But an Instagram has a high risk of failure whereas a transportation infrastructure is a very low-risk investment. The Hyperloop would be better compared with a huge Internet infrastructure like Google Search than with Instagram.
That's a good one. Building out a technology that has never been proven in a lab, let alone at production scale, in an industry where 2x cost overruns are inevitable and 10x not uncommon, that is dominated by government spending and not private capital for infrastructure, you consider the hyperloop a low-risk investment.
It might work, despite the skepticism, but there is no sense in which it can be considered low-risk.