According to Bloomberg, it is an interesting time for Virgin Hyperloop One as one of its board members was arrested on fraud and misappropriation charges in Russia last week. Other three high-profile directors departing the board were also arrested during the same. But, this has not stopped Virgin Hyperloop One, the futuristic-transport startup, from presenting its latest pod prototype. Firstly, it presented for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and now it is available for the rest of us via video. According to the reports, the charges faced by Russian billionaire and board member Ziyavudin Magomedov have no relation with Virgin Hyperloop One. They have already appealed for the arrest. The company has refused to comment on this matter.
After the arrest, the company updated the list of board members on its website. Magomedov is still in the list. But, Jim Messina, the former adviser of Barack Obama, Peter Diamandis, X Prize founder and Jim Rosenthal, former exec of Morgan Stanley are no longer in it. The company has replaced them by the appointment of new board members Bill Shor, Anatoly Braverman, and Yuvraj Narayan.
Taking a tour of Hyperloop One’s Devloop Facility
According to Ryan Kelly, a spokesman for Virgin Hyperloop One, changes have been made in the work for a while. Messina and Diamandis remain supporters and shareholders of the project. Rosenthal has left the board in order to focus on his new cybersecurity startup. Kelly said that changes were reflected by the new board appointments when Sir Richard Branson became the chairman of the company. Also, the company raised a new investment at the end of the last year. But, nothing of these is related to Mr. Magomedov’s arrest. Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin remains at the top of the company as chair of the board. This week, he was present to show off the company’s latest Hyperloop pod design to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz.
Saudi Arabia comes among locales of the world trying to explore the feasibility of installing a Hyperloop system with the help of Virgin or Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (competitor). The company claims to reduce the travel time of route from Riyadh to Jeddah, from 10 hours to 76 minutes, and a trip to Abu Dhabi could turn from 8.5 hour to just 48 minutes.
The concept of Hyperloop was brought into the public consciousness by SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk. Elon Musk is still working on the technology with the help of Tesla and his tunnel-digging startup, The Boring Company. The video published by Virgin presents a full-size pod prototype on an enclosed test track at the company’s test place in Nevada. It is hard to say how fast it goes. But in tests, the company achieves a speed of 240 miles per hour. It nearly achieves one third of the speed it eventually wants to achieve.
