Secret's Out

You know how, when you’re stuck in traffic, you wish that you could pull a secret lever in your car that would make it shoot up in the air, fly you out of the congested street, and quickly whisk you to your meeting—where you are, of course, a corporate (and punctual) hero?

Well, it seems Google cofounder Larry Page may have been thinking the same thing. Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Page secretly owns a startup named Zee.Aero, a company that has been so evasive that employees were allegedly given cards with instructions on how to deflect reporters.

While Zee.aero has vehemently denied any affiliation with Google, the mere fact that their office lies right next to the technology giant’s headquarters—on property they strictly control—indicates otherwise.

According to the report, Page has invested more than $100 million of his own personal funds into Zee.Aero since they started in 2010. Moreover, it asserts that he is funding another flying car start-up named Kitty Hawk.

He even allegedly kept the whole second floor of Zee.Aero’s headquarters in Broderick Way as his personal man cave, where he is codenamed “GUS,” a clever pseudonym which simply means “the guy upstairs.”

Zee.aero employees only got to use the floor later on as the company needed more space, and they looked on as Gus’ belongings, including one of SpaceX’s first rocket engines, was dragged out.

Personal Planes

The design, which Zee.aero sent along with the patent they filed, can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but is small enough that one of the versions can fit in a standard parking space like a car.

It has ten propellers, eight of which are dedicated to launching it vertically and the other two to push it forward.

Artist's drawing of Zee.Aero's vertical take-off-and-landing (VTOL) flying car.

Page’s interest in building flying cars is reportedly in part of his mission “to usher in an age of personalized air travel, free from gridlocked streets and the cramped indignities of modern flight.”

 


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