Who Needs Hyperloop? This Guy Is Building Something Bigger

BY TODD NEFF14 HOURS AGO

This piece is part of Mashable Spotlight, which presents in-depth looks at the people, concepts and issues shaping our digital world.

A brilliant, big-thinking, subtly accented, physicist turned financing pioneer turned engineer, self-made billionaire who has led the design of revolutionary cars and rockets, Elon Musk needs no introduction. So when, on Aug. 12, Musk unveiled his idea for a next-generation transportation system, it got the attention of about every news organization between Earth and Mars, where Musk hopes to aim his rockets one day.

Musk's SpaceX and Tesla Motors, which he launched after cashing out of first billion-dollar idea,PayPal. Then Musk let slip the term “Hyperloop,” and he and the dozen SpaceX and Tesla Motors engineers amped up the effort. They modeled, mapped, quantified and qualified their way to the 57-page preliminary design study that garnered galactic coverage on that August Monday.

But that may have been it. Even before the preliminary design hit the .pdf — which he released open-source, no strings attached –- Musk had made clear that the Hyperloop remained “extremely speculative.” He was a bit busy, at the moment, to take on a $6 billion project, which would represent more investment than Tesla and SpaceX combined, he added.

“Obviously I have to focus on core Tesla business and SpaceX business, and that’s more than enough,” Musk told reporters on an Aug. 7 Tesla Motors conference call. “I did commit to publishing a design and provide quite a detailed design, [but] I don’t have any plan to execute because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla.” He did hedge in a conference call after the Hyperloop report’s release, saying, “I think it might help if I built a demonstration article. I think I probably will do that, actually.”

One imagines John F. Kennedy: “I think we probably choose to go to the moon, actually.”

To be fair, for all his means and influence, Musk does lack a massive taxpayer-funded bureaucracy to perform his bidding. So he realized the vision of ultrahigh-speed land travel could well depend on someone marshaling a tiny fraction of Musk’s net worth and name recognition, but with the brains, time, energy and passion to ride herd on a moonshot-class mission.