4 ms·

Why announce the publication date in advance? It's not like he needs to disrupt anyone else's futuristic transport plan announcement.

• rdouble 13y ago
  Maybe to apply social pressure to himself to get it done by that date.
• swamp40 13y ago
  Probably some combination of: a) He's getting asked a lot. b) By publicly announcing a deadline, everyone involved (including him) will be racing to hit that deadline or lose face. c) He's telling the world "I say what I do and I do what I say".
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• JunkDNA 13y ago
  There was that recent PR article that made the rounds here last week from some company allegedly developing an evacuated tube based system that was written in a way to imply they were working on Musk's idea. I would not at all be surprised if he's a little miffed about that and has decided to just get everything out there. Given that they may not actually be working on what he specifically has in mind, there is a risk that his idea gets a bad connotation if someone implements something similar (but not identical) and does it poorly. There is a whole political dimension to this in terms of getting zoning, approvals, etc... and the last thing he needs is for it to be stillborn because a bunch of politicians hear it "was tried and failed".
  • hankcharles 13y ago
    is this the company you are referring to? http://www.et3.com/ http://www.et3.com/
    • proksoup 13y ago
      Well those guys are pretty transparent eh, a google checkout for their license http://et3.net/book/et3-license http://et3.net/book/et3-license I get physically ill trying to empathize with intellectual property sycophants.
    • JunkDNA 13y ago
      Yes, here's the relevant discussion from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6018064
• bemol 13y ago
  It also helps that two major accidents happened recently.