In July, Elon Musk shocked many observers by claiming he had received “verbal governmental approval” to build a Hyperloop between New York City and Washington, D.C.
However, it has just emerged that the whole thing may have just been a misunderstanding and that Musk jumped the gun when announcing the project.
Speaking to Recode earlier in the week, a top tech advisor to President Donald Trump, Reed Cordish, admitted that he may have been the one to get Musk’s hopes up.
“I think that I was the culprit. As I said to Elon after, I think what you heard was ‘verbal government excitement,’” he said.
Despite admitting that Musk hasn’t been given the approval he initially thought he was, Cordish did throw his support behind the entrepreneur’s plans to challenge how tunnels are built with The Boring Company.
“In essence, we’ve had the same technology for tunneling, it hasn’t changed in the last fifty years. And what Elon has done is he’s challenged his best engineers to reimagine that approach and we are working with them every day.”
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017
