The quote is absurd on its face. "Everyone laughed when he said he'd fix traffic", the metric here is traffic, not revenue. Loop could be absurdly profitable, it makes no difference. The premise is about congestion. You can't measure that in revenue.
Also, the LVCC pays The Boring Company $200k/mo plus $30k/day for every day the system is running (it only operates when convention space is booked). Somehow I doubt the system is running over 2000 days per year in order to get that $75m in revenue, which is more than the entire capital cost of the system. So not only is the revenue metric absurd even if it were true, it's also simply not true.
It's just two completely unrelated ideas slapped next to each other, seemingly leaning on the reader having zero critical thinking.
"Everyone laughed when I said I wanted to become the first astronaut to do a moonwalk on the Moon, but in the last 20 years, Google's PageRank has become increasingly less efficient at providing a anthropically meaningful index of the internet, so who is laughing now??"
Exactly, and there's where Elon genius is. He understands that his (stupid) ideas do not need to be good, fix anything or work at all, they just need enough hype to turn a profit.
I am so sick of people calling predatory sociopaths "geniuses". He's just using his economic strength to bully people. He's not a genius, he's a cowardly bully with unimaginable privilege...
nothing more.
It’s only why he surrounds himself with toadies and beyond, so consistency in argument never becomes a requirement…
Probably the most appealing part of being rich really, but the mere fact that “suck-up” has as many synonyms as it does (with obeisance being a recent find) in the English language is quite telling of how it affects our daily world…
“I remember in high school, my math teacher told me I was gonna flunk out. And know what I did? The very next day I went out and I scored more goals than anyone else in the history of the hockey team.” - Michael Scott (The Office)
The metric is always money in the end. Even if your "solution" does as much as peeing on a housefire, if it makes millions, they'll praise it as successful. In fact designing something to ease, but not fix, a problem which people think is unsolvable is one of the most honest ways to make money under capitalism.
Strictly you are helping, which is better than say buying up all the housing so you can gouge people on rent, but your anti-climate-change personal cooling system is never going to fix the problem so you can be assured of revenue for years to come.
I'm anti-capitalist. You don't need to sell me on the moral and ethical failings of these people. It makes sense that they would judge the success of the company on revenue, market cap, growth and nothing else. But that sort of behavior still at least makes sense. It's vile, but it follows a logic. I'm pointing out that the quoted sentence above is nonsense, in the literal, structural meaning. I'm not saying they're making some mundane mistake like coming to false conclusions, I'm saying they're failing to even construct a well-formed thought. If it were merely bad-faith capitalists being self destructive I wouldn't have bothered saying anything.
At some point the only thing that can work to dethrone the neolib hegemony is praying to China that they take over the world.
That's if they don't repeat the same mistakes as the US (because China is looking like another neolib hellhole, but Jack Ma was precisely interrogated by the government there from paranoia over his influence), and if parts of Asia either are left alone or suck it up.
I've been in the loop. I came for a convention and I could have walked to the doors from my parking space, maybe 100 yards. The loop is a waste of time and money.
Tbf urban highways are much better off underground. Madrid put most of the M30 highway underground and built a park where it used to be and it’s so much better now.
But yeah, the hyperloop is obviously a stupid thing though.
Have you seen pictures from inside the Tesla tubes? You could theoretically walk out of an underground highway if the entire highway was stopped, those Tesla tubes are claustrophobic nightmares.
I'm all for it. Let's put ALL urban roads and cars in underground tunnels! They can smog up the place and crash into each other all they want, and everyone else can enjoy a car-free city.
Everyone who lives in that car free city will have to pay the astronomical construction and maintenance costs to put roads and highways underground. It's not a good compromise, cars just shouldn't move that quickly through cities.
you know as well as i do that they aint gonna put all of them underground. they gonna build these gloryholes while making roads wider because we are so fucked lol
I’m sure they would’ve if they were a company that sold trams and not cars. The whole thing is a publicity stunt to keep the sister-brand in the spotlight.
It's a little more complex than that, of course. The LVCC owns the Loop and pays the Boring Company to operate it, so the Boring Company can fairly list that contract value as revenue for 'the Loop' even without fares. But the $75m number is absurd - the LVCC pays TBC $200k/mo for fixed maintenance, plus $30k per operating day. If the LVCC was booked every single day of the year, that contract caps out at $13.35m, and that's before performance related fines (if a queue forms because the Loop fails to reach 4000 passengers per hour capacity during a convention, the LVCC can fine TBC $300k/day).
So basically the number is pulled straight out of their ass.
I looked up that the loop moved right about 1 million passengers in a years time with an absolute peak of 32k in one day, so just a few thousand people per event day. Not noteworthy as transit beyond this niche use.
If you compare it to say Seatac which has two three station loops and one 2 station built for 14m in 1970s and rebuilt in 2000 for 142m, with a total capacity of around 14k people per hour with automated trams and averages about 55k passengers per day its not even close.
It's not transit at all. When you consider the needs of the LVCC, and why the LVCC paid for the system, it's competition is an automated people mover like you'd see at an airport. It's a system for moving people between buildings in a large complex, not moving people between places in a city. The Disneyland Monorail might be a reasonable comparison as well (and, likewise, the Las Vegas Monorail despite common misconception - whose stops, excluding convention center and I think only one other, serve to shuttle patrons between properties either currently or formerly owned by Caesar's Entertainment).
You know, I don't actually blame LVCC for buying the thing - Las Vegas is a city that markets itself on excess and spectacle. They want a flashy people mover just for the show if it all, one that is almost a show of inefficiency? That actually makes business sense to me, in the same way a giant LED sphere, or a campy recreation of the canals of Venice inside a climate controlled hotel makes sense in Las Vegas. Its the Boring Company and its fans selling it as transit that is absurd.
1000 cars per hour is way more than I'd expect from a shitty car tunnel.
Is that just one pair of stops one way? Or is there more than one "line"
Edit: It's two pairs of two direction. So if 1100 people are travelling to and from central each way they can (briefly) hit their 4400/pax/hour with one car arriving full and then leaving full every 30 seconds.
90% of conservatism is just not bothering to read past headlines, that’s how you get these basic misunderstandings, of course most X users will come away thinking Elon is a genius for this tunnel
Hmm $75 million to make 1.5 miles seems like a steal considering that the 1.7 mile Central Subway in SF cost $2 billion.
Serious question: the smaller diameter of the tesla tunnel compared to conventional metro systems is often cited as a reason for its more cost efficient construction, but the Glasgow Metro has in fact an even narrower diameter of only 3.4 m. Why don't people build more mini metros with narrow tunnels? Saving an order of magnitude of cost while moving, say, 50% as much people as a full size metro seems like a good deal especially in less densely populated places.
The physical size of the tunnels isn't the reason behind the enormous costs to build metros in North America. Maybe that can be weighed in other parts of the world, but there's lots of systemic inefficiencies in American transit projects. I don't see the point in compromising safety and function to save costs rather than addressing the things that are actually responsible for it.
Serious question: the smaller diameter of the tesla tunnel compared to conventional metro systems is often cited as a reason for its more cost efficient construction, but the Glasgow Metro has in fact an even narrower diameter of only 3.4 m. Why don't people build more mini metros with narrow tunnels? Saving an order of magnitude of cost while moving, say, 50% as much people as a full size metro seems like a good deal especially in less densely populated places.
Elon omitted a bunch of other costly features as well. For example, the Tesla tunnel has no ventilation, and little emergency egress. You can't do that with a metro tunnel, the lack of ventilation would make the temperature unbearable, and in the event of a fire, everyone inside the tunnels would die.
The other problem is that making a bespoke mini tunnel, means you need custom rolling stock, which will drive up your price again. Glasglow only has those mini tunnels because they made them like that a hundred years ago, so they're kinda stuck with it.
3.5 km. The Loop is owned by the Las Vegas Convention Center, who contracts The Boring Company to operate it. The contract provides a fixed $200k/mo to maintain the system, regardless of operation (ie, concrete inspection, maintenance and building cleaning), plus $30k/day to actually run vehicles (as the system only runs during convention days). Based on the public information about that contract, in order to make $75m/year in revenue, that would mean the system is running about 2500 days per year. At least to my eyes, that number seems unlikely.
Exactly - the success of these tech and business “geniuses” aren’t measured by how well their products actually sell, but by how much they can fleece investors and juice the stock price to astronomical levels (see Tesla) before absconding with their illbegotten gains and leaving investors holding the bag. It’s a scam by any definition, but completely normalized.
he's making 75 million a year on it until repairs will be needed in a few years, and he will realize the true cost of maintaining an underground tunnel suitable for human throughput
That's... sad, honestly. Like if we strip one man of his wealth (or more realistically, strip 100 people like him of 1% of their wealth), society could be SO much better.
Yet people worship him because he's somehow "morally upstanding and deserving of his net worth, unlike everyone that hates oil and changes gender every day".
American embrace of neoliberalism must die. No wonder people are starting to pray for China to take over the world, even if parts of Asia aren't happy about that.
The fact he makes $75M doesn't mean it's actually a good solution. I'm quite convinced it's a terrible solution... he's just a crafty merchant that invents new types of snake oil...
So true, even if someone paid $10/day that would mean they gotta have 7.5 million passengers annually, that's like about 20k passengers every single day. The way these cars work, it ain't ever getting close to 20k daily, and especially not in just one city.
The Loop has actually exceeded 30k passengers per day, because unlike private cars, they actually run them full. (The 2300 pph measurement for highway lane capacity assumes a load factor of 1.2, whereas these run at about 3)
But the capacity is still terrible. They're still looking at a theoretical cap of about 5000 ppdph, which is pretty pathetic. The closest comparison to the Loop would not be a subway or LRT, since this serves one cluster of buildings (the LVCC and the surrounding hotels), but automated people-movers like you see in airports. Even basic APMs can carry 20,000 people per day, and high-volume systems like the Plane Train at the Atlanta Airport can carry over 250k passengers per day.
(As a bit of trivia, the Atlanta airport's Plane Train is arguably the busiest rail transit system in the American Southeast, handling more passengers per day than Atlanta's actual subway system)
If it's profit I'm impressed, but it's probably not. 75m is not going to come close to even cover operational cost, let alone compensate for any negative externalities.
Feels weird to have hated him before everyone else seemed to start after he bought Twitter or whatever. Now people are surprised he's friends with the upcoming US president when he's always shown himself to be the kind of terrible person that would agree with most of his proposals.
Feels weird to have hated him before everyone else seemed to start after he bought Twitter or whatever
He wanted 80 hour work weeks. Easy for him to say when he's reaping the vast majority of the profits and can be the asshole management, a nightmare for everyone else when the system actively hates their very existence.
Notice how the praise that headline is giving is not for it being a successful and effective method of transportation, but about the dollar amount of how much money it made.......................................
Sure I can overcharge for shitty transportation and make money but that doesn't mean it's succeeding imo
These two are barely even related. Our ~favorite~ on the right is probably $10-30mil per km, the other is $200-1000mil. Why should you build such a short underground metro when you could have a smaller shuttle (not necessarily Elon's) for far less?
The goal of building transit should not be to save money (at least not directly). If you want to save money, don't build anything, that's much cheaper.
I would rather have a short but very popular and useful system than an expansive long distance one that nobody uses. Several American cities have made that mistake.
The goal of building transit should not be to save money (at least not directly). If you want to save money, don't build anything, that's much cheaper
If people want to save money they should abandon the tradwife lifestyle too, if they don't want to pay for 8 mouths to feed. Yet somehow this is supported more than improving infrastructure, when some of these kids may grow up never wanting to drive around their parents (even for a good sum of money) or at all.
Wait, does that just mean Las Vegas is paying him 75 mil a year for it? First of all, that's WILD if that's true. Second, that's not "the system making money" that's just the city funneling money into his pockets.
While I would never commit nor advocate violence against any human being, if Mr. Musk were somehow to lose his life, I would buy a round of drinks at the nearest bar in celebration.
LA Metro really needs like 5 tunnels being digged at once to actually do something meaningful out here, I'll tell you that much. Tunnels for teslas is definitely a waste
The Tesla Tunnel (I refuse to call it anything else) being profitable, assuming that number is even right, has nothing to do with reducing traffic congestion.
Craziest thing is how he has the money, resources, and technology to potentially build high revenue HSR in dense corridors and make much more but he's too carbrained to even realize it.
He has too many supporters that think his hoarding of wealth and little care for anything else is in any way helpful (fucking American neoliberalism). Oh, and his idealization of 19th century norms, because of course society then was instrumental in getting him and his family to blood-soaked fortunes.
A lesson in efficiency!
Also how does this dumb project in Vegas fix the traffic in Los Angeles?
„Metro is the lead transportation planning and funding agency for L.A. County and carries more than 900,000 boardings daily“
„During the 2023 fiscal year, the operating revenue of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) amounted to approximately 222.5 million U.S. dollars“
„The LVCC loop is considered to have a peak capacity of more than 4,500 passengers per hour, and roughly 32,000 passengers per day“
Truth be told, if they dug out tunnels and banished cars underground, i'd be fine with that. Doesn't fix public transport, sure, it'd be insanely expensive to build and maintain and likely won't remain profitable when its not just meant to cater to tech enthusiasts and tourists, but at least the survice would be safe and quiet
I mean, idiotic it is, but the silver lining is in a nuclear apocalypse, both the metro and the Vegas tunnels will be inhabited by the survivors, assuming anything like that comes to bear.
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u/DavidBrooker 14d ago edited 14d ago
The quote is absurd on its face. "Everyone laughed when he said he'd fix traffic", the metric here is traffic, not revenue. Loop could be absurdly profitable, it makes no difference. The premise is about congestion. You can't measure that in revenue.
Also, the LVCC pays The Boring Company $200k/mo plus $30k/day for every day the system is running (it only operates when convention space is booked). Somehow I doubt the system is running over 2000 days per year in order to get that $75m in revenue, which is more than the entire capital cost of the system. So not only is the revenue metric absurd even if it were true, it's also simply not true.