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Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered just how bad an idea must have been. If Musk didn't go after it. Specially considering that he is the one who published it...

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He did it to divert investment into high speed trains, which have the potential to significantly reduce the number of Teslas he could hope to sell.

He successfully made investors waste hundreds of millions into these hyperloop startups, which are like real life parody of high-tech scam startups.

On the other hand, one must be quite illiterate scientifically to buy into Musks grand sci-fi projects. Should only work on 5 years old. But you don’t have to believe, you just have to pretend and take these easy millions from rich but dumb VCs.

He has the street cred to do that though. He took money to build SpaceX, and then delivered a system that can send astronauts to orbit. Unlike Jeff Bezos, Virgin Galactic or any of these other vaporware companies that promise a lot and then don't deliver.

Phase 1 of the Californian high speed rail is/was not planned to open until 2030, and is just a 275 km long. Does that really sound like something that will slow the sales of Teslas?

Why risk your reputation on something high-risk or likely impossible if you can crowdsource others to waste their time and money to verify its continued infeasibility for you?

You can say what Elon should have done with Twitter all you want, were talking about hyperloop /s

Hahaha. There are many viable businesses productive people can generate, many times more than they can delve into. As such, there is never an absence of ideas, it's almost always a lack of concentrated, deliberate execution in a category that can iterate into a viable, sustainable business. I think it's also possible to posit sketchy ideas that haven't worked before and bribe or cajole people into trying them.

> Why risk your reputation on something high-risk or likely impossible

You mean like the world's first reusable rocket, the only private company to sent astronauts to the ISS, the world's biggest rocket, or mass producing EVs?

Yeah, you're right, it's good he stuck to the easy stuff!

Elon Musk said from the outset that he was not gonna build it, he thought the idea was good and published a whitepaper on it which basically started the conversation.

He also talks about a supersonic electrical passenger jet from time to time, but he says he don't have the time to do that either.

Perhaps we should apply a bit more of a critical standard to Elon's various statements: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

Argh those pesky regulators stopping Tesla from delivering robotaxis to their customers since 2018

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