Anyone who saw Elon Musk interviewed at South by Southwest this year will not be surprised the man who seemingly owns the future has just come up with a game-changing concept for mass transportation.
Not content with founding PayPal and being CEO of SpaceX, electric car company Tesla and widely credited as the inspiration for Robert Downey Junior’s portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man, Musk has come up with The Hyperloop.
The Networker can’t help but feel most of us would be laughed out of town if we put a vague blog up proposing giant metal tubes shooting pods, capable of carrying cars, at speeds of up to 800 mph over a 350 mile route, running on magnates and giant fans and powered by solar panels.
But such is the influence of Musk he’s literally got the press eating out of his hand with the new concept.
Indeed he even notes how upset he was by the proposed high-speed rail project, costing $70bn, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which he reckons is too unambitious for the home of Silicon Valley.
As if to demonstrate what a different plane (literally) he operates on, Musk says in his blog: "The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper."
Err, right.
One thing’s for certain – Musk is definitely a disruptor. The problem is, he’s a bit too busy apparently to take on the project himself – so he’s hoping someone else can stump up the $4bn he reckons it’ll cost to get the first one off the ground.
We’ve got five bucks. Anyone else game?
