This pretty much nails it.
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.
But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
The whole post is on target except for one fairly minor detail which I am contractually obligated to bring up.
I think Krugman may be conflating the two definitions of the hyperloop. By making the "no working" distinction he may be suggesting that we could see one eventually, which is true if he's talking about what most people think of when they hear the term: a maglev vactrain. A few years ago there was a big push to develop one of these systems, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars and limitless credulous press. It never got beyond the prototype stage because the design is insanely impractical and prohibitively expensive, but the underlying idea is sound from an engineering standpoint. You could build one of these with enough time and money. Hell, if things stabilize and Saudi Arabia and its allies don't blow all their money on other techno-optimist vaporware, I wouldn't be surprised to someday see a small working "hyperloop" functioning as a tourist attraction someplace like Dubai.
This is not what Elon Musk proposed. His idea was for a high-speed, perhaps even supersonic, train that would run on a cushion of air like, as he put it, an air hockey table. Air casters are a perfectly good technology for a lot of applications, like slowly moving heavy loads across a flat warehouse floor, but as a component in a high-speed rail system, engineers ruled it out as completely unworkable decades ago. As far as I can tell, not a penny of all of that research money from companies like Virgin Hyperloop went to developing Elon Musk's idea. Not only did it never make it to the prototype stage, it appears that real engineers immediately saw how bad the idea was.
Every hyperloop company settled on the same strategy. They would quietly ignore Musk's laughable white paper (which also included, I kid you not, dealing with thermal expansion by putting train stations on rollers and letting them move a few hundred yards on hot days), but they would keep the name because that was the only thing of value.
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