Hyperloop concept art from HTT
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It beggars belief, but it appears that Elon Musk's Hyperloop is actually going to be built. The first test track will only be five miles long, and it won't operate at the supersonic speeds that Musk envisioned, but still, it's coming—Musk's "cross between a Concorde, railgun, and an air hockey table" really is coming.
Back in January, Elon Musk said that he planned to build a Hyperloop test track "soon" and that Texas was "the leading candidate." Curiously, nothing more has been said by Musk on the matter since. Then, in February, Hyperloop Transport Technologies (HTT)—an organisation that is unaffiliated with Musk—said that it had struck a deal to build a five-mile Hyperloop in California.
HTT is a research company that was founded soon after Musk's original Hyperloop thesis was published in 2013. The structure of HTT is somewhat interesting: it has employees, but it also uses crowdsourced engineering talent from across the US that is being paid in stock options. The CEO is a guy called Dirk Ahlborn, who founded JumpStartFund—an online platform that facilitates with building crowd-powered projects; basically, he took his own service and used it to build HTT.
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