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Elon Musk Inspired an Industry of Hyperloop Startups. Now He's Building His Own (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk introduced his vision for a futuristic mode of tube-based transportation called the hyperloop in 2013. In an exhaustive white paper, he laid out a body of research conducted with his team at Space Exploration Technologies demonstrating the system's viability and seemingly offered it as a gift to the entrepreneurial community. "I don't have any plan to execute because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla," he said in a conference call at the time. He apparently changed his mind. Last month, the SpaceX and Tesla chief executive officer revealed on Twitter that he'd received "verbal government approval" to build a hyperloop capable of ferrying passengers between New York and Washington, D.C., in 29 minutes. The tweet came as a shock to executives at the various startups racing to develop their own hyperloops based on Musk's specifications. Several of them initially expressed hope that Musk would simply dig the tunnels and perhaps choose one of their startups to create the physical infrastructure, which involves a tube-encased train traveling at speeds faster than an airplane. Nope. A person close to Musk said his plan is to build the entire thing, including the hyperloop system. Musk also holds a trademark for "Hyperloop" through SpaceX, which could be used to prevent other companies from using the term, according to U.S. public records. The billionaire's unexpected entry into the hyperloop business could threaten the ambitions of three startups, which have raised about $200 million combined from venture backers. "There's probably a finite amount of capital willing to bet on this space -- and bet against him," said Jonathan Silver, the former loan programs director at the U.S. Department of Energy. Silver learned not to underestimate Musk after overseeing a 2010 loan of $465 million to Tesla, which the electric carmaker paid back, with interest, nine years ahead of schedule.
I doubt he'll hold onto the trademark for Hyperloop very long. It's already used generically by enough people who don't think of it as a company-specific term.
Trying to hold onto the Hyperloop trademark will cause headaches. Perhaps Musk will need some asprin.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So he basically tricked a bunch of hacks with money into pursuing his idea instead of their own, then joined it late in the game able to rip off their R&D while holding all the marketing/branding power?
I'm no Musk fan, but as far as Silicon Valley marketing/sales people go he's no all-bad this time around. (his borderline sweatshop of engineers with low pay in constant burn-out mode withstanding)
no, you are missing the point. Hyperloop does not compete with cars. it competes with airplanes.
You forgot the solar business and energy storage business (both now part of Tesla) and tunnel boring business (Boring Company) ;) And he's involved in OpenAI. And started Neuralink. I wonder when he's going to get around to his electric airplane plans, too.
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century? Because cars came about! Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it. Nobody wanted to be a slave to the train schedule 100 years ago, and nobody will want to go back to being a slave to the train schedule again, either. Thinking otherwise is a fools errand.
That ignores the whole part about building it. It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city. Philadelphia has been trying to make their subway 8 city blocks longer for over 50 years now and has gotten absolutely nowhere. But we're supposed to believe that a 400 mile long tube is just gonna magically show up across the I 95 corridor overnight? With that kind of thinking I might as well start going to church again.
Nobody?
There are millions of people in Chicago and New York alone that are a "slave to a train/bus" every single day and have been for decades.. Many of them don't even own cars... So, "nobody" is a false assertion by far.
This isn't about Boring Company, which has up to this point just ostensibly been about tunnels. This is about Musk building a Hyperloop himself.
Musk's companies are juggernauts, and he raises capital with ease. This is going to be a tough wave for the other startups to weather.
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
Yea... I live in NYC and despite the MTAs shortcomings I find that the subway gives me *more* freedom. It doesn't run on a fixed schedule, you just go and wait and eventually a train shows up to take you where you need to go. It's cheap, $2.50 to go anywhere and I don't get harassed by the police looking to bolster their budgets. I can go out to the bars, get shit-faced, and get home without having to worry about where I parked my car or paying for a taxi. I don't have to pay car insurance or maintain a pile of metal and plastic that's slowly decaying.
I dream of NYC banning personal vehicles all together and leave half the local streets to taxis and delivery vehicles and the other half for bikes/parks/walkways.
The idea of a vacuum transport tube has been around before Elon Musk. I remember attending colloquium in college where some inventors were trying to get interest in building evacuated tube transport. http://www.et3.com/
Yes, airline scheduling is so much better, where the wait in line is twice as long as the trip itself. It seems that people are willing to suffer through a great deal. It's their patriotic duty.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it
Hyperloop uses many small independent pods rather than a single long train. So on a busy route such as NYC to DC, a pod would launch every minute or so. Rather than a fixed schedule, it would make more sense to just launch each pod as it filled up.
Right now, it's not competing with anything.
This guy wants to be Steve Jobs so bad it's fucking comical. Steve Jobs was unduly idolized and poor musk wants the same thing so badly. You've nor your company have innovated anything. The US Tax Pay funded both Tesla and SolarShitty. Now you think a train is a technological marvel...
Well, in all fairness, he's already done more to help mankind so far than Jobs did. Jobs made some great commercial electronics but nothing revolutionary. The iPhone was a well put together piece of equipment and his best contribution, but it's not like there weren't already similar products before, and co-currently being worked on by other teams. His was just better than anything else in the beginning... the smart phone revolution was dawning anyway- he just made it better and maybe sped it up a year or two.
Musk on the other hand has single handedly pulled the world up and made electric cars a reality. It's not the fringe technology we might develop 20 years from now, in perpetuity any more.
His impact is so big, countries are beginning to mandate electric cars in the future His impact with electric cars has also spurred a battery revolution for solar panels- solar panels were coming anyway, so were home batteries- but he's made big impacts there.
He has leapstarted self driving vehicles. Whilst Google has been floundering for a decade- Tesla has gone ahead and done it and made it a reality. Maybe not whole-hog, maybe not even close, but his baby steps towards self-driving has made the technology a reality and other automanufacturers are taking note.
He's also been leading the only really successful team for privatized space. Sure Virgin Galactic, and a few others are looking promising, but he's pretty much spurred a whole second space-age.
If Hyperloop works and doesn't turn into vapour, it promises to be a massive change on how we think about transport. I'm less optimistic for hyperloop than his other ventures, but it could potentially be a big shaker.
So yeah, Jobs had some nice consumer electronics, but Musk has already done more that is useful to mankind. He's not just turning over a profit, he's doing useful stuff that betters man. He long since overshot Jobs.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Trains were used, because they offered something that couldn't be rivalled until cars came along. Hyperloop is not a straight replacement for the outdated train model - it offers a massive speed increase over the current (i.e. car) model.
I don't think you understand anything about Hyperloop (like 98% of the people who complain about the concept).
* Hyperloop pods leave every few minutes. There is no "schedule" like with trains.
* Hyperloop pods in the "large" variant carry cars. And that seems to be the variant that Musk is pursuing.
* As for cost (and this gets very tedious having to go into this on every thread): the reason for the costs in Hyperloop Alpha being low vs. HSR are.. first, the fundamentals:
1) Hyperloop costs are budgeted at rates similar to (but more expensive than) pipelines, on a "length times cross section" basis. Because it is a pipeline, not a railroad. It has a number of aspects that make it more expensive than a pipeline (greater straightness requirements, interior polishing, higher elevation, human factors, partial-vacuum pumping) and cheaper (low pressure is easier to resist than high, vastly lower pumping energy requirements, no risk of environmental contamination making approval expensive, vastly lower mass loadings, little to no thermal management needs, etc).
2) The cost to elevate something (like a rail viaduct) is almost linearly proportional to peak loading. Hyperloop pods are an order of magnitude lighter than HSR trains. The peak loadings are also much more transient, which is much easier to resist.
3) Because the elevation cost is reduced, it lets them build the whole thing elevated over public right-of-ways (assuming the government has buy-in - which for getting a high speed transport system at no cost to them, is not an unrealistic expectation), greatly reducing acquisition costs. This is limited by bending radii.
4) While permitting is still required, building over a public right-of-way - something already permitted for much noisier and more polluting operation - is much cheaper than permitting for greenfield development.
Now for the cheats in the Alpha document:
5) Hyperloop serves fewer passenger trips than CA-HSR - it's in-between HSR numbers and air passenger numbers.
6) It stops in fewer locations - it's just a direct LA-SF route.
7) It doesn't go into town. It's far more expensive to build in-town than out of town. The document excuses this on the premise that airports are located out of town - but airports are located there because they often must be, not because people want them there.
8) To get government permission to use right-of-ways, they should be expected to have impositions for more stops (just like HSR had to) and/or in-town terminals (as HSR has to pay for).
A note about the cost: there are small tunneling sections in Hyperloop Alpha; however, none of them are in-town (which is very expensive). They're budgeted at standard tunneling rates per unit length times cross section (the tube is very low cross section compared to road and water tunnels). However, this ignores what Musk is trying to achieve with Boring Company (major reductions in tunneling cost); if Boring Company succeeds, then this portion of Hyperloop Alpha is overbudgeted.
That is all.
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why did people stop using trains in the mid 20th century?
They didn't in much of the world. Passenger rail is alive and well.
Why do people like cars better than trains? Because cars don't have a set schedule that must be followed to the minute.
Strawman. People don't necessarily like cars better. In many parts of the US they simply don't have a choice. I've lived in cities where passenger rail was an option and it was hugely useful and I generally preferred it to driving in many cases. (traffic jams suck) Whether cars or trains are advantageous is circumstance dependent. It also depends on what infrastructure has been invested in. Trains are economically efficient for a certain set of conditions. They are widely used in Europe and Asia. Honestly I would happily ride a train to work if it were feasible where I live.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
People all around the world ride trains and airplanes and even boats on fixed schedules. Including in the US. The fact that the schedule is fixed is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially when it is as reliable as the trains in Japan. The primary advantage of cars is that they can go point to point rather than having their start and end points fixed. The lack of a schedule with cars is usually a much more minor advantage in the presence of a well functioning passenger rail system. Go to a city like NYC or Chicago and odds are you'll park the car and ride the light rail system + taxis to get around.
It took 90 years and 4 billion dollars to get an additional 2 miles of subway track added to new york city.
Which is irrelevant regarding whether hyperloop systems would be cost efficient. A subway in one of the most densely populated cities in the world isn't really a good comparison. If you want to make a proper comparison consider the efforts to put in high speed rail in the US. A lot of land will need to be purchased and right of ways obtained. The reason passenger rail struggles in the US is precisely because 1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper and 2) population density in large parts of the country. But in places where the infrastructure exists and the population density is sufficient, like in the Northeast Corridor or in much of Europe and Japan, trains are popular and heavily used for transport.
I have my doubts that a hyperloop system will make economic sense. I suspect it will fail for much the same reason monorails never really caught on. But there may be specific cases where it makes a lot of sense so I'm withholding judgement until there is more data to work with. Worst case is that it's kind of a nifty technology that might have interesting applications down the road.
People in most countries haven't stopped using trains; the USA is the exception.
A fixed schedule is not a problem as long as trains run frequently enough. The route I use most has a train leaving every 15 minutes, so no matter when I arrive at the station, it's never a long wait. Having trains at 15-minute intervals will only be profitable in densely populated areas, so this is not a solution that can be applied everywhere.
Technically, Hyperloop isn't even limited to those speeds. The main limitation is that you can't get too close to the speed of sound, as it causes a lot of problems with the concept. But the speed of sound is not a universal constant. It can be raised either by increasing temperature (which may well happen on its own; rarified atmospheres are terrible heat conductors) or by using light gases in the tube rather than leaked air. The latter means better pumping requirements, but the amount of gases involved (H2, He, H2O, CH4 or NH3) is very small, and too sparse to pose combustion or corrosion/embrittlement risks (with the possible exception of in the compressors/skis)
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
There's no way he could get enough space to run a giant tube over the land. He'd have to do something crazy like dig giant tunnels everywhere. Good luck finding someone who can do that without breaking your budget. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
As long as hyperloop or whatever else operates on a fixed schedule, then it solves no problems, and people won't use it.
That depends on the schedule. If there's enough trips, then it will still be useful. If not, then it won't.
we're supposed to believe that a 400 mile long tube is just gonna magically show up across the I 95 corridor overnight?
Yes, overnight. That's exactly what was claimed. You sure did find the fatal flaw in the argument there, Holmes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
yeah, as long as you don't care about the destination
Musk's companies are juggernauts, and he raises capital with ease. This is going to be a tough wave for the other startups to weather.
Musk has competition, sees what the other startups do, does whatever looks best. But he won't be building every meter of the system, so there's still plenty of opportunity around the world, and the startups get to see what he does and improve on it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Man, where to even begin?
1) People still take trains (and other fixed-schedule transports, like buses) all the time. Your post acts like public transit isn't a thing (and then proceeds to mention subways...)
2) Trains for long distance travel between cities (and countries!) are still very popular in many places in the world, like Europe. Let me guess, you're American and are only familiar with cities that are designed to be car-centric.
3) Expanding an underground subway line inside a dense city is not at all the same thing as running track above ground along existing transport corridors (that's the whole point of using pylons, the Hyperloop can re-use existing corridors without needing to clear a bunch of new land/dig tunnels)
4) As others have pointed out, this competes with airplanes, not trains. That's how fast it is.
5) I'd argue that people prefer cars not because they hate schedules, but simply because a car will get them from point A to point B faster (in PART because they don't have to stand around waiting at any point). When an airplane gets you from A to B faster, people take airplanes. When the hyperloop gets people from A to B faster, they'll take hyperloops.
It's true that people enjoy the freedom of a car, and they aren't going away. But it's not a binary either/or thing. Public transport thrives when implemented well in an area with demand. Look at the NY Subway or London Underground.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Airplanes to all destinations all queue to use a (usually) single fixed resource of the runway. They have to book slots.
With hyperloop there is no such bottleneck. Each tube is separate. They can literally go as soon as pod is full, or after the first passenger on the pod has waited a certain time. No slots.
Right, which is why VDUs and the lines that feed them are constantly catastrophically imploding, right?
Sorry, but engineering for vacuum is no harder than engineering for pressure, and a lot safer in the event of a failure. Let me tell you, given the choice between a problem in a VDU and a hydrocracker, you'd much rather be working on the VDU. Of course you can make an implosion in something not designed for holding vacuum - that's why you hire bloody engineers, to prevent that. Which means some combination of appropriate wall thickness and regularly spaced reinforcing rings.
Again, if you'd read the Hyperloop Alpha document, you'd be aware that the design calls for emergency exits at periodic intervals. The pods move on wheels at low speeds.
Now, if your issue is that "they haven't been demonstrated", nobody said that they have, and I'm not sure where you got that idea. It's a new concept, with test facilities just starting to come online.
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
When you have enough money, you just pay other people to do the work and take credit at photo ops.
Musk on the other hand has single handedly pulled the world up and made electric cars a reality. It's not the fringe technology we might develop 20 years from now, in perpetuity any more... His impact is so big, countries are beginning to mandate electric cars in the future.
What a load of BS, unless you are fishing for "Funny" mods. You do know that Tesla existed before Musk's involvement and he just bought into it? The UK, where I am, has begun to mandate electic cars in the future but that is nothing to do with Musk, and people here do not especially think of Musk when they think of electric cars. That seems to be an Americanism
If Musk wanted to be the next Steve Jobs then at least he has succeded in that, which I do not mean as a compliment. Like Jobs, he is primarily a successful salesman, using the device of creating a cult following.
I lived in Singapore for a few years and had to use public transportation (busses and subway). Personally, I thought it was miserable. The main issue was infectious disease. Everyone was always sick. I got really tired of being coughed and sneezed on by sick people. But there was also the general issue of "personal space" - having some guy lean over and scrape the dandruff out of his hair all over my shoes when it was too crowded to move away. Or having the guy in the seat next to me pick his nose or his acne and then absent-mindedly flick in the gunk in my direction. These days I'm back in the USA and can commute to work in my own car and it's absolute heaven - no sick people sneezing in my face, no one flicking boogers on me, I can even turn on the radio and sing along to my favorite music.
>Driving sucks. I'd much rather fly, but it's too expensive
I hear that a lot. Personally, I don't get it. Could you elaborate on why you feel this way?
For me, driving doesn't involve TSA (big plus), lets me stop at a restaurant of my choice (big plus), I can bring nearly unlimited cargo (big plus), I can bring drinks (big plus), it is more comfortable (big plus), and I can set the cabin temperature as I like (big plus). Oh, I also get to kick off any passengers I can't stand. All my drives are direct and start anytime I like (big plus). It also costs less if you have a family (big plus).
The only negatives I can think of are: You have to control the vehicle (big minus), it is somewhat slower (big minus), and, unless you are a passenger, no entertainment other than the radio (minus). It can cost more if you are single (big minus). And if you are driving, no alcohol (minus).
Those positives outweigh the minuses for me. Let me know why you think driving sucks more than flying!
You might be mixing up innovating and inventing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Automated cars will improve the usability of mass transit, rather than killing it off. You give your driving app a destination and let the server algorithm figure out whether you are in for a local point to point drive in one car, or whether the car will deliver you to a train at a place where one going your way is about to pass through. You will then be directed by the app to get off at a designated station and jump into another car to finish the trip. All handled seamlessly and billed by the month.
Except that they don't. So their peak loadings are higher. So viaducts must be able to support the higher peak loads.
The amount of towers, tunnels, etc is all laid out in Hyperloop Alpha.
1. It's not.
2. That's wrong.
Go talk to anyone who's ever engineered a VDU and start lecturing them about how terrible the engineering is on vacuum systems.
That doesn't even make sense.
I'm not "forgetting" anything. Wind loads in normal conditions are almost irrelevant. 3,3 m^2 per m of cross section, a Cd of 1,17 with Cat-5 70m/s winds is 1,225 * 1,17 * 70^2 * 3,3 N/m = 23,2kN/m, roughly the same as a 26 tonne *empty*, 15m long, passengers-plus-3x-vehicles capsule plus the track mass. More to the point, the tube has to maintain alignment with vehicles passing over it; if you eliminate alignment requirements (aka shut it down due to your category 5 hurricane) the ability to bear loads becomes vastly higher.
You're mixing up terms. They impose the same force, but for a much reduced period of time. Try this. Hold a steel bar between your hands and have someone swing a 2kg hammer at it at 10m/s, with the hammer coming to a stop in 10ms. No problem, right? That was 20kN force. Now instead of hitting the bar with a hammer, park a 2 tonne car on that bar. How are you doing holding that up? Because that's the same amount of force.
Time is absolutely relevant in terms of how hard a load is to bear.
(BTW, before you plan to pivot to "Well, but the deflection from a pod passing over would be too great...", actually run the numbers. It's not.)
Except mapping it out is literally what they did in the Hyperloop Alpha document. That you can be so dismissive of something that's literally already done tickles me.
The noun clause ("public right of way") immediately preceding the descriptive clause ("something already permitted for much noisier and more polluting operation)". Do I really need to diagram the sentence for you?
He's really very... gentle... and fuzzy. We're becoming fast friends.
Musk on the other hand has single handedly
That's a big "fuck you" to all the engineers, scientists, investors who have been working on the project, even before Musk ever came along. Or do you think that each Tesla is personally designed and hand-made by Musk himself?
He's also been leading the only really successful team for privatized space.
SpaceX is no more private than ULA . SpaceX has some interesting engineering concepts to improve costs, but the business model isn't any different than any other contractor.
The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
In which way?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Rei, I think the salient difference is that nobody works inside a VDU.
There has been relatively little focus on the details of car/capsule design. The design of a capsule able to withstand multiple trips per day in near-space conditions, providing life support while maintaining a near-zero failure rate, would be in my estimation more impressive than evacuating a long pipeline to 0.001 bar. I wish them luck, because the design of the doors alone would be of great benefit for space technology.
big airports can have more than one runway, just like hyperloops can have multiple boarding tubes
Hence why I said "(usually)".
Thing is they only get multiple runways when the slots on the existing runway has already been full for years. So the sharing of a bottleneck resource is still the same.
It will never be the same as hyperloop which idoesn't have to share anything between tubes.
In a complex hyperloop system with multiple destinations (I know, we are being theoretical here), most likely the boarding tubes would be shared for different destinations, just like airports gates or runways can be used by different planes.
Except, it doesn't require nude photos and an intimate groping to board, nor has delays due to a toilet issue, weather, snow, turbulence, etc.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Airports still have many problems, even with multiple runways. No airport in the world currently lands more than 4 planes a minute that I'm aware of, because of the issues surrounding vortexes. Larger planes only make them worse, and reduce the landing frequency, so once a certain size plane is being used, larger planes do not really help with the number of passengers being able to be serviced.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You mean calling out biased invested parties? One can not assume any value inherent in a fan post without disclosures. They are most likely in it for their own financial benefits and at the cost of your own, so they are not only useless but detrimental to everyone.
Doubt it. The more complicated you make it, the harder it is to maintain the low pressure.
Actually, the MTA subway does run on a fixed schedule. Nobody cares, though, because a 1 minute wait during peak hours and 5 minutes or so during off-peak means we just show up and wait (well, in Manhattan, anyway.)
Wish I had mod points - you are explaining reality well.
You could board in a high pressure area and then some airlock before entering the low pressure tube. The passengers have to get in and out one way or another. Especially in a city mid point, it would be stupid to block the main tube while people get in and out.
Here's hoping it stays that way.
The science behind it is iffy, at best right now.
Actually, the science is pretty well understood. Even the engineering is pretty well understood. The biggest issues with hyperloop are the scale and the cargo.
There've been pretty impressive systems of "pneumatic tubes" that have been built for sending things around. Of course, those tubes were fairly small and they carried inanimate objects. Now we want to make them travel much further and be much bigger and carry people at high speeds, so there's bunches of issues there that need to be figured out.
The capsules should be relatively easy to design. The pressures we'd be containing are very minimal compared to stuff that is used constantly already in everyday life. At the very highest pressures you're talking about sea level atmospheric numbers plus a little if the weather is nice, so maybe 18psi. Compare that to commercially available pressure vessels that hold contents at over 100psi. The vacuum isn't what makes space difficult, it is the exposure to radiation and extremes of temperature. In a hyperloop system the pod won't be exposed to such extremes of temperature and will be shielded from radiation by virtue of not being in outerspace.
Life support is really the only challenging bit at all and compressed atmosphere combined with something to pull out the carbon the people exhale is about all you'd need. Depending on the length of the trip you might be fine just using whatever atmosphere is trapped in the pod when you close it up.
The door system for placing a pod into the evacuated tube I imagine would be done via an airlock. If the airlock chamber is sized to be just slightly larger than the pod you end up with very little atmosphere to pump out.
Not at all, there's no one to attack, no one to take over, the only thing you can do is blow yourself up. The pods are relatively small, at least last time I looked, holding only 4 or 8 people. So mere explosives screening is sufficient, no need to worry about paperclips or pens.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
... Umm... No, no... They understand math, physics, engineering, and this concept - very well. Read the history of their posts. You could probably just bail on the thread, and nobody will notice. You could also just say sorry and ask them to help you learn.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Uh no. Ppl quit riding the train because cars were cheaper and faster. With HL, it will not be a train, but small pods/cars which can take off at various times and get 100 miles in 7 minutes (compared to 70-90 minutes for car). If his prices compete against cars, he wins flat out.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm a fan of Musk, but the same reasons you shun Jobs also apply to Musk. Without either person what they had accomplished would have eventually been accomplished by others, which can be said about any human endeavor other than art. What makes both of them visionaries is how they both pushed boundaries ahead of their times, to glimpse a piece of the future and bring it to the present via exemplar leadership abilities. I will agree though that what Musk has accomplished to date greatly exceeds what Jobs has accomplished, although Jobs arguably had at bit of an artist's impact with his design in conjunction with Jonny Ives et. al.
Like Jobs, he is primarily a successful salesman, using the device of creating a cult following.
Why the hate? It's an undeniable fact that Musk's companies are revolutionizing industries where many, many others have tried and failed. Self-landing rockets weren't even on anybody's radar until Musk proved it could be done with SpaceX. That's a bigger step towards reusability than any space corporation or national program has been able to pull off in all of history, and that isn't for a lack of trying.
There are legitimate criticisms of Musk to make. He's got a reputation for burning through employees at a furious rate. His schedule projections are almost always wrong. But trying to deny his accomplishments just makes you look ignorant and spiteful.
Besides the negatives that you've already brought up, driving is also significantly more dangerous.
Most people outside of the US take trains regularly.
The fact that trains are shit is a specific problem to the US.
Sorry, but trying to build a miles-long vacuum chamber out of thin-wall steel tubing, and pushing people through it at high rates of speed?
The science behind his CHOSEN SOLUTION is iffy.
Sure it can be brute-forced to work. But there are several major points of failure that are simply ignored. And actual safety systems haven't even been discussed.
The fact is, this thing is supposed to be carrying people. People generally object to being worse-than-killed on a business commute.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
People fly in airplanes despite the schedule thing, because they are much much faster than cars. In other countries where they have real high speed trains, which the Acela Express is not, people ride trains because they are much much faster than cars. The Hyperloop will also be much much faster than cars, so people will use it.
Thunderfoot did a good job of debunking the hyperloop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Passenger rail died out due to being more expensive and a miserable experience. When you could fly for $120 and be there in a day but a train took almost 3 days and cost $250; people took flights and ignored the passenger rail. (1968 prices for trip from Mississippi to Baltimore.) Remember, this was a day when a meat and two veg lunch ran 25 cents. The cost difference was a budget breaker.
NRRPT/RCT
There is no way to "debunk" the hyperloop concept.
If you don't grasp it, you are very bad in physics.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"willing to bet on" and "bet against him" , makes it sound so wild wild west, professional and totally planned xD ... tsch , the land of Edison ... if it wasnt for the opportunities then what would it be without the military huh ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I suspect that, should a hyperloop actually ever be created, the scheduling would likely be done electronically in a somewhat uber-like fashion. It would be easy to set up an algorithm where the users indicate when they want to leave, and they get scheduled at a time that's convenient for the most users for each pod. Perhaps charging more if nobody else wants to go, and less if you're packing the pod to capacity.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor