Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered. It threatened his interests as an automaker and his elite vision of “individualized” mobility that simply worked better for him.

[...]

In the time since California started talking about high-speed rail and Elon Musk interjected with his fantasy to help sidetrack it, China moved ahead and built a network consisting of 42,000 kilometres (26,000 miles) of track. Europe is continuing to expand its own network, and Japan is building a maglev line that will run at speeds of over 500 km/h (310 mph). The first segment from Tokyo to Nagoya could open by 2027. Not to be outdone, China is working on a maglev of its own to beat its Japanese rivals. While the Hyperloop deception spread far and wide, nowhere was it stronger than in the United States. As countries around the world moved forward with real transport improvements, North Americans were distracted by the fantasies of clueless, but self-confident tech moguls. They left people trapped in their cars and denied better options to get around that people in many other parts of the world — even those that are quite a bit poorer — take for granted. Now all they can do is shovel money at automakers to try to power cars with batteries instead of internal combustion engines. They have no vision for a better, less car dependent alternative.

Opinions on Musk's stupid ass hyperloop project from a few years back? Did it have literally any potential?

He literally admitted he made up the whole concept to stop California High-speed Rail so that he could sell more cars. It was a grift and a scam and far far far too many people fell for it

Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation company building tube-encased lines to zip passengers and freight from city to city at airplane-like speeds, is shutting down, according to people familiar with the situation.

Once a high-profile startup, Hyperloop One raised more than $450 million since its founding in 2014, according to PitchBook. It built a small test track near Las Vegas to develop its transportation technology, and for a time took the name Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson’s Virgin invested. Virgin removed its branding after the startup decided last year to focus on cargo rather than people.

Buried halfway through: it's another failed Elon Musk venture.

Not mentioned at all: the only reason Musk proposed Hyperloop was to thwart California's high-speed rail initiative and sell more cars. You see, his alternative technology of shooting supersonic capsules through evacuated vacuum tubes would be so much better than stinky old trains.

The only problem?

None of the technology exists. All the prototypes sucked. Even after ten years and a half billion dollars.

One "prototype" is literally a one-lane concrete tunnel allowing a single Tesla automobile to travel at astonishing speeds up to 107 MPH. Technically you can drive faster than that on most american highways.

Also that's 50-100 MPH slower than the high speed rail California wanted to implement a decade ago.

And now the whole venture is quietly going away.

Unpaywalled version here.

Colossal waste of time and money, produced and accomplished nothing, other than diverting interest and investment from other forms of mass transit so the creep could sell more expensive electric cars (probably his real angle all along).

The hyperloop idea is likely the reason why Musk’s name was mentioned in an early episode of Star Trek Discovery as an example of a historical pioneer of technology. That aged like milk.

Look who's there, my new sticker design ! Obviously a good pair with my "Train Good" sticker.

For sale on my shop !

Hyperloop (Prototype Vacuum Train) Spoorwegmuseum (Railway Museum) Utrecht, Netherlands

the minds behind “the subway but with traffic jams” will now revolutionize twitter, i guess

hey so how's the future of transportation going

I think Taiwan should build underground tsmc chip factories in western ukraine. and just also build hyperloop or regular giant tunnels between ukraine and Poland.

ukraine is technologically savvy and could produce quality chips for Europe

And then tsmc can set up corporate offices in Poland.

So I saw this comment under a post here on Tumblr:

And I’ve seen a lot like it on Reddit of course:

So just real quick, let me explain why this is wrong.  Four simple things, not too complicated:

1. Musk specifically chose to buy Twitter as-is without doing due diligence.  If he’d wanted a better look under the hood, that could have been part of the deal and it wasn’t.  So you can’t now say that this was some kind of 4D Chess thing by Elon.

2. Twitter has given him everything they reasonably could, they just refuse to give him private user data.  That’s a good thing.  (I mean, fuck Twitter obviously but I’m just saying in this case “no you can’t have our user’s private data” is what I would want them to say.)

3. He’s trying to back out because it’s a fantastically shitty deal.  It wasn’t a great deal in the first place frankly, and then stock prices dropped.  Legally he could be forced to go through with it, but he’s super rich and shit happens so more likely he’s going to have to pay something smaller (bare minimum there’s a one billion dollar penalty).  This is a bad thing for Musk and very much not what he would have wanted.

4. Please stop saying he’s an inventor, or that he cares in any way about making America a better place.  He’s a rich idiot that sometimes hires inventors and fucks over normal folks.  That’s not the same thing.  He’s a terrible human being, and the majority of his ideas are ridiculously bad.  The hyperloop, the mars colony, the scheme to launch people around on a rocket as a replacement for airplanes, his replacement for semi trucks, the list goes on.  They’re hilariously and obviously bad ideas with such massive flaws that you can see them from the Tesla he shot into space.

Good. Die faster before I finish the job by slitting the throat of elon musk and shreding his skin before throwing his miserable Corpse in a vat of acid which I will then be poured down Hollywood boulevard.

Why am I thinking of the classic episode of The Simpson’s with the Springfield monorail project? I don’t know whether to be pleased or appalled that the super-wealthy are so super-stupid as to fall for this obvious super-scam.

I'm surprised no billionaires have ever tried to build Captain Nemo's Nautilus to live a self-sufficient life at sea. It could never work, but that's the exact kind of mad project that someone like Elon Musk would cook up to waste money if space travel weren't in vogue right now. Nuclear reactors can run for years before needing to refuel, and modern subs can make their own oxygen from seawater, so they can stay submerged for as long as their supplies last (the record is 111 days set by the HMS Warspite in 1982-3). I don't think a sub could stay underwater forever by fishing for all its food, but then again I'm a rational adult with common sense and the ability to recognize the impossible, while a billionaire just wants his neat toy to work no matter what. It's like that Australian guy who wanted to build a replica of the Titanic and a "real" Jurassic Park with lifesize animatronics, and gave up after he realized they would take a lot more time and money than he imagined at first impulse.

Thing is, as funny as it would be to watch someone like Musk try snd fail to build the Nautilus, there's no incentive for him to do it. All his half-baked ideas are designed to fail from the start because the failure is the point; there's always a benefit to his failures. The hyperloop was never really supposed to exist, he only hyped it up so California would cut funding for high speed rail. SpaceX rockets explode more often than they succeed so they're not really gonna take anyone to the moon or Mars anytime soon, this program is just a blank check from the government so the US could hypothetically launch military supplies anywhere on Earth within a couple hours. A real life Nautilus would have to be some scam, a cover for something heinous like a prison camp for the homeless straight out of some 80s sci-fi dystopia movie, or a cartoonish distraction from horrors of war like an underwater drone program or American terrorists privateers attacking fiber optic cables and gas pipelines owned by eastern companies.

The eccentric billionaire is a myth designed to make the worst human being you could possibly imagine look like benevolent innovators who want nothing more than to Propel Humanity Into the 22nd Century Today™!

Tony Stark isn't real. Nobody alive is like him, nobody ever was, nobody ever will be.

Hyperloop the future of transportation #Hyperloop #facts #shorts