In downtown L.A., millions of dollars and hundreds of labor hours are being spent on a technology most people don’t believe exists. But as powerful political players start to get involved with the company, traveling just under the speed of sound is getting a little more real.
Hyperloop Technologies employees and their guests gather for a party at the company's Innovation Campus in the arts district of Downtown Los Angeles.
BuzzFeed / Caroline O'Donovan
Brogan BamBrogan wants to know if he should put a shirt on. It's been a hectic day of preparations for a big party, and he's been running around in a T-shirt trying to figure out last-minute plans. But in a few hours there's a board meeting for Hyperloop Technologies -- a company where BamBrogan was once CEO and now serves as CTO -- and investors are already starting to show up to tour its 2.5-acre "Innovation Campus" in Downtown Los Angeles' Arts District. BamBrogan is whisked away — probably to explain the nuances of magnetic levitation technology to some billionaire or other. The next time he appears, at a brand-new, 32-foot-long walnut-and-steel conference table that seats up to 25 people, he's wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt — with no more than three buttons done.
Later that late September night, in the same massive, exposed-brick, industrial warehouse — complete with an engineering test lab, warehouses for light manufacturing, and a handful of 11-foot-wide steel tubes — at the edges of what are considered hip and dangerous neighborhoods in central L.A, BamBrogan, Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar, and newly minted Hyperloop Technologies CEO Rob Lloyd will host Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and 200 other local luminaries, West Coast investors, political consultants, neighborhood artists, and SpaceX engineers. By that time, BamBrogan has changed his costume once again, this time into a suit.
The event, held under those ubiquitous California string lights, was catered by L.A.'s trendiest food trucks; cocktails included frozen margaritas that looked more like balls of sherbet than drinks, and shooters of a viscous, clear liquid in which small pink pearls of liquor were suspended. The atmosphere was distinctly L.A., the women in tight bandage dresses and very high heels and the men, for the most part, in jackets (though one wore a kilt). As the sun sank behind the corrugated metal of one of Hyperloop's warehouses, pink light slanted across the dance floor, the café tables, and the partygoers waiting in line for too-sweet Old Fashioneds.
The occasion for the celebration was the hiring of Rob Lloyd, former president of Cisco Systems. Lloyd hasn't started his new job as CEO in full yet, and is still living in Northern California, but was down in L.A. for his first board meeting. Lloyd isn't the only industry heavyweight involved with Hyperloop: The board includes Pishevar, Emily White, formerly of Snapchat; David Sacks, formerly of PayPal; Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir; and Jim Messina, former deputy chief of staff to President Obama. Most of them joined the party and were repeatedly toasted from the podium.
But the festivities weren't really just about welcoming Lloyd to the company; they were about showing the world that the hyperloop is more than a moonshot idea floated by a bunch of zany engineers — it's also got a critical mass of grownups on board, and a premise promising enough to make the mayor of America's second-most populous city slog through L.A. traffic to sing the project's praises. Still, getting people zipping along at a speed that touches the sound barrier without barfing is no small challenge — and that's before you've figured out how to pay for it.
A hyperloop is basically a vacuum-sealed tube, inside of which there is a pod that can, theoretically, move very quickly, possibly exceeding 700 miles per hour. Because no hyperloop has ever been constructed, however, there is no one definitive use case or design. Some plans place the tubes above ground, others underground. Some go through water; various pod designs are on skis, or wheels, or levitate using a number of different methods. Some engineers are planning to use hyperloops to move people quickly and comfortably from place to place, while other are working on systems meant to transport goods faster than ever before.
The idea of the hyperloop did not originate with anyone at Hyperloop Technologies. In fact, this isn't even the only company trying to build one. And the man who actually came up with the idea — Elon Musk — was conspicuously absent from the festivities. In 2013, Musk released a whitepaper in which he sketched out, for the first time, his idea for how to build a hyperloop. But, what with trying to revolutionize commercial space travel and dominate the electric car market — via his companies SpaceX and Tesla, respectively — Musk was too busy to build it himself. The document, simply titled "Hyperloop Alpha," was a challenge to engineers around the world.
About a year ago, that challenge was picked up by Shervin Pishevar, who is not an engineer, but does stand to some day make a significant amount of money off of his major investment in Uber, and was looking for something to do with it. Pishevar needed an engineer to see if the project was really viable; he recruited BamBrogan, who had been at SpaceX for eight years, for the job. "If you look at what it can deliver in terms of driverless, weatherproof, fast, safe — all these things are great," BamBrogan told BuzzFeed News. "But can you do it on a cost structure that is reasonable? As we started to run the numbers, we started to understand — the answer is yes."
In the wider world, the Hyperloop concept seems about as as actual and legitimate as a flying car. But if there's one thing everyone at Hyperloop Technologies knows for sure, it's that the hyperloop is real. That fact — the legitimate, technological plausibility of the thing — is repeated at Hyperloop headquarters almost like a chant. They want the world to know that building a hyperloop — right now, as we speak, today — is possible.
On paper, at least.
SpaceX is, ostensibly, not working on a hyperloop, and Hyperloop Technologies, despite being Musk's idea, has no connection to SpaceX. But the two companies share a number of similarities — and not by accident. BamBrogan described SpaceX as "the most fun place I'd ever been," and as CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, he wanted to inspire the same sense of opportunity and "unconstrained resources."
"We're definitely bringing lots of parts of SpaceX into it," BamBrogan told BuzzFeed News. "I think the way we're working is very similar to that on purpose."
Though not physically present, Musk — with whom everyone at the party, at the company, maybe even in the city seemed to be on a first-name basis with — was hard to avoid. Musk insists he has no interest in commercializing the hyperloop, but earlier this summer SpaceX announced a competition for students to design the ideal pod. The point, supposedly, is to stir up excitement, but it can be hard to tell whether Musk does or doesn't want to be associated with the development of the technology.
Musk is the man behind the idea, but to convince the world that the hypothetical is a reality, Hyperloop Technologies needed a different set of men entirely. BamBrogan, with his mustache, creative choice of name (he merged names with his wife, Bambi, when they were married; she is now Bambi BamBrogan and he is Brogan BamBrogan), and tendency toward enthusiastic hugs, seems like a visionary leader. But, while his faith in the hyperloop is convincing, he admits he lacks the business chops to sell it to foreign dignitaries and transportation executives as a realistic transit option. In fact, BamBrogan said the most difficult part of his time alone at the top was dealing with unexpected levels of interest from potential customers.
Which is exactly where Lloyd, the reason for the party, comes in. At Cisco — a company worth $129 billion, with more 70,000 employees — Lloyd built "billions of dollars in sales," according to Brogan; at Hyperloop Technologies, he plans to start building a sales team right away. Lloyd was hired because of his experience executing major infrastructure deals; his presence means Hyperloop Technologies is ready to get serious about building — and funding — this thing.
The first step, as he described it, is to make people understand the hyperloop not as one singular object, but rather — like railways or highways — a method of transit with any number of uses. To that end, Hyperloop Technologies, according to Lloyd, will soon have a catalog of products for customers to choose from, "a family of solutions or systems that actually fits the almost infinite use cases" of hyperloop technology.
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