogurt, the Yoda parody character, after he fires it up.

According to Teslarati, there may be at least one real version of the Boring flamethrower, as demonstrated in a now-missing Instagram post from musician D.A. Wallach while he was on a Boring Company tunnel tour earlier in January. The post, for the moment, lives on Wallach's Facebook page. Wallach is also a SpaceX investor.

Earlier this week, Musk fans on Reddit posted the Boring Company flamethrower URL, which leads to a password-protected page. The password "flame" worked at that time and loaded a preorder product page showing a $600 Boring Company flamethrower. But now the password has been changed.

Griddy McGridfinFace, a parody Twitter account for the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, posted a screenshot of the page on Thursday:

It was leaked a few days ago but they changed the password pic.twitter.com/wcMXZ0ARFk — Griddy McGridfinFace (@FalconGridFin) January 25, 2018

The product page sure sounds compelling: "Prototype pictured above. Final production flamethrower will be better." The Verge says the flamethrower appears to be a modified version of an Airsoft rifle, which would normally shoot plastic pellets.

Users of the BoringCompany subreddit group on Reddit are now banding together to try to figure out the new password. So far, they've tried everything from "12345" to "hotenoughforyou" with no luck yet. I tried "flameymcflamethrowerface," "flameflameflame" and "boringflamethrower," but also to no avail.

Fans will keep trying to gain access to the product page, but we may have to wait until Musk and the Boring Company decide to make it go live to the public somewhere down the line. It could all end up being an April Fool's joke. If it turns out that way, then maybe Musk will bless us with Boring Company lunch boxes and breakfast cereal instead.

Tesla, Boring and D.A. Wallach didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

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