If this project makes back $10 billion I’ll be surprised.
It’s ongoing costs will probably never render a profit from year to year.
Jerry’s Folly
<rant>
a. There will be no ongoing cost - it will never be finished.
b. They claim that if ever finished it would employ 150,000 people. That would be vastly more than are currently employed in SF to LA passenger air transport, so it would be significantly more expensive than air travel, take longer, you will still need to rent a car at the end, and so few people will use it, meaning huge subsidies by the state government to keep it afloat and save the legacy of the idiot governor and the idiot democrats in the legislature.
c. Think Amtrak/Acela, endlessly subsidized in a corridor with at least 5x the population density of the SF-LA corridor.
d. Everybody involved in it knows the above, but is driven by ideology and the need to buy the votes of union members, uninformed and stupid people, environmentalist nutjobs, and bleeding-heart unthinking liberals.
</rant>