The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.

The quote doesn't show him admitting it, but rather says his biographer said it.

Thunderf00t made many videos about the Hyperloop and while you do need to keep thinking for yourself while watching them because he makes mistakes or interjects conjecture or personal opinion as fact at times, he still does a good job of showing how absurd Hyperloop is on its face.

The so-called "fall of Elon Musk" should be a reminder to everyone so just think for yourselves. I know the TV ended up painting this guy is the second coming of Christ, but you don't become a multi multibillionaire several times over by just being a good guy. There's an old saying, you can become a millionaire through honesty, integrity, and hard work, but you can't become a billionaire.

Also everyone needs to keep in mind that most of his billions came out of your pocket. His companies are based off of massive government subsidies including the hyperloop, and one of the reasons why Tesla's stock price is so high is just because of government policies that have led to a massive stock market bubble at the expense of the common man. And there's just so much money sloshing around due to excessive government debt and massive central bank money printing it had to go somewhere, and it ended up going into stocks and other assets making those people rich while inflation adjusted wages have stagnated for decades.

It's shameful that this individual keeps talking about making a better world for humanity and then he pushes for things like this. I always thought it was some scheme to launder money...

The title is misleading, as Musk didn't admit anything.

Kinda like the auto industry killing rail cars, which is why in many states you see the paved over

Anyone who thinks that Hyperloop is a great idea is an idiot.

Let's face it, he's trying to build a vacuum tube over many hundreds of km's. The energy you need to keep that at reduced pressure is more than a Little Boy or a Fat Man. The pods are the size of somewhere between a coach and a railway carriage, with seating built to Frecciarossa Executive Class. It's propelled using Maglev tech, so you need a not-insignificant amount of power to also move your pods. And getting into or out of your vactube is going to take some extra work.

One thing that I've seen being pointed out by some critics is that a maglev system is often quoted to cost about a billion per unit distance, while high speed rail is quoted at about 500 million, about half. But then the Hyperloop shows up and is quoted at 250 million. How do the economics of that work? I mean, you take a maglev, which is twice as expensive as conventional but very precise regular railway, but by adding a vacuum tube, which is an added system that takes a ton of energy to even get it start making operational sense, you somehow cut costs in half from effectively a regular railway? I'm no economists, but that makes no economic sense.

The tech looks really snazzy in CGI renderings until you start to look into the engineering and physics to make it actually work. At which point it becomes awful.

So what if we tried?

First thing, the vacuum tube has to go. This is the number one obstacle preventing it from ever working. We'll still accept the special right of way for high speeds though, we'll just make our pods amazingly aerodynamic. Given the fact that our constraining factors may just become simpler, we can rig our pods to form a hyperpod chain, which allows us to bundle power and improve reliability and efficiency via an economy of scale. We can lower the seating quality in some of these pods and sell those seats for a lower price, making up for it in volume. We can still power everything with green energy, we're still using our own hyperway, with a very narrow path that our hyperpods can take, so rigging up an electrification scheme via an infrastructure power supply is quite easy. If we want to deploy quickly and make true on our 250 million quid per unit distance, we may have to rely on proven technology, so we probably base our new hyperway structure on two steel beams being kept a fixed distance of 1435mm apart. Bonus: there's a lot of largely compatible infrastructure at both ends that we can now use, as well as a giant pool of trained professionals around the world, so we can cheap out on stations and hyperway maintenance can be quite cheap and quick.

I just invented a train again, didn't I?

Elon is a con artist and I will take no criticism.

Where does Elon Musk admit it? All I could see was a mastodon post to an editorial…

I mean, it does make logical sense. But does the article actually say that he admitted to it? From how I understand it it doesn't.

Let this be a lesson to people who time after time after time fall for corporate bullshit. This is why companies should never be elevated above what people - specifically experts - say. Whether it is some social campaign or greenwashing or a host of other "feel good" initiatives that almost universally are there for marketing and nothing more. Companies are here to make money. That's it.

Fuck Elon, what a tosser.

Governments need to hire Thunderf00t to personally inspect these fad-ish techs

The country could have saved a bunch of money on scams like solar roadways and Hyperloop

So fucking stupid, we can't wait for corporations to fix our systems. It's one thing to allow rezoning so that such a project can be built and then offer the project/bid it out to someone like Musk to build, but it's another thing to place all expectations in a corporation on for them to completely drop the ball.

Hope this gets put on the ballet again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, fuck me

Good, because hyperloop is just a dumber, expensive and more dangerous train with terrible throughput.

The reason why the Hyperloop is such a bad idea is that it would literally be the largest vaccum chamber ever built by orders of magnitude, and even if it does work, just one small leak on the tube somewhere and the people inside will get Titan submersible'd due to the sudden deceleration. (Depending on the design, the pod could be fine though)

Maglevs are a much more realistic option if speeds higher than high speed rail are needed, and even those are usually cost prohibitive.

I mean, it an impossible and impractical project from its inception. Everyone should have known this, but Elon Musk iron man hurr durr.

Musk, a noted public transit hater

Does anyone have a source for that?

Here's a link to an article that includes biographer Ashley Vance's take on Paris Marx's statement. https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-california-high-spee-1849402460

Hyperloop is such a hot mess. Everyone talks about something different, when they mention Hyperloop. There is no consensus among pro-Hyperloop and anti-Hyperloop people, what this project even would look like from a barebones conceptual perspective.

In my eyes governments see Hyperloop as some kind of prestige project. All big governments invest in it, otherwise you are not modern. America, EU, China, Arab oil states and India.

Somehow "Hyperloop" has become a political buzzword, just like "Smart City" or "Green City". Everyone claims to build those, everyone invests in those, but they all seem to be fantasy products, that go nowhere.

It is weird that Elon Musk was so worried about California's high-speed rail project because it had the look of a boondoggle from the beginning. It's horrendously expensive and the promise of an alternative to air travel has been diminished as they've decided to use more existing rail (you can't run high speed on it) to save money.

Uh unless they caught him saying it/email/memo this is pure speculation and should be marked as such lol. Not a musk fan but people need to demand sources on stuff like this or you'll just be lemmings (the bad kind, not Lemmings)

I miss the days when aristocrats and big business owners were genuine philanthropists and not greedy money-hoarding bastards. Even Edward Colston, a merchant who literally profiteered from the transatlantic slave trade, built homes, schools and other public works.

I'd have a much higher opinion of people like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk if they used the vast sums of wealth they hoarded to build homes, power stations, water treatment plants and other useful infrastructure, not lobby governments for even more tax cuts. Otherwise, they're chasing privatised space travel pipe dreams that we either aren't going to achieve, or will be reserved only for the ultra-wealthy.

How can we honestly have dreams to colonize Mars, the Moon, or Venus in the next few decades when we can't even fix our own problems at home?

You can't just post stuff like this without providing a source.

Elon didn't want the government to in his mind waste money building the train system which would go over cost and not even be state of the art by the time it was built.

He wanted them to do something substantially more innovative. He never wanted to build the hyperloop, it was meant to try and get others to see if they could make it work, but also as an example of how California should be looking to lead and do something really next level.

Hyperloop wasn't meant to stop it so they'd build it instead. It was there to try and foster any kind of innovation rather than have the existing plan go forward.

So out of context, the thread title can be seen as true, but it's not the whole story, and not what he meant.