Elon Musk's Chicago Loop May Be Ambitious to a Fault
*By Britt Terrell*
Elon Musk is a man with ideas...a lot of them.
But Vanity Fair's Maya Kosoff wonders if his latest project may be more than he can handle.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO won his bid to build a tunnel from downtown Chicago to O'Hare International Airport, partnering with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to modernize the city's struggling transportation system.
The task, though, may be particularly tricky.
"With public infrastructure, you have contracts with the government, and digging a tunnel underneath the city literally disrupts people's lives. I think it's more impactful so therefore it's kind of the most difficult (problem) to solve," Kosoff said.
The issues are only exacerbated by the fact that the airport link is far from Musk's only project. His SpaceX still aims to send humans to Mars by 2014, and Tesla is developing new cars and trucks, even as it continues to struggle with meeting production targets and burns through cash.
And in her article, ["Is Elon Musk Scamming Chicago?"](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/is-elon-musk-scamming-chicago), Kosoff points out that the cost and the time it will take to construct the Chicago Express Loop may also be far higher than anticipated.
"It's supposed to cost a billion dollars," Kosoff said. "But look at the cost of other public infrastructure projects in the country. It cost a billion dollars to build less than a mile of the expanded Q train on \[New York City's\] Upper East Side."
Musk estimates the 18-mile track will take three years to complete and says his Boring Company - not taxpayers - will foot the bill.
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/elon-musks-next-big-endeavor).
Stocks closed lower to end the last trading day of May, but the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones both rose over the past month. The Federal Reserve in early May raised interest rates by half a percentage point as it tries to fight inflation, but the question continues to linger: will we enter a recession as we try to tame inflation? Anthony Saccaro, Founder & President of Providence Financial, joins Closing Bell to discuss today's close, the possibility of a recession, where he is telling clients to look for opportunities, and more.
The semiconductor industry is at an inflection point as it tries to fully recover from the worst of pandemic-era headwinds. While Broadcom has announced it will buy cloud computing company VMware, Nvidia is lowering its current quarterly outlook. Meanwhile, TSMC and Intel are contemplating raising prices -- again -- thanks to higher materials costs. Where does the industry go from here? Ted Mortonson, technology strategist at Baird, joins Closing Bell to discuss.
Memorial Day rang in the unofficial start of summer here in the United States -- and with it, the unofficial start of summer travel. Whether consumers traveled by air or by land, they probably experienced some form of frustration over the weekend. Flyers faced delays and cancellations, and drivers faced the most expensive gas prices ever recorded on Memorial Day. Zach Griff, Senior Aviation Reporter for the Points Guy, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Next-generation gaming ecosystem Joystick recently raised $8 million in a seed round and is in the process of raising a $110 million Series A funding round. Gaming ecosystems are a relatively new type of platform in the Web3 space, allowing users to maximize their play-to-earn gaming opportunities, exchange crypto-currencies, and sell their digital assets. Joystick says its platform is flipping the current model on its head by giving players the opportunity to keep 100% of the revenue they earn. Robin Defay, co-founder and CEO of Joystick, and Michael Le, co-founder of Joystick and TikTok content creator, join Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Abe Stein, Head of Innovation at Sports Innovation Lab, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why the top four spots on his company's 2022 list are European soccer clubs and discusses Sports Innovation Lab's plan to publish data on women's pro sports teams in the not-too-distant future.
Joel Birch, Co-Founder and CEO of Stacked, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why he doesn't see any new catalysts that would lead to a Bitcoin rally at the moment. He also reiterates that now is a good time for long-term Bitcoin investors to buy low.
The dating app Bumble has sponsored bills and pushed lawmakers to criminalize the online practice of sending unsolicited nudes or “cyberflashing." Payton Iheme, Bumble's head of public policy for the Americas, joined Cheddar News to discuss why the app was going after the harassing behavior beyond its own platform. "Now, while we went to work internally in the company, and we created something called private detector to automatically blur those images so the user can decide if they want to see them, there's nothing for the rest of the internet," she said. "And so that's why we went to work with these laws."
