Elon Musk produced a white paper in 2013 that teased the concept of zipping from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under 35 minutes using a vacuum-sealed tube, dubbed the hyperloop. According to his biographer, Ashlee Vance, the notion “originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system.”
Ten years later, Hyperloop One, the most high-profile firm that attempted to follow in Musk’s footsteps, is shutting its doors. Its collapse came less than two weeks after the Biden administration announced $6 billion in support for high-speed rail projects across California.
It’s a significant victory for public transportation supporters, many of whom have spent decades campaigning for not just high-speed rail but improved train service in general. (In addition, Biden’s presentation included financing for a plethora of additional rail projects around the nation.) But it’s far from a clean triumph. 
For one thing, the hyperloop siren song seduced many towns and states into complacency, leaving them stranded. When I called Colorado’s Department of Transportation in 2018 to ask about the demise of Arrivo, another hyperloop startup founded by one of Hyperloop One’s co-founders, I learned over the phone that they were unaware of the situation.
Colorado was not alone in this. Hyperloop One had offered West Virginia a $500 million testing and certification facility. It also created a test track in Las Vegas where it momentarily moved passengers through a tube—apparently enough of an achievement for then-CEO Jay Walder to declare it the “first new form of mass transportation in over 100 years.”
Other hyperloop initiatives and corporations exist, mostly outside the United States. Fortunately, this nation was already resuming its investment in its rail infrastructure, with an emphasis on quicker trains.
Brightline, a business that just expanded its current service in Florida all the way to Orlando, letting customers go there from as far away as Miami, is the most high-profile attempt.
Brightline is also constructing “the nation’s first true high-speed rail network” between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The Biden administration just approved $3 billion in financing for this project, which is set to begin construction in early 2024.
It will require more than just money to build high-speed rail. Years of deregulation have resulted in deeply ingrained issues that are impeding progress. Projects of this scale also have difficulty staying on schedule and under budget. The second major beneficiary of the freshly announced government cash—another $3 billion—is the original cause of Musk’s ire, a high-speed rail project set to traverse the spine of California.
Could the rebirth of high-speed rail risk a rematch with the world’s wealthiest man? Perhaps, but rail enthusiasts might find consolation in Musk’s distraction since that 2013 white paper.
Aside from a few technical competitions hosted by SpaceX, Musk has only ever shown a passing interest in his personal hyperloop initiatives.
Musk previously tweeted that he obtained “verbal government approval” to create “an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC hyperloop.” It was never constructed. In April 2022, he said that The Boring Company, his tunneling venture, will “attempt to build a working hyperloop.” The next day, the business tweeted, “Hyperloop full-scale testing begins later this year.” That, too, never occurred.
Musk has rarely engaged with the hyperloop over the previous decade, largely outsourcing his quest to eliminate high-speed rail. With Hyperloop One’s demise throwing a fog over that notion, it seems the billionaire must make a choice: Does he care enough to find the time to complete the work himself?
