LinkedIn's Co-Founder Is Going in on Flying Taxis, Which Are Definitely Realistic This Time

Joby Aviation’s prototype craft flying in a promotional video.Screenshot: Joby Aviation (Fair Use)Time and time again, tech companies have promised a future where commuters will be able to zip around in the flying cars from The Jetsons. And time and time again, that just hasn’t happened.That’s because the practical engineering challenges are immense—building small, electrically powered vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, aircraft would require a massive leap in technology over helicopters. It’s also because many of the business models proposed so far, such as Uber’s now-former “aerial ridesharing” unit Uber Elevate, have been patently ridiculous concepts amounting to not much more than speculative futurism. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is nonetheless taking a big bet that the era of the flying taxi is coming in the foreseeable future, according to Axios.According to Axios, Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus’s special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Reinvent Technology Partners reached a deal on Wednesday to buy Joby Aviation, the company that bought up Uber Elevate, in a deal that values the firm at $6.6 billion. (An SPAC is a corporate entity with no commercial operations formed for the specific purpose of acquiring private firms.)Uber is an investor in Joby, and the company already has…
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