Nevada Governor's office covered up Boring Co safety violations

Summary

On May 28, hours after Nevada’s workplace safety agency served notice of more than $400,000 in fines to Elon Musk’s $5.6 billion tunneling startup the Boring Company, the phone rang at Nevada governor Joe Lombardo’s office. Boring Co. president Steve Davis was on the line. Boring Company was challenging citations from Nevada’s workplace safety regulator blaming it for chemical burns two firefighters had suffered in its tunnels during a training exercise. By the next afternoon, a group of high-ranking state officials, including the governor’s state infrastructure coordinator who took the call, were convened in a room with Davis, who was himself wrapping up a stint in Washington D.C. helping Musk run the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). At the beginning of that meeting, the citations and fines—among the agency’s largest in a decade and a potential threat to Boring’s plans to build tunnels in other U.S. cities—were summarily rescinded. Soon, something else disappeared: The record of the Governor’s office meeting with Musk’s company was removed from a public document without explanation. More irregularities in the case file occurred: Documents weren’t saved to the file, and a document intended to provide reasoning for revoking the citations was left out. The sequence of events, which Fortune is the first to report, raised alarm and has had a chilling effect within Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, according to an OSHA staffer as well as someone who worked on the case, and it raises questions about the degree to which a powerful business is able to bend regulatory guardrails to its will and skirt proper oversight, especially as Musk’s consortium of companies become increasingly intertwined with Nevada’s economy. “There is a defined process, and we didn’t follow it,” says one of the people that worked on the case file. “It wasn’t the agency that decided to do that—it was above the agency,” the person added, speaking ...