L’escroquerie de l’Hyperloop : le rêve d’Elon Musk devient un cauchemar de réalité

Elon Musk is a genius, especially when it comes to pulling the wool over people’s eyes. For ten years, leveraging his meteoric success (Tesla, SpaceX), he has managed to get hundreds of people and startups to invest in the future of the “revolutionary” hyperloop train, which can reach speeds of over 1000 km/h, traveling in a partially airless tube.

But perhaps Elon Musk’s goal was just to make people dream with other people’s money, namely ours through taxes and fees (SNCF also invested 80 million euros in this beautiful folly in 2016, the Toulouse metropolis 5.5 million, and the Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region two million euros through the European Feder Funds).

A harsh return to reality

It all started in 2013, with the publication by Elon Musk of the famous Alpha Paper, a 52-page Open source document in which the billionaire described his exciting idea.

However, he and his associates focused on easy-to-solve issues, while ignoring important technical obstacles. Profitability was also greatly underestimated.

Elon Musk’s Alpha Paper was more like a student project or a letter to Santa Claus than a solid techno-economic study.

Dreamers and clever people looking for subsidized projects jumped on the bandwagon, ignoring the impossibilities resulting from the laws of physics, such as circulating passengers in a nearly airless tube (one thousandth (one millibar) of the Earth’s atmospheric pressure, which is 1000 millibars).

The hyperloop was supposed to be a sustainable, ultra-fast, and efficient vehicle composed of aluminum capsules kept afloat by a magnetic levitation system in long, low-pressure tunnels. The appealing concept was supposed to deeply transform the transportation industry.

However, it had already been imagined by Jules Verne in 1891, who clearly sold dreams in his books, and the Swissmetro project, proposed in 1974 and abandoned in 2009, already looked like Elon Musk’s project.

Logically, ten years and 450 million dollars later, the initial enthusiasm has waned in the face of technical setbacks. The thousands of promised jobs on paper have vanished. The tunnels are still in the draft stage, and the startup Hyperloop One, which promised to revolutionize transportation, officially died on December 31, 2023.

Total stop

This outrageous industrial saga, which cost a lot, has mesmerized a select audience for a decade that wants dreams, not complicated studies.

It was necessary to think differently, be disruptive, open your mind, and leave your comfort zone, which physics mocks. And some have come face to face with the reality they wanted to overcome easily, crying out, “Technology is progressing, we’ll find it soon, trust us…”

What remains are pretty animations and music on the screen, and images, in other words, nothing.

Some still argue today that this financial waste was justified because the idea had potential, and it would have been a shame not to try.

For other diehards, the hyperloop simply emerged too early… or too late, in an economic context not conducive to the development of this technology. It is difficult to confront reality and physics.

It was predictable… and foreseen!

Of course, some will think that in hindsight, it is easy to say now that money was wasted, that this project was foolish, and that it was predictable from the beginning because it is never possible to ignore the laws of physics. But there was a need to dream and an opportunistic effect to create cash pumps, much like the absurd development of wind turbines and solar panels.

Alas, public funds also allow politicians to support a small world of obligated parties for a certain time, thanks to subsidies granted. Then, when the excitement wanes, this little world of profiteers disperses, closes startups, and starts over elsewhere to sell dreams to the naive about another project neatly packaged in a beautiful animation.

Thus, some make an entire career out of emptiness, wind, and nothing, as long as there are subsidies and money to be had.

Elon Musk’s project may have been intended solely to torpedo the TGV in California, making it seem outdated in order to jeopardize public and Californian transportation, and to better sell his Tesla cars.

In the end, this hyperloop is a huge flop, a hyper failure, a techno-intellectual scam. The ruse of the hyperloop lasted… ten years and swallowed up hundreds of millions of euros, mainly public money, to no avail.