Hyperloop, Elon Musk’s Pipe Dream, Bites the Dust

Hyperloop One, a futuristic transportation startup highly touted by Elon Musk, is shuttering its airless tubes.

The company is laying off employees, selling remaining assets (which include a test track and machinery), and closing its offices, Bloomberg reports. After hiring more than 200 people in 2022, remaining workers — who are tasked with supervising the asset sale — were told their employment ends Dec. 31. All of Hyperlooop One’s intellectual property will be handed over to majority stakeholder, Dubai-based DP World.

The billionaire estimated in a 2013 proposal that a pod would be able to whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes and “feel a lot like being on an airplane.” After its founding in 2014, the buzzy startup raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments, and even constructed a test track near Las Vegas to develop its technology.

For a moment, things looked promising for the company that vowed to end traffic once and for all. Originally founded as Hyperloop Technologies, the business changed its name to Hyperloop One in 2016, and then rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson invested in the company and joined its board of directors. After an exodus of top execs, Virgin dropped its name from Hyperloop One after opting to focus on cargo rather than passengers.

A former SpaceX subsidiary, the Boring Company, spun out as a separate business in 2018, did build a few short tunnels, including a mile-long prototype tube near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. However, other proposed loops never materialized. A route from East Hollywood to Dodger Stadium, with a set completion date of 2020, remains a pipe dream, and elsewhere, slated projects in Chicago and Washington, D.C. were quietly shelved. 

Musk has long evangelized on the concept of a Hyperloop, and news of its shuttering follows the recent revelation that two million Tesla vehicles were recalled following a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency found that the car models featuring the self-driving feature — including models Y, S, 3, and X produced between Oct. 5, 2012, and Dec. 7, 2023 — contain a high-risk software flaw that likely contributed to an increase in wrecks and crashes.

A report published by Reuters on Wednesday detailed how the electric vehicle manufacturer denied responsibility for the failures of parts it knew to be defective, and often cited “abuse” or “misuse” of vehicles in order to reject claims for repairs on cars under warranty.

Musk’s hype-happy approach to startups aren’t limited to transportation ventures either. After acquiring Twitter for $44 billion last year and promising shiny new changes to the platform coupled by his vision of making it a home for free speech, Musk managed to turn the once semi-functioning website into a hellscape. As X continues to burn in its own hot pile of misinformation, reinstated right-wing extremists and Musk’s own endorsement of white supremacist propaganda and antisemitic conspiracy theories — top advertisers cut ties while the company’s CEO has once again found a way to blame his misfortunes on anyone but himself.

This article was updated at 9:23 p.m. E.T. on Dec. 21 to include additional information regarding Hyperloop One.