An Italian rapper, a 'hangman's noose' and a $250m lawsuit: the chaotic race to build Elon Musk's hyperloop
WIRED's exclusive four-month investigation into Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, the two companies aiming to reinvent travel
In 2013, irked by the $68 billion (£51 billion) cost of California’s high-speed rail project, Elon Musk proposed an alternative. He called it the Hyperloop: levitating pods that would travel in near-vacuum tubes at near the speed of sound. By his calculations, a hyperloop from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take just 36 minutes and cost under $6 billion – a tenth of the cost. "Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would be awesome,” Musk declared, the hyperloop is “the only option for super-fast travel.”
Musk being Musk, the internet went crazy. Proponents argued hyperloop routes could transform economics in a way not seen since the invention of air travel, turning far-flung cities into stops on a continental tube map. Others thought the idea a sci-fi fantasy. Either way, Musk declared himself too busy running SpaceX and Tesla to build it, and instead invited anyone ambitious enough to try.
Today two startups, Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, are racing to be the first. Between them, they employ hundreds of engineers and have raised millions in venture capital. They have met with world leaders, signed deals with sovereign nations and partnered with global engineering firms. Earlier this year, WIRED set about to document their progress.
It did not go as we expected.
***
On a cloudless morning in May, a convoy of coaches drove out to a test site belonging to the transportation startup Hyperloop One. A sweeping, fenced-off cluster of low container buildings, the facility lies less than an hour north from Las Vegas into the Nevada desert. Fighter jets soar on thermals overhead. Sections of steel tubing, painted white, lay in the dirt. Next door, a solar farm dazzles in the sunshine.
As the coaches approached, kicking up dust plumes, the site thrummed with activity. Music blared over loudspeakers. Jumbo screens broadcast the company logo (the company, formerly Hyperloop Technologies, had rebranded the night before). Disembarking, the passengers – more than a hundred journalists, investors and dignitaries – filed up on to an observation deck erected for the occasion. The event had the atmosphere a rock concert: in fact, the audience was gathered to see a test of the propulsion system that would power the company’s hyperloop design. The platform overlooked a raised bank, topped with 300m of steel track. At one end waited a metal sled, rigged with sensors and cameras. Beneath it, thick cables snaked from the magnets that would propel it down the line.
On stage, Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop One’s venture capitalist co-founder and executive chairman, welcomed the audience. Among them sat partners from engineering giants ARUP AECOM and the architect Bjarke Ingels. Pishevar has dark, thinning hair and a wide smile, and was dressed casually in a navy blazer and jeans. He quoted Teddy Roosevelt (“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena”) before previewing the company’s “Kitty Hawk moment” – the future date, named after the first Wright brothers flight, that the company says it will demonstrate its first fully operational hyperloop.
But trouble was stirring. Unknown to the audience, the generators to power the test had failed with just minutes to go. (In a case of pre-show nerves, the team later surmised, an engineer had turned them on early, causing them to overheat.) Now its first demonstration was in jeopardy.
On stage, Brogan BamBrogan, Hyperloop One’s co-founder and chief technology officer, took over. As BamBrogan – a former SpaceX rocket engineer with a handlebar moustache and a cap hanging from his belt – stalled, his team rushed to find a solution. They hurriedly wrote new parameters to run the demonstration using one generator. It wouldn’t reach the speeds planned, but it might save the presentation. A public failure for such a basic piece of its technology could be disastrous for a nascent startup.
With the hurried solution in place, BamBrogan signalled the control room. After a dramatic ten-second count-down, the electric motor kicked in. It worked: the sled fired down the track at 186kph, into a bank of sand. (Like much of the Hyperloop technology, the company hasn’t perfected brakes yet). In the control room, the engineers embraced; the audience whooped and applauded. “I’d really love to note that all of that happened on purpose,” BamBrogan said. The technical glitch went unmentioned.
In the distance, telephone poles stretched into the scrub, marking an approved route for a test hyperloop, “Devloop”, that the company plans to build by early 2017. Although the first commercial route has yet to be decided, BamBrogan said, it hopes have hyperloops moving cargo by 2019 and people by 2021. The test generated headlines around the world. Hyperloop, it seemed to say, isn’t just real – it’s almost here.
But generators weren’t the only things failing within Hyperloop One. Weeks later, BamBrogan would resign, and the two co-founders would find themselves locked in a $250 million legal battle.
Still, for now, they put their arms around each other’s shoulders and smiled for the cameras.
***
Shervin Pishevar was born in Iran in the early 70s. When he was six, the Pishevar family fled the revolution and developing Iran-Iraq war to live in Washington, DC. His father found work as a taxi driver (the inspiration, Pishevar says, for his later investment in Uber). His mother was a housekeeper. “I saw them working really hard,” he recalls. After graduating from Berkeley, he launched a series of internet startups. In 2011, he sold one of them, Webs.com, to Vistaprint for $117.5 million, and moved into investment. He joined Menlo Ventures – where he was involved with high-profile bets on Tumblr, Warby Parker and Uber – before co-founding his own firm, Sherpa Capital.
In Silicon Valley, Pishevar built a reputation as a networker and socialite. He would often post pictures partying with celebrity acquaintances: Miley Cyrus; Justin Bieber; he and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick with Kanye West. An earnest sharer, he has been known to post his own poetry. “He could get a hug out of anybody, instantly,” says BamBrogan. “He always leads with that.” He is also politically engaged: a campaigning Democrat, he sits on the board of the Fulbright scholarship. When George and Amal Clooney hosted a $353,000-per-couple private fundraiser in San Francisco for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, they did it at Pishevar’s house.
One friend who shares Pishevar’s political interest and financial means is the actor Sean Penn. In 2011, the pair flew to Egypt to witness the protests in Tahrir Square. During the Libyan civil war, they flew into Benghazi to meet the rebels who had liberated the city. “This was during the bombing of Sirte,” says Pishevar. “We had to get the NATO general to allow us to fly in, because all commercial flights were cancelled.” One fighter gave Pishevar a Libyan flag wristband, which he later passed on to President Obama at the White House.
Hyperloop One lawsuit accuses former employees of plotting to form Hyperloop Two
It was this Libya story that convinced another friend, Elon Musk, to join the pair on a trip to Cuba in January 2013. (Musk declined to comment for this report.) The group had hoped to negotiate the release of an American prisoner. It was on Musk’s jet, en route to Cuba, that they first discussed the hyperloop. “He said, ‘you know, I’m a little busy trying to get to Mars and doing Tesla, and raising five boys. I think I’m going to open source it.’” Pishevar – who, like many in the tech industry, idolises Musk – volunteered. He pushed Musk to make his plans public.
That August, Musk released his proposal in a white paper. The hyperloop, he wrote, would be a steel tube, with most of its air removed. With drag reduced, passenger pods propelled by electric motors could travel at speeds of over 1,200kph. The remaining air would be compressed beneath the pods, like an inverted air-hockey table, letting them levitate inside the tube. It would be powered by solar panels and, because it was so lightweight, could be elevated on concrete pylons along existing highways, reducing the cost of acquiring land.
Newspapers quickly proclaimed that the hyperloop would heal regional divides. Others argued that the hyperloop would transform the economy, moving packages across continents in hours. Others were more sceptical. “There’s a concept in mathematics, which is known as ‘trying to prove too much’,” says transportation blogger Alon Levy, who wrote a widely cited post disputing Musk’s cost projections. “It’s such a pointless idea it’s not worth print space or even talking about,” Rod Smith, an engineering professor at Imperial College London, told WIRED.
But generally, engineers were cautiously optimistic. “I didn’t agree with his figures, but I found myself closer to his ideas than I expected,” says John Miles, an engineer at Arup and a Cambridge University professor, who is now consulting with Hyperloop One. It could be done. Pishevar just needed an engineer to build it.
***
While Pishevar searched, another entrepreneur launched into the race: Dirk Ahlborn, a plain-speaking German with a wave of dark hair and the chin of Mr Incredible. Ahlborn, 39, had run pellet stove and barbecue businesses in Italy before moving to Los Angeles, where he worked for the Girvan Institute, a non-profit business incubator once funded by Nasa but which by then, he says, “was struggling a little bit”. Ahlborn proposed an idea for a new, online-only incubator. The site, called JumpStartFund, would let individuals suggest business ideas; the crowd could then volunteer their time and invest. Ahlborn drove for Uber part-time as he worked to get the idea off the ground.
When Musk released the hyperloop paper, Ahlborn posted it on the site. Hundreds of believers signed up. They began sharing pod designs in forums and on Facebook, discussing the physics and suggesting potential routes. Ahlborn formalised the group into a company: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT).
He was joined by an Italian entrepreneur and investor who calls himself Bibop Gresta. (His real first name is Gabriele). An exuberant showman with a Tony Stark beard and a Muppet’s rhythmic laugh, Gresta had aspired to be a rapper in his youth, and toured briefly as a stage performer with the popular Italian dance group Mato Grosso. He had a short TV career presenting on Italian MTV, where colleagues remember him rollerblading around the office, before moving into startups. The pair met at a tech event in Los Angeles, where Ahlborn pitched his idea. “I said ‘you’re completely crazy, just to think about this’,” says Gresta, now HTT’s chief operating officer, chairman, and “chief Bibop officer”. “This will change humanity if you do it well. But you need my help.”
HTT now boasts more than 400 volunteers, including engineers from Nasa, SpaceX and Boeing. Unlike most startups, its employees are not paid, instead dedicating at least ten hours a week contributing to the project remotely – suggesting materials, building simulations, designing marketing materials – in exchange for stock options. Ahlborn and Gresta were soon travelling the world, pitching their vision: Germany, Slovakia, Dubai. Companies began to sign up as partners, offering patents or suggesting manufacturing techniques. “It’s big enough and crazy enough to be a viable solution,” says Lloyd Marino, one volunteer.
Ahlborn puts it another way: “We realised that we had to build a movement, not a company.”
***
Asking around at SpaceX, Pishevar found his engineer: Kevin Brogan. (BamBrogan fused names with his wife Bambi Liu on marriage in 2013; they are now Brogan and Bambi BamBrogan.) A gregarious Burning Man devotee from Michigan, BamBrogan had helped design the space startup’s Falcon 1 rocket and Dragon capsule. “A brilliant guy,” according to two former SpaceX colleagues, if “a little eccentric”. He flew to San Francisco, where Pishevar pitched the idea: BamBrogan would build the technology, Pishevar would take care of the money. They called the startup Hyperloop Technologies, and set up shop in BamBrogan’s garage on a leafy street in Los Feliz.
BamBrogan quickly approached a former SpaceX colleague and friend, Josh Giegel, then working at Virgin Galactic. Pishevar, meanwhile, used his connections to line up $8 million in Series A funding and an all-star board of executives, including former White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis and Snapchat’s Emily White. Joe Lonsdale, an investor and co-founder of big-data firm Palantir, signed on as deputy chairman. Pishevar used a private audience at the White House to pitch the idea to President Obama.
Around this time, Pishevar’s 18-year-old nephew Abraham died in a plane crash alongside three college friends. Pishevar flew in to help collect the body. Afshin Pishevar, Abraham’s father, was racked with grief. “I felt like I was going to lose my brother,” Pishevar recalls. He encouraged Afshin, a lawyer in Maryland, to move to the west coast and join Hyperloop One. “He thought this could be a legacy for Abraham,” Pishevar says. He messaged BamBrogan to ask if Afshin could stay with him in LA. While the BamBrogans visited friends over Christmas, Afshin lived in their guest room.
The company moved into a former factory space and began construction, replicating the industrious culture Musk preached at SpaceX: “Build fast, test faster.” Pishevar meanwhile stayed in San Francisco, working at his VC firm. To run Hyperloop, he appointed Rob Lloyd, a Canadian former Cisco executive, as CEO. The pitch, by text, was typical Pishevar: “Come change the world with me”.
But there was trouble from the start. BamBrogan and Afshin didn’t work well together. Although BamBrogan was popular among the engineers, others found him intimidating, quick to anger. Meetings could descend into shouting matches. Some thought Pishevar wasn’t taking the company seriously. When he did drop by Hyperloop One, he would sometimes bring guests who seemed out of place for a transportation startup: Katy Perry, will.i.am. Once, early on, he arrived with a live pig.
***
In early July this year, WIRED visited Hyperloop One’s headquarters in a gentrifying neighbourhood in downtown LA (Soho House is moving in a block down, opposite a strip club). Retro train posters lined the walls. Staff at standing desks worked on simulation models. The company has grown to more than 150 employees; in reception, an engineer sat waiting for a job interview.
One noticeable absence: BamBrogan. In late June, the company announced he had resigned, citing “personal reasons”. Giegel was appointed president of engineering in his stead. (He was also, belatedly, made a co-founder). “It’s been a difficult couple of weeks for the company,” Lloyd says. “Our team is much closer together than it was.”
In the yard, engineers were pouring concrete inserts to guide the test pod down the tube. Others were redesigning the motor. The hyperloop’s low pressure and high speeds can have bizarre effects on physics, so the site includes a low-pressure wind tunnel, for testing against its digital simulations. “I called up a place and said, ‘we want a wind tunnel that can do this’,” recalls Giegel. “They said, ‘we can get you a design in 90 days’.” Instead, the team built it themselves in ten.
Hyperloop One’s design now differs largely from Musk’s proposal. For one, it has ditched air bearings for passive magnetic levitation. (Unlike Japan’s maglev trains, which require super-cooled, superconductive magnets, passive systems are considered cheaper: levitation is created by the pod’s movement.) “Air bearings have tiny clearances. With this new maglev system, we’re riding somewhere between 25 to 40mm, which is more sustainable,” Giegel says.
It has also dropped the solar panels. “That limits the amount of through-put, because if you wanted more pods, you don’t have more solar panels,” he says, adding that a grid-powered hyperloop would be far more energy efficient than high-speed rail.
Building a hyperloop still presents major engineering challenges. Accelerating and braking at such high speeds requires vast distances, as does turning. Any route would need to be as straight and level as possible, in order to avoid uncomfortable g-forces. “We don’t want this to be a rollercoaster,” says Giegel. “We’re aiming to keep the experience similar to what you’d feel on a plane: take-off, landing, banked turns.” One option to address this would be tunnelling underground. Another is building underwater. Both would dramatically add to the hyperloop’s projected cost.
Much of Hyperloop One’s work is focused on reducing that expense. Inside its “robot training school”, a machine was being programmed to weld tube joints “way faster and more repeatably than humans can,” Giegel enthused. In another, it is stress-testing alternative materials to cut the cost of steel tube and concrete pylons.
“There’s an engineering challenge in getting the system to work, but I don’t see why we couldn’t overcome it,” says Miles. Besides, he said, the risks are worth it: “Even if hyperloop’s cost escalated to the cost of high-speed rail, its performance is in a different league.”
One cost proved too high: both companies have abandoned the idea of a hyperloop from LA to San Francisco. The land is simply too expensive – and even Musk couldn’t work out a way to build stations close enough to the cities’ centres. Hyperloop One is instead exploring an LA-Vegas route, but more likely the first hyperloop will be outside America, in emerging markets, or somewhere with a long stretch of privately held land.
***
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies’ headquarters, a 30-minute drive away in LA traffic, has a more homespun feel. A small hangar with an upstairs office, the company’s headquarters is filled with promotional posters and models of its design. That afternoon, two workmen were knocking together a life-size hyperloop capsule from pieces of wood. What looked like reupholstered car seats stood in for the real thing. Gresta, dressed in a waistcoat and tie over leather trousers and high-top trainers, showed WIRED around. At one point he produced a metal tube and a puck-sized magnet to demonstrate magnetic levitation, he dropped the puck, which slowly hovered down the tube. “Wow, right?” he said, excitedly. “Magic.”
Gresta is a gifted entertainer with infectious enthusiasm. HTT’s hyperloop, by his telling, sounds almost too good to be true: in addition to using solar panels, its hyperloop – “the real hyperloop,” he says – will also harness wind, kinetic energy and, where relevant, geothermal power. “The combination of this generates up to 30 per cent more than we consume,” says Gresta. Its pylons will be vertical gardens, he says, designed by “the biggest Chinese vertical garden company”.
It will be so transformative that landowners will welcome hyperloop routes across their property. “All the critics who say how difficult it is to take the right of way? Yes, if you are disrupting everything and not giving a shit, like we are building our roads and highways,” he says. “You are the farmer. I come to you and say listen: I put one pylon every 200ft on your land, OK? In exchange I give you electricity, water, and I give it to you, and you can do whatever you want and make a profit off it. You can collect dew from the air, and it’s almost a pity to use it to farm because you can bottle and sell it – that’s how pure it comes. I can give you bandwidth. It’s completely silent. And it’s beautiful to see – not a pipeline, as you saw in the middle of the desert.” HTT is considering offering tickets for free, instead monetising passengers through advertising. He says the company will build its first hyperloop by 2018.
Elon Musk's Hyperloop 'might be free to passengers'
HTT has yet to demonstrate any of this. Its design lab, Gresta says, is off limits. “They are copying everything,” Gresta says, referring to Hyperloop One. “Whenever we disclose it, it will be too late to copy.”
He sounded bitter. “They copied the name – they were Hyperloop Technologies, if you remember. They copied the logo,” Gresta says, angrily. “Every time we announce something, every nation we go and speak with the government, they go there. So the strategy is very clear.” (Pishevar denies this and says his name was inspired by Uber Technologies – “I’d never heard of them.”)
Some of HTT’s technology is public: its hyperloop will also use maglev, via a patent licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and will use vacuum pumps supplied by Leybold, the manufacturer that supplies CERN. Other elements sound almost fantastical: HTT says its pods will be coated with “Vibranium”, a touch-sensitive carbon fibre made in Slovakia and named after the fictional metal that makes up Captain America’s shield. (The Marvel fandom runs deep: in emails, Gresta uses an AI assistant called J.A.R.V.I.S, like Tony Stark’s in Iron Man.)
“Very honestly, the technology is not very difficult,” says Ahlborn. “Everything is existing. You have to put everything together and they have to work well together. We are now mostly focusing on passenger experience, new business models, alternative monetisation strategies.”
The company has already signed a deal with the government of Slovakia to explore potential routes in the country. HTT has also agreed a deal with Deutsche Bahn, the German train company, to develop an “innovation train” using hyperloop features such as augmented-reality windows (these were also not available for demonstration).
As for Hyperloop One? “They did a stunt on a rail.” Gresta shrugged. “They created a rollercoaster. I mean, good luck.”
***
The morning after WIRED visited Hyperloop One, BamBrogan and three former senior employees – Knut Sauer, then-VP David Pendergast, and William Mulholland – filed an explosive lawsuit against the company. In it, they alleged that “those in control of the company continually used the work of the team to augment their personal brands, enhance their romantic lives and line their pockets (and those of family members)”.
Among their most remarkable claims: that Pishevar had begun dating an employee of the Pramana Collective, a PR firm employed by the company. They later became engaged. During this time, the suit claims, Pishevar “increased her salary from $15,000 to $40,000 a month, more than any employee in the company”, terminating the contract when the engagement fell through.
(Hyperloop One and the Pramana Collective say the increase reflected a change from a discounted rate to their standard retainer, and call the claim “sexist and demeaning”.)
It alleges that Pishevar pressured potential Hyperloop One investors to do so via Sherpa Capital (Pishevar denies this), and that Pishevar and Lonsdale hoarded control over the company by issuing themselves shares with 20-to-1 voting rights.
They also claim employees were made to sign contracts which stipulated that the company could buy back their shares at below market rates and to cancel un-exercised options if it was ever acquired: “Those options, even after vesting, were thus potentially worthless to employees.” (Several experts WIRED spoke to agreed the clause was unusual if true. “No one does this, because there’s no point in having the options,” says Colin Kendon, a partner at law firm Bird & Bird.)
Days later, Hyperloop One responded by filing their own lawsuit. The 46-page document reads like an airport thriller: BamBrogan, Pendergast, Sauer and Mulholland are referred to throughout as “the Gang of Four”. Their suit is rebranded “the Sham Complaint”. BamBrogan, the company now says, is “a slightly below average engineer”, an “egomaniacal and greedy” sexist who “often appeared inebriated at the office”. (BamBrogan denies this.)
The company angrily denounced the allegations made against it. Instead, it said, “The Gang” had been “secretly plotting and fomenting a coup” and planning to launch a rival company, Hyperloop Two. Alleging numerous breaches of contract, it filed for damages in excess of $250 million.
The legal battle revealed infighting going back months. Just days after the test in Nevada, 11 senior employees, including BamBrogan and Giegel signed a letter to Pishevar and Lloyd, demanding that Pishevar step down as chairman and grant employees voting control of Hyperloop One. Over weeks of tense negotiations, the company agreed to several demands, including adding engineers to the board and removing the share buyback clause in its contracts. But Pishevar refused to step down.
Over the following days, according to Hyperloop One’s version of events, the “Gang” considered leaving to form a rival hyperloop company. The signatories of the letter met back at BamBrogan’s garage to discuss their options. There, the lawsuit alleges, they discussed how to get around Hyperloop One’s patents, and drew up a list of potential hires on a whiteboard, if Pishevar stayed. At one point, the company maintains, BamBrogan registered the domain hyperlooptoo.com. This, BamBrogan says, was part of a joke among colleagues. “If I was going to start another Hyperloop company,” he says, “I sure as hell wouldn’t call it HyperloopToo!”
Hyperloop One’s lawyers also assert that hyperloop2.com and hyperlooptwo.com have also been purchased, “presumably by BamBrogan”. BamBrogan denies this. And the timing is odd: those addresses were registered on May 9 and May 11. Hyperloop One announced its rebranding on May 10. (Asked to confirm that neither it nor anyone working on its behalf had actually registered the addresses, Hyperloop One would only say that, “No current officer of the company directed that those domain names be purchased”.)
The breaking point came in mid-June. BamBrogan was scheduled to travel to Russia to meet high-profile investors, including the billionaire Ziyavudin Magomedov. The trip also involved an event with President Putin. BamBrogan bought a new suit for the occasion, and gifts of quinoa and chocolate, for the investor’s family. But, with Pishevar still in control of the company, BamBrogan told the investors he wouldn’t be coming. Pishevar went alone. When he arrived, the investors – alarmed by what BamBrogan had told them – expressed their concern.
What happened next is the matter of legal dispute. This much is clear: while Pishevar was in Russia reassuring the investors, Afshin, upset by BamBrogan’s actions, procured a length of rope with a slip-knot tied at one end, went back into the office late at night, and left it on BamBrogan’s chair, to send a message.
Discovering the rope the next morning, BamBrogan took that message to be a death threat, believing the rope to be a “hangman’s noose”, and called the police. (He also filed for a restraining order, which was later denied.) “He had lived with my family. Still had a key to my house. I was extremely fearful. I’ve got a pregnant wife at home, and my life is being threatened,” BamBrogan says. Hyperloop One maintains the rope was a “lasso” intended “for someone acting like a cowboy”. Either way, Afshin Pishevar was immediately fired. The company hired security for the office. The BamBrogans spent the night in a hotel.
Meanwhile, Pishevar was in St Petersburg at the city’s Economic Forum, an annual gathering for the global elite hosted by President Putin. Ahlborn was also in town, talking up HTT’s hyperloop: the event, hosting billionaires and world leaders, is a potentially lucrative one for infrastructure startups. In a grand ballroom at the Konstantinovsky Palace, Pishevar pitched the hyperloop to Putin and the heads of China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s sovereign wealth funds, collectively worth trillions. Putin cracked jokes about the hyperloop. “He actually said he believes hyperloop will fundamentally change the global economy and the world,” Pishevar says. The two posed for a picture together. The mayor of Moscow and Ziyavudin Magomedov signed an agreement to explore potential hyperloop routes in the capital.
Back in Los Angeles, BamBrogan was incensed. The group gathered with their families at the company’s office for emotional showdown talks. Pendergast, accused by Hyperloop One of undermining the company’s position with investors, was fired in front of his wife and daughter. During the meeting, the four former employees allege, the company threatened “economic and legal warfare by millionaires with extensive networks”. Seven signatories of the letter, including Giegel, stayed with the company. BamBrogan, Sauer and Mulholland resigned.
***
Hyperloop Transportation Technology says the first hyperloop could open as soon as 2018. The company has announced plans to build an 8km operational hyperloop in Quay Valley, a proposed new urban development in Kings County, California. “We start construction this year,” Gresta said. “We are not building a test track in the middle of nowhere. We are building a full-scale hyperloop in a city that will have ten million people riding on it.”
The Quay Valley hyperloop is projected to cost between $100 million and $150 million. How will they pay for it? “The money is not really an issue,” says Ahlborn. “The moment we pull the trigger, the money will be there.” Gresta was similarly offhand, saying that HTT has “several offers on the table” from investors. In addition to their time, he pointed out, some volunteers have also invested money. One German company has committed $1.7 million.
Pushed for more specifics, Gresta became unsettled. “You can say the company has $70 million in assets,” he boasted – counting land, engineering and its vacuum pumps. (The manufacturer, Leybold, says the pumps are on loan.) Again pressed, he said $30 million amounted to engineering talent – that is, the value of the time being donated by its volunteers in return for stock options. (Ahlborn and Gresta are paid a salary through JumpStartFund.)
Another source of income, he said, is the pair’s plentiful speaking engagements. “We get paid to go there! Speak at events, then we have press conferences, meetings. I can manage the company with that.” Gresta pointed to his phone. His eyes shone with delight.
Gresta’s theatrical tendencies were entertaining, but later seemed to occasionally overstretch reality. For example, he said that he made his name in Italy through selling a 40 per cent stake of an online media company, Bibop Research, to a subsidiary of Telecom Italia. “I sold it for 11 billion Lira,” Gresta said, repeatedly boasting this amounted to “$50 million”. Except: at 1999 exchange rates 11 billion lira was worth just over $6 million. And, according to financial statements from the time, the actual figure was four billion lira.
(Responding to this finding, Gresta said that the contract had included an additional seven billion lira in “services”, but that shortly after, the company which had acquired the stake began “not honouring the contract” and sold it on. He continues to use the 11 billion figure in company statements.)
Prior to joining HTT, Gresta also said he had worked for an Italian company called ClearLeisure that, among other things, owns amusement parks. “Looking how to create crazy engineering projects, not killing anyone – that was my job,” Gresta said. “Trust me, if you build amusement parks? Hyperloop, it’s easy.” Except: according to company filings, Gresta only worked at ClearLeisure as a non-executive director for 13 months, during which time the company had no parks under construction.
In mid-August, the Kings County planning department told WIRED it had yet to receive a completed planning application from the company for the Quay Valley project, and that approvals can take six months to several years.
At one point, unsettled by WIRED’s questioning, Gresta seemed to snap. “You want to talk out of your ass and do some sensational title? Do it!” he said, angrily. “But you are not doing a good service to your community, or to humanity. Whatever you write, it’s bad for me now, but it will be bad for you in a year.”
He calmed down a few minutes later. “Everybody who is working here is really passionate about what we are doing,” he said. “We don’t give a shit they don’t take us serious. They will.”
***
As this story went to press, the Hyperloop One lawsuit was making its way through the courts. By email, Giegel said the company is “stronger than ever”. Construction on the Devloop is under way in the desert, with a public demonstration planned for early 2017. The company is exploring hyperloop routes in Russia, Dubai, Scandinavia and Switzerland. Here in the UK, it has held discussions with the Peel Group, which owns the Manchester ship canal. One option might be a hyperloop route “making Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds a great single city,” says Alan James, who worked on UK high-speed rail and now heads Hyperloop One’s international business development.
BamBrogan remains distraught. He has no future plans, but said the experience helped him double down on his personal ethos, “to build rad shit with rad people, that changes the world for the better.”
Disputes between company founders are not uncommon. Facebook, Apple, Tinder, Snapchat – it’s hard to find many that weren’t, at some point, embroiled with internal drama. Some companies survive. Others are torn apart.
“It’s bigger than Shervin, it’s bigger than Brogan, it’s bigger than Rob,” Josh Giegel had said, back at Hyperloop One. Something else he said: “We don’t fly on Wright brothers airlines. After they were the first ones, they spent the majority of their time litigating, suing people they thought were stealing their ideas.”
Elon Musk’s idea still inspires belief. Startups are springing up from Germany to Canada. SpaceX is building a track for university students to test their pod designs. “I think it can be built,” says John Sullivan, an engineering professor at Purdue University, home to one competing team. “But on the scale of decades, not years.”
Perhaps the hyperloop will be built. Perhaps not. Perhaps we just want to believe it will.
As Ahlborn said: “We have been in meetings with David Cameron, with Angela Merkel – with princes and kings.”
Just before WIRED left Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Gresta decided, at his assistant’s urging, to perform a magic trick. He produced two matchsticks, which he crossed lightly between two outstretched forefingers. Staying perfectly still, he paused for dramatic effect. It was late. Outside, rush-hour traffic was backing up on the highway. Then, all of a sudden, the uppermost match leapt dramatically into the air. It clattered on the table. Gresta laughed. “How is it possible?”
He didn’t seem to have done anything at all.
Additional reporting by Gian Volpicelli
Updated 5/9/16: This story has been updated with some minor factual corrections. Josh Geigel's job title is president of engineering, not CTO. And Pishevar sold Webs.com, not WebOS.
Updated 7/9/16: A SpaceX spokesperson contacted WIRED to correct HTT's claims: "There are no active SpaceX engineers volunteering for Hyperloop Transportation Technologies."