Save Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk is famous for his ambitious, technologically improbable projects on the ground and in the sky. Tesla Motors is fundamentally changing the automobile. His private space-exploration company, SpaceX, wants to colonize Mars. Musk’s most futuristic project, however, he is not building himself. A few years ago, Musk put forth the initial idea for a Hyperloop—a high-speed, solar-powered transportation system that would shoot passengers in a tube from point A to point B at hundreds of miles per hour—and companies have since begun to race to turn his quixotic vision into reality. One of these Los Angeles–based companies, Hyperloop Technologies Inc., announced Tuesday that it would rebrand itself as Hyperloop One, likely in part to avoid confusion (Hyperloop One’s rival in the space is the similarly named Hyperloop Transportation Technologies). In addition, the company announced, it has raised $80 million in venture-capital funding to help achieve its goal of successfully creating and deploying its high-speed, tube-based transportation system. Its notable new investors include GE Ventures and Khosla Ventures. On Wednesday, Hyperloop One will conduct the first demo of its propulsion technology at a track north of Las Vegas. Hyperloop One, which is working with world-renowned construction and design firm Aecom, will also examine the possibility of creating more hyperloop systems around the world, in places like Los Angeles, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden. Hyperloop One’s competitor, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is locked in a race with Hyperloop One for dominance. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced days ago that it had exclusively licensed passive magnetic levitation technology, which would allow the start-up to send humans and cargo inside pods in its vacuum-like tube system at up to 760 miles per hour. Both Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies have a long way to go before their vision for high-speed, human-carrying, levitating pod-based transportation becomes reality. The land rights necessary to build such a track over private and public land, for instance, could be a major headache, and the estimated $6 billion price tag for such an endeavor is staggering—not to mention the provisions necessary to ensure safety when human beings in pod-like contraptions are traveling at the speed of sound. But hyperloop technology also stands to better transportation: instead of spending six hours in a car traveling from L.A. to San Francisco, you could get there in half an hour. Less cars means less pollution and traffic. And, if they can run on the solar and electric power systems Musk is developing at Tesla and SolarCity—another company the billionaire co-founded—all the better. Maya Kosoff Maya Kosoff writes about tech for VF.com. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Slate, Inc., Entrepreneur, and she has appeared on CNBC's Closing Bell, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight, and Huffington Post Live. Maya graduated with her bachelor’s in magazine journalism from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at ... Read more