Kremlin’s Russia-Alaska tunnel pitch to Musk is ‘interesting’

President Donald Trump said Friday that a Russian proposal for Elon Musk and his tunneling business, the Boring Company, to build an undersea rail tunnel through the Bering Strait was “interesting” and he’d have to think about it.

“That’s an interesting one,” Trump said when asked about the suggested tunnel from Russia to Alaska. “We’ll have to think about that. I hadn’t heard that.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was “not happy” with the idea following Trump’s response.

Kirill Dmitriev, an investment envoy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested in posts on Musk’s social media platform X that the project would be partly funded by Moscow.

Dmitriev said it would be “a 70-mile link symbolizing unity.”

A tunnel like this would traditionally cost an estimated $65 billion to build, said Dmitriev, who is head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, adding that The Boring Company and its technology could potentially reduce those costs to $8 billion and complete the project within eight years.

“Let’s build a future together!” he wrote.

Dmitriev’s suggestion followed a call between Putin and Trump on Thursday, during which plans were made to discuss possible resolutions to the Ukraine War.

Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other high-level advisors will meet next week with a Russian delegation before Trump and Putin meet in Budapest, Hungary, at a future date.

Musk did not respond to a request for comment about the proposal.

Construction of an undersea tunnel in the Bering Strait would require Musk’s Boring Company to work through below-freezing temperatures in a region without existing infrastructure and with deep and frequent earthquakes.

The Boring Company has no track record of working through such conditions.

Its previous tunneling efforts were completed in hot, dry locations with plenty of infrastructure and services nearby.

The Boring Company was recently fined and cited by environmental regulators in the state of Nevada for an “extraordinary number of violations,” ProPublica reported, citing public records. Those violations included: digging without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling waste from trucks.

The Boring Company is now working on a 10-mile tunnel project from downtown Nashville, Tennessee, to its airport, dubbed the Music City Loop. Residents protested, in part, due to the lack of planning before The Boring Company project was authorized in the flood-prone city.

Musk’s automaker, Tesla, has supply chain ties to Russia, and the CEO has spoken with Putin about other matters in the past few years.

The EV maker has purchased millions of euros worth of aluminum from Rusal, a company founded by sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, CNBC previously reported.

Musk held secret talks with Putin in 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported in October 2024.

In one instance, Putin had pressured Musk to direct SpaceX to withold Starlink, its satellite internet communications service, from Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Journal reported, citing two people briefed on the request.

Beijing is a critical ally to the Kremlin.

The conversations between Musk and Putin, who once ran the KGB, reportedly occurred as Musk was in the midst of a leveraged buyout and takeover of Twitter, now known as X.

Working with NASA, Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor, SpaceX, has also launched Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station.

CNBC’s Chris Eudaily contributed to this story.