Back in March, Elon Musk announced that his Boring Company would be selling LEGO-like bricks made from leftover dirt, excavated to make way for his Boring tunnels. Land excavation is a costly endeavor and the question of "where will 550,000 cubic yards of dirt go?" poses many economic and environmental challenges. If the dirt is of good enough quality, it is often sent to other construction sites in need of filling, or to highways and other infrastructure projects. But, if it is deemed of poor quality, excavated land is sent off to landfills and quarries, or contamination facilities in a worst-case scenario. In the end, all options are expensive and time consuming.

Musk's brick approach is not an entirely bad way to address issues of leftover waste. How much of the land removed would be safe enough to use as material remains an obvious point of inquiry, but, recycling the earth that is decent enough into bricks could reduce costs as well as environmental impact. On Boring Company's website, they've even suggested that "these bricks can potentially be used as a portion of the tunnel lining itself."

However, recent tweets suggest that Musk has some additional plans for these building blocks

Over the weekend, Musk's troll of an announcement that he would be starting a candy company prompted many on Twitter to pressure the business magnate into addressing some of the world's more pressing problems, like California's housing crisis. 

To this, he replied "The Boring Company will be using dirt from tunnel digging to create bricks for low cost housing."

Even if we are to take Musk at his word that these bricks would be "rated for California seismic loads," as other tweets of his insist, there are still other practical questions, like: how much of the State's building codes would permit this type of construction? And, would the home building industry in a state that doesn't really build with brick even be equipped to put all of this to use? Nevertheless, by far, the Tesla CEO's biggest misfire here is, quite obviously, believing that low cost—or even free—building materials could come close to addressing the problem. 

According to research from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, while the price of construction materials has risen in recent years, soaring land values, labor shortages, lengthy approval processes, and codes and regulations that place onerous costs on developers are the much larger reasons that building affordable housing remains often untenable. In no way does Musk's current proposal address those aspects. 

The brouhaha over Musk's brick idea comes amidst growing impatience with the tech industry's lack of accountability over a housing crisis their influx of wealth, and import of job seekers, often helped exacerbate, if not create. Many of their campuses and office buildings are situatied within miles, if not blocks, of large tent encampments that continue to grow as people are pushed out of their homes due to rising rents. And, the inequality of it all is leading to mounting pressure—particularly towards billionaires like Musk, who claim to want to better the world, meanwhile launching cars into space at astronomical costs and then offering up his leftover dirt to the poor as some sort of concession.