The Hyperloop Exodus

While American crews paved over the mile-long Hawthorne tube, a Chinese enterprise quietly shattered land speed records.

[Speaker 1]: If you drive past the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California today, and you look for the spot that was supposed to change the future of transportation, you won’t find it. [Speaker 2]: For years, that street was dominated by a massive, white steel tube. It was a mile long. It was where the hyperloop "golden era" happened. You had thousands of students from around the world showing up for competitions, testing these prototype pods. [Speaker 1]: But if you go there now, the tube is gone. It was demolished back in November 2022. And what replaced the future of transit? [Speaker 2]: Employee parking. [Speaker 1]: A parking lot. The builder who tore it down, Erik Wright, actually called the demolition a "memorial service." And then, just over a year after that, on New Year’s Eve 2023, the biggest player in the space-Virgin Hyperloop-liquidated its assets and effectively shut down. [Speaker 2]: They burned through 450 million dollars. So if you look at the American wreckage, it is very easy to assume the hyperloop is dead. [Speaker 1]: But that assumption is wrong. Because while the US was liquidating its assets, a state-owned enterprise in China was building a track that just set a speed record of 623 kilometers per hour. [Speaker 2]: That is 387 miles per hour. On land. [Speaker 1]: It’s Monday, February 2, 2026, and you’re listening to The Angle. [Speaker 2]: The big misconception here is that we think of the Hyperloop as a startup story. We think of it as Elon Musk, pitch decks, and venture capital. [Speaker 1]: Right. We treat it like it’s Uber or WeWork. But the narrative has shifted. It stopped being a startup race and turned into an infrastructure heavy-lift. Basically, the technology didn't die; it emigrated. It left the venture capital world of Silicon Valley and moved to state-owned enterprises in China and industrial consortiums in Europe. [Speaker 2]: And that distinction matters because the barriers that killed the American projects weren't really about physics. Physics is hard, sure, but the barriers were financial. The "state capacity" just wasn't there in the private sector to build hundreds of miles of vacuum tubes. [Speaker 1]: Yet, we still have Elon Musk's "Boring Company" operating right here in the US. They’re digging tunnels. So we need to clarify exactly what is happening domestically versus what is happening overseas, because they are not building the same thing anymore. [Speaker 2]: No, they’ve completely diverged. And this is where people get confused. So let’s look at the US pivot first. The Boring Company has effectively decoupled from the "vacuum tube" concept. [Speaker 1]: This is the difference between a "Hyperloop" and a "Loop." [Speaker 2]: Exactly. A Hyperloop is a pod levitating in a vacuum tube, aiming for 700 miles per hour. A "Loop," which is what the Boring Company is operating in Vegas right now, is just a paved tunnel. It has air in it. And you drive standard electric vehicles through it. [Speaker 1]: It’s an underground road. [Speaker 2]: It is. And it works. They’re moving thousands of passengers an hour in Vegas. And back in July 2025, they announced the "Music City Loop" in Nashville. They’ve been doing site prep, and they’re waiting on permits to launch the tunnel boring machines. [Speaker 1]: But the critical thing is that it’s not high-speed transit. It solves traffic, maybe, but you aren’t getting from LA to San Francisco in thirty minutes. That dream-the supersonic speed dream-has moved entirely to China. [Speaker 2]: That is where the CASIC program…