Musk published Hyperloop as an open-source concept in 2013 and explicitly said he wasn't going to build it himself — he released the white paper for others to develop and ran student pod competitions to spur the field. The "scam to kill rail" theory rests on a quote from a biography years later; whatever Musk's private views on a specific California rail project, the public record is that he gave the idea away for free rather than profiting from it. Hyperloop hasn't become a commercial system, and Musk was candid it was a concept, not a product. Seeding an open idea that trained thousands of engineers is an unusual sort of "scam" — nobody was charged anything.