I'm disappointed with the tone here; not in a "you should be nicer" kind of way, but because he seems to assume that Musk is acting insultingly in his proposal.
This seems to me to be the way all startup ideas start: there's a hypothesis about X, so far I've found documentation to support that it is likely feasible to do (there are no immediate show stoppers), here's why, and so therefore I'll go off and build it and deal with things as they come up. I imagine this is how Musk works and that this is how SpaceX and Tesla started. The only difference is that this time Musk can't take it the rest of the way so he wants the community to take over the next phase if there's ample interest.
This article reads to me as coming from someone who wouldn't take on this endeavour themselves, and that's perfectly fine, but he instead comes across as entirely destructive, condescending and insulted (somehow?) when he may very well be able to contribute something.
You don't have to get into thermal expansion and FEA to know that the Hyperloop proposal is back-of-the-napkin quality. As to why Musk did this -- dropped this hand-wavy shell of a proposal -- I don't know.
I see only benefits to releasing something like this proposal. Even if absolutely nothing comes of it, we all learned some interesting Physics, Musk learned what happens when you publish your unfinished proposals, others may start thinking about the problem and come up with a different solution and finally, the cynics can point out how bad the idea was to begin with. Of course the cynics won't realize that working on these ideas and in this case even publishing the work are the reason that Elon Musk runs Tesla and SpaceX and they don't.
Yeah, I don't want to worry about motivation; the proposal itself is prima facie unserious. Perhaps Musk was just tired of being asked about it all the time. Perhaps he has a nefarious motive. Ultimately, I don't know or care.
Would you attitude be different if it were some other "Bachelor of Arts in business from Wharton" proposing a rather sketchy idea and asking if you'd like to sign on to fill in the details?
Of course it would; but academic qualifications don't really play into this, do they?
Take 2 Harvard dropouts; one founded a tech company and one deals drugs from his basement. Are they interchangeable? If the former took you aside with a proposal, would you be more, or less likely to think about it than if the latter did?
This seems to me to be the way all startup ideas start: there's a hypothesis about X, so far I've found documentation to support that it is likely feasible to do (there are no immediate show stoppers), here's why, and so therefore I'll go off and build it and deal with things as they come up. I imagine this is how Musk works and that this is how SpaceX and Tesla started. The only difference is that this time Musk can't take it the rest of the way so he wants the community to take over the next phase if there's ample interest.
This article reads to me as coming from someone who wouldn't take on this endeavour themselves, and that's perfectly fine, but he instead comes across as entirely destructive, condescending and insulted (somehow?) when he may very well be able to contribute something.