Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030, whose accomplishments the media toy with, exposes new disappointments and failures with every day that goes by.
High-speed freight transportation company Hyperloop One will shut down, having failed to win any contract to build a working hyperloop, Bloomberg News reported citing people familiar with the matter.
“High-speed freight transportation company Hyperloop One will shut down, having failed to win any contract to build a working hyperloop, Bloomberg News reported citing people familiar with the matter.”
Once a high-profile startup, Hyperloop One raised more than $450 million since its founding in 2014, according to PitchBook. It built a small test track near Las Vegas to develop its transportation technology and, for a time, took the name Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson’s Virgin invested. Virgin removed its branding after the startup decided last year to focus on cargo rather than people.
It is important to remember that the Crown Prince’s bad luck with Vision 2030 did not end with the Kingdom; it also affected the Hyperloop firm. Following his approval of his vision’s logo to its designs, the business has now declared that it has failed to meet its objectives and is completely leaving the labor market.
Experts stated that the Crown Prince promised to invest $1 billion in space and transportation technologies with multiple companies, the largest of which was Hyperloop, during his visit to the company and contract signing. However, the actual, undisclosed sum far exceeds this amount, indicating that the Kingdom has lost more money in the company than what the MBS administration and its government men disclosed.
The CEO of Hyperloop, Jay Wilder, had anticipated that the company would start building its first line in the Kingdom, which would have cost roughly $3.7 billion, before November 2020, but none of that materialized. The Saudi government did not comment on his statements.
Experts further surmise that MBS’s major projects in the cities of NEOM and The Line—which he claimed were two cities that had never existed in the world before and seem unlikely to ever exist—have collapsed as a result of the Hyperloop company’s closure and withdrawal from the labour market.
Numerous Western nations disapproved of the Hyperloop company’s concepts, deeming them impractical and declining to provide funding, including France. But MBS was the company’s easy target due to his poor human rights record, his failed policies, and his lavish spending.
Now, will MBS’s media and the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs apologize to the public for years of deceiving them and selling them illusions by boasting about non-existent projects for which billions of dollars were wasted, or will they keep lying to them incessantly?
