Maybe since people did say that, but the problems faced by the hyperloop are actually unsolvable with current materials science. Rockets have been remote-guidable for years, so it's a natural progression of that technology to just steer a bigger rocket and make it land safely. A huge metal tube with vacuum in it has to contend with the expansion of whatever material it's made of expanding and contracting with temperature differences along its many miles of length, which is not very confusing to maintaining that vacuum. And on top of that, he wants to run a turbine-driven vehicle in an intentionally low pressure environment? That's just silly.

Everything about this would have been better had he proposed a more normal high speed rail line with some fancy high tech improvements. What he has done so far is to reinvent the wheel, and imagne it as a square.