> You, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by the challenge of maintaining vacuum in a tube that spans a mere 17 miles.

You say 'overwhelmed' but I'll just point out it is built and working, and at almost-perfect vacuum.

Yes... it clearly is a manageable issue. The opening comment writer was the one who was overwhelmed, and no surprise given his lack of understanding demonstrated in his answer elsewhere. I just hate it when people with such a lack of knowledge make rude, hateful remarks.

Hmm, that person "worked on the LHC for several years" so they might know a couple of things about long evacuated tubes. Unless I'm not following the thread very well. Shrug.

be careful, tesla is not successful as a car company yet, and its not in good shape to become one either.

one day it might be, and more generally i do hope that we see more progress in the electric car world... but for now tesla only turns a profit as a car company coupled with government incentives. even then, outside of the US (and inside actually) their market share is tiny or zero with very little growth. saying that it doesn't even exist is a very good approximation to reality... if you ignore tech focused news articles and the like at least.

i wouldn't call that a success just yet... as much as we may admire the mission.

>but for now tesla only turns a profit as a car company coupled with government incentives.

Subsidies and protective tariffs are the norm in the auto market.

It would put any car company that didn't get them at a significant disadvantage.

In terms of their mission statement which is convince people that electric cars can be 'cool', practical and inexpensive he has succeeded much more than you are giving him and the people at Tesla credit for.

fair enough, but its a different metric of success. :)

Cool maybe, practical and inexpensive I'm not so sure about.

year over year grown >50% seems a lot for a car company.

If I build 2 cars last year and sell 3 this year then I bet you'd be really impressed huh?

Given that the Hyperloop is failing spectacularly, "a high intellect and a good general purpose engineering training" seem empirically to not accomplish quite as much as you think they do -- although, in fairness to high intellect and good general purpose engineering training, there was never any real reason to think that they'd be able to accomplish magic.

1) Elon Musk is not building any Hyperloop, so I don't see how its supposed failure reflects on him.

2) Which Hyperloop is failing? There are at least three groups, and as far as I know, they haven't even got close to testing the system, let alone know if it's a failure or not.

I'm skeptical of the whole concept, but declaring failure at this stage is no less silly than assuming it'll definitively work.

I don't think he was alone in this, if he says it was hard, I'd assume it was hard for a whole team of world class physicists and engineers.

also he started a successful, innovative new rocket company