To travel between SpaceX and Tesla, Elon uses his private jet because it takes too long time to drive. Flying a jet is not to save the world from its dependency on oil, so there’s clearly a need for a new type of transportation between the cities that’s more environmental friendly than an aircraft and faster than a car. The state of California had the same idea and decided to build a bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the train wouldn’t be a bullet. “Because the $60 billion bullet train they’re proposing in California would be [one of] the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile,” Elon said. “They’re going for records in all the wrong ways. Why are we, in the center of high tech, doing such a bad job [with transportation]? It’s embarrassing. It says all sorts of wrong things about our state.”51
Elon thought the story about the bullet train was sad, so he came up with the Hyperloop. “I was thinking about what could be better, state of the art?” Elon said. “That’s where I came up with the idea for a fifth mode of Earth transport, apart from planes, trains, automobiles, and boats. The Hyperloop could go from city center to city center [San Francisco to Los Angeles] in not much more than a half-hour.”316 While the California bullet train will cost $70 billion, Elon thought the Hyperloop would cost only $7 billion.401
The Hyperloop was a secret project and Elon didn’t want to reveal any major details when asked to do so by reporters. But the Hyperloop was finally revealed in August 12, 2013. The released document is not the final document as Elon’s idea is to give away the basic idea to anyone who wants to build it. “I just want to put it out there in a way that doesn’t require me to do day-to-day execution,” Elon said. “I would like to do less, actually. I tried my hardest to avoid being CEO of Tesla. Running two companies is not the most fun thing in the world.”400
If no one shows any interest in the idea, Elon will probably build a smaller prototype of the Hyperloop to get things moving. If he wasn’t the CEO of two companies, it would have taken one to two years to build this prototype. Then it would take another five years before we could travel between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 35 minutes.400
The Hyperloop is a glorified roller coaster with two stations. “It’s like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland,” Elon said.403 Single pods leave the stations continuously and travels inside of a steel tube. There are two tubes, one in each direction, and the tube sits on the top of concrete pillars. The idea is to construct these pillars along an already existing highway to avoid spending money and time on purchasing new land.401
The optimal environment inside of the tube would have been vacuum, but it’s incredible difficult to create a vacuum inside a long tunnel. A better idea is to use pumps to maintain a low-pressure environment inside the tunnel. The problem with a low-pressure environment is the air in the tube. Everyone who has traveled by subway learned that a subway train has to push air through the tunnel to move forward. The wind almost blows you away when you are waiting for a train. Some Indian engineers have by the way an idea to use this wind to generate electricity by installing wind turbines.402 To overcome this problem of having to push air, Elon said it’s possible to install a fan on the nose of the pod that transfers air from the front to the rear of the pod. This fan will also produce an air cushion, so the pod doesn’t need any wheels.401
To power each pod, the Hyperloop will use the same batteries as in a Tesla car. But the batteries will not propel the pod forward – just power the internal electronics. To achieve speeds of 760 mph [1220 km/h], linear electric motors will be used. A linear electric motor produces a linear movement, while a traditional electric motor produces a rotational movement. There’s no need to accelerate each pod continuously, so linear electric motors will cover about one percent of the total length of the tube. Solar panels positioned on the top of the steel tubes will supply power to these linear electric motors.401
Each passenger has to pay $20 to get a ticket to travel in one of the pods for 35 minutes to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The same trip with a car would have taken 5 hours and 30 minutes, 2 hours and 40 minutes with the proposed bullet train, or 1 hour and 15 minute by aircraft.401 “Unlike an airplane, it is not subject to turbulence, so there are no sudden movements. It would feel supersmooth,” Elon said.403 But we will still use aircraft for longer distances as the optimal length of an Hyperloop is 900 miles [1500 km].401
The released report argued that the pods could come in one of two sizes. The smaller and thus cheaper pod can carry 28 passengers. The larger more expensive pod can carry as many passenger as the smaller pod, but also three cars with the same size as a Model X from Tesla. Since the major problem with electric cars is that they are difficult to travel with over long distances, it would be much easier if you could transport the car with the Hyperloop.401 “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Elon said.403
The Hyperloop and Elon’s other projects share a common thread: they solve large and difficult problems. Zip2 might have begun as a smaller idea since the founders needed to make money as fast as possible. But as time passed, Zip2 grew and Elon said the company could have become as big as Yahoo. X.com competed with America’s largest banks. SpaceX has the goal to colonize Mars. Elon’s plan with Tesla was to reinvent the highly competitive car industry by building General Motors 2.0. SolarCity and Tesla are saving the world from its dependency on fossil fuels. Both the electric aircraft and the Hyperloop are so innovative that no one is trying to design something similar. “The bottom line for me, which I don’t let myself forget, is that challenges are what drive me above all – the challenge of creating things that I hopefully will get a chance to look back on and be proud of,” Elon said.265
But Elon has nothing against the smaller ideas that may not affect the world in a similar way as the larger ideas. “They provide a small amount of value to a lot of people, and that sums up to something – that’s still good, it makes their lives better,” he said.68 He recommended that if you have the ambition to change the world with one of these larger ideas, then you should begin with a smaller idea within the Internet or software industry. New companies in these industries tend to require little initial capital. “Unless you’ve got a ton of capital that someone gave you or you’ve inherited, you have to start a company that requires a small amount of capital,” Elon said. “It would have been impossible for me to have done electric cars or rockets right from the start.”437
Finding a problem to solve is only step one. Step two is to find a solution to the problem. “The way I tend to view problems is from a physics standpoint,” Elon said. “I think that physics is a good analytical framework. One of the key things in physics is to reason from first principles. This is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place, which is by analogy [‘We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way’ or ‘Nobody has ever done that so it must not be good’]. Reasoning from first principles just means that you figure out what are the fundamental truths, and can you build up a conclusion from that? Reasoning by analogy is helpful because it’s a shortcut, and is mostly correct, but tends to be mostly incorrect when you are dealing with new things.”357