Erik Nordeus - The Engineer

The Hyperloop is a glorified roller coaster with two stations. “It’s like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland,” Elon said. 403Single 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. 402To 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. 403But 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. 68He 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

You can first say that battery packs for electric cars will always be expensive because they have always been expensive. From a physics standpoint, you can break the batteries down into the materials they are made of, and then ask what the value is of those materials on the commodity market. You will now realize the material is not as expensive as the final battery pack, so you just have to come up with a way to improve the manufacturing process. 324,354“Data informs the instinct,” Elon said. “Generally, I wait until the data and my instincts are in alignment. And if either the data or my instincts are out of alignment, then I sort of keep working the issue until they are in alignment, either positive or negative.” 22

When you have found a solution to a problem, the next step is to create a company. In a creative company, it’s important to allow a certain amount of chaos. In most organizations, failures are severely punished and successes are moderately rewarded, and that’s not a good idea if you want to be innovative. Innovations originates from many attempts that haven’t worked. “Because when you try new things, you try this idea, that idea,” Elon said. “Well, a large number of them are not gonna work, and that has to be okay. If every time somebody comes up with an idea it has to be successful, you’re not gonna get people coming up with ideas.” 354

To nurture creativity in their company, Google came up with the “20 percent time,” where employees can work with what they want for one day each week. “I think Google has been pretty good at this by allowing people to take Friday every week to work on some crazy project,” Elon said. “I think that’s a good idea, I think we will probably implement something like that at SpaceX and Tesla. Lots of employees have great ideas, and if they can simply get the resources to implement them.” 360

Like when Elon believed in a small government, he’s neither a fan of big companies, partly because of his own experience from an internship. “They didn’t have just one coffeemaker there, they had a special coffeemaker for the executives. An executive coffeemaker,” he said. 263

While Steve Jobs wanted his Macintosh-group to act like pirates, Elon want his companies to act like the special forces. SpaceX is like Top Gun and Tesla Motors is like Delta Force. “We do the missions that others think are impossible,” Elon said. “We have goals that are absurdly ambitious by any reasonable standard, but we’re going to make them happen.” 24In comparison, NASA is like a navy and General Motors is like an army. “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy,” Jobs said. 3