Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and also a rocket builder, has asserted he has received a verbal government green light for his tunnel boring company to build a Hyperloop — a high-speed pod-and-tube transportation system — between New York City and Washington, DC.
“Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins,” he wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
Musk didn’t offer any additional details but the White House didn’t dispute the notion.
“We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector,” a White House spokesperson said.
The system would run from “City center to city center in each case, with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city,” Musk said in a later tweet.
Musk’s aptly named company intends to build the system underground using an excavation machine. The futuristic concept envisions transporting sealed passenger capsules in a low-pressure tube at hundreds of miles an hour, The Washington Post reports.
Like Trump, Musk likes to use Twitter to communicate — but the brief messages must necessarily be limited in detail and qualification.
“Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,” he wrote in a later tweet.
Hours later, he tweeted again: “If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know. Makes a big difference if they hear from you.”
Even if official federal permission is forthcoming, the need for local ones is a potential major complication, Washington, D.C.’s major newspaper reported.
Leif Dormsjo, director of the DC’s Department of Transportation, said, “I’m completely unaware of any request to the district government to permit or review anything related to an Elon Musk project.”
