Ok, fair enough. I wasn't taking that sentence very seriously. I suppose he could try to get people to ride it, especially if he only operated out of a country where the regulations were lax enough.
Yeah, it's a little off-the-cuff. They definitely sound more interested in launching satellites (an interesting system for doing so, to be sure). I'm biasing it towards people-oriented since this is all anchored by a hyperloop article.
Yeah, it's really two separate things, but related.
1) Satellite launch using a 1-10km long, 1m diameter tube on the side of a mountain in Somalia. Conventional RAMAC. Small impulse, long push from natural gas ramjet in the tube, potentially an atmospheric rocket stage, and a circularizing rocket (probably liquid fueled, using liquid fuel to fill the void spaces around deployables to deal with the 1000-5000G acceleration). This is just a matter of financing and implementation, I think -- the basic engineering and science is pretty sound.
I think this could actually be <10G, and thus suitable for humans, if you had an 8-9m diameter tube. The peak acceleration goes down with longer/thicker tubes. For a 155mm, it's about 50k G. An iPhone is fine at 5k G; potted boards are fine at 50k G (we have artillery rounds which have satellite receivers, guidance, etc.)
2) A long tube, continuous, designed on the same principle. Mag rail gun to start, natural gas in the tube for ramac (continuous or maybe intermittent), and air bearings, and then either reverse-ramac or just steadily increase density to brake. Doing this for passengers is maybe possible. I'm not sure if the engineering works out at all.
No way he could do that in SF or LA though.