this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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You forgot to mention, that was was fired from PayPal(?) for being incompetent.
And the engineers he hires are either not that great, or (more likely) are having to play fast and loose due to unrealistic expectations. Like the original hyperloop demo that was setup years ago for a competition, instantly rusted and was secured poorly. It's since been destroyed.
Yeah he did, I thought I mentioned it but there is so much to say about this horrible man..
The Hyperloop thing was never ever going to work as even high schoolers could have seen the long list of practical issues with it, prohibiting it from ever getting even in the direction of being real. It's a fundamentally flawed project
Making a (partial) vacuum machine 3-4 meters in diameter and 600km long? Won't happen, we can't even do a fraction of a % for that
Having a 600km tube in the sun will move your endpoints around by hundreds of meters throughout the day due to the metal warming up and expanding
That same tube will also be warmed up more on the top than the bottom, causing that tube to try and warp itself into a circle
So you do have your 600km partial vacuum tube? Awesome, now how do you get that ~~pod~~ train in there, or how do you get the people into that train (or out of it) without breaking your vacuum?
Even with a partial vacuum, when moving that train over 600km will cause a pressure buildup in front of it what will become a problem
This entire design is a terrorists wet dream. I need one rifle of sufficient force to puncture that metal tube and the next train that comes in will end up hitting a hammer.
And there is lots more but I will try hard not to make this post too crazy long
Meanwhile we could have had normal trains but without having a source for it, I do recall reading multiple times that musk didn't wanted trains because they'd compete with his shitty Tesla cars, and that being the reason why he whipped this up. So now over the past two decades, China has been building railways like there is no tomorrow and now has. Huge network of high speed rail while the US (and Canada, Mexico) have basically and practically nothing. But they have cars, yaaaaaayyyy...
Yeah, the PayPal one is so spot on.
He had a company that I guess was like CitySearch that no one ever heard of and managed to win a lottery of selling it to Compaq who thought they had to do something in this whole dotcom thing.
Then he founded 'x.com', a failure of an online bank while Paypal took off. Then, somehow, in the wake of being merged in he talked the company into letting him be in charge, despite his company pretty much the relative failure in that relationship, and he nearly tanked it before being kicked out. Despite this for a long time he got credit as 'the paypal guy', despite his only contribution being almost tanking it after losing to it initiallly in the market. Again, won the lottery because he had such a share and eBay tossed so much money at it.
He's supremely successful at taking credit from others when things work out.