[eco]

A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up.

Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what.

The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX.

1. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies

3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...

[atdrummond]

What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.

[anchpop]

They have very little in common besides the name and the fact that they both are transit systems involving tubes. Hyperloop's main goal was to provide fast intercity transit, TBC's goal is to provide convenient intracity transit

[atdrummond]

By that distinction, I'm not sure why VHL is called "Hyperloop" either - it is using maglev AFAIK.

[me_me_me]

have you seen the size of that Vegas tunnel?

Now google Tesla's battery fire and imagine it happens inside that tunnel.

Those tunnels are death traps.

[panick21_]

TBC works on Loop systems, not Hyperloops.