Elon’s Musk: Burnt hair perfume nets tech billionaire $2m

Elon Musk claims to have sold more than 20,000 bottles of his ‘Burnt Hair’ perfume, raising more than $2 million for his tunnel-digging startup.

The tech billionaire described it as “the finest fragrance on Earth”, with the company listing it as “the essence of repugnant desire” and smelling “just like leaning over a candle at the dinner table, but without all the hard work”.

The product initially appeared to be a joke, though its listing on the company’s online store led Twitter users to describe it as “world class trolling”.

Others were less impressed, with one person tweeting: “Sad thing is... he thinks he’s funny when is is just so incredibly lame.”

It is the latest unusual fundraising initiative for The Boring Company, having previously sold a modified roofing torch dubbed ‘Not-A-Flamethrower’, which sold out within days after going on sale in 2018.

A limited edition hat, marketed as “the world’s most boring hat”, also sold out in 2017, with both pieces of merchandise soon listed with huge markups on third party sites like eBay.

Another of Mr Musk’s company’s, the electric car manufacturer Tesla, has also produced novelty merchandise, selling a $250 bottle of Tesla tequila after originally teasing it as an April Fool’s joke.

Mr Musk tweeted on Tuesday: “With a name like mine, getting into the fragrance business was inevitable. Why did I even fight it for so long?!”

The Independent has reached out to The Boring Company for comment.

Since launching in 2016, the tunnel-digging venture has built a Loop transit system under Las Vegas to transport passengers between three stations in Teslas beneath the Nevada city, though more ambitious projects of cutting down Los Angeles traffic are yet to be realised.

“A large network of tunnels many levels deep would help alleviate congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels),” the company’s website states.

“The key to making this work is increasing tunnelling speed and dropping costs by a factor of 10 or more – this is the goal of The Boring Company.”