It seems so, for that’s exactly what the pioneer tweeted on Thursday.
Elon Musk, in my opinion is somewhere between the E.F Hutton commercials of the 80s (where everybody listened) and a real-life Tony Stark (Iron Man). It seems what ever he does he’s successful. Having parlayed his PayPal money, into Space X and Tesla Motors, I struggle when I read people dismissing him as many did when he unveiled his idea of a “Hyperloop” capable of theoretically sending people city to city in pods that travel at around 700 miles per hour.
The two tweets
On Thursday, Musk sent a couple of tweets that returned the Hyperloop to the news. The first from his official account read “Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas.”
That tweet was then followed by another just three minutes later that read, Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE http://students.sae.org/cds/formulaseries/about.htm …”
It’s quite ambiguous as to “who” is going to build the test track when you read the tweets. It’s doubtful that Musk would do it with a personal expenditure though that can’t be ruled out by any means. Both Space X and Tesla could be involved? Who knows?
When Musk unveiled the idea last year, he made it quite clear that he had neither the time nor the inclination to take part personally at the time but invited others to take up the mantle. Is he now backtracking?
Elon Musk: JumpStartFund and the hyperloop
While many scoffed at the idea of using “old” pneumatic tubes in like those in the stock brokerage houses of yore,” others embraced the idea. In the third week of December, Wired and others reported on the work of a group calling themselves, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. The group was begun by JumpStartFund which combines elements of crowdfunding and crowd-sourcing. Essentially, its a group of about 100 engineers working at companies like Boeing, NASA, Yahoo!, Airbus, SpaceX, and Salesforce in their spare time for future stock options.
Later, about 25 UCLA students in the SUPRASTUDIO design and architecture program joined the program after speaking with JumpStartFund.
Who knows what the future may hold for the technology, but Musk seems to want others to have a place to test their ideas.