Here's another place for you to vent.
And because I called out Elon Musk before I stopped publishing daily, I thought you would like this story
In a disappointing but not wholly unexpected twist, Elon Musk has admitted that his Hyperloop — a proposed mode of transport that will get passengers from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes, traveling close to the speed of sound — is “extremely speculative.”
Furthermore, Musk also says that he doesn’t intend to build the Hyperloop himself — rather, he will publicly share his plans on August 12, and then let other people build it.
During a Tesla Motors investor call yesterday, Musk said, ”I think I shot myself in the foot by ever mentioning the Hyperloop. I’m too strung out.” Here, of course, he’s referring to the fact that he’s already the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and is understandably too busy to build a multi-billion-dollar transport link. Musk did say, however, that if no progress has been made by other people/companies in the next few years, he might try to “make it happen.”
Is Elon the biggest, most grandiose, self-promoting asshole of all time?
If not, he's certainly right up there. And this story has gotten almost no press coverage (see here).
You know the person is a an unabashed techno-optimist when they say "I'm considering open-sourcing it". It's actually a great litmus test... we just need a list of marketing jargon commonly used by techno-optimists, add a filter to google news to remove all news that contains such words and well, we will discover we have no news left.
Posted by: Adam Noel | 08/08/2013 at 10:56 AM