Personally, right now I'd invest in high speed trains. It's not "disruptive new tech", it's proven tech, so not exciting to a lot of the HN crowd hoping for AI miracles for self-driving. But it could be quite disruptive to car infrastructure and airlines given the right funding and development plan.
No, for many of the same reasons I don't think it made sense for them to invest in cars.
But also, yes, for the same reasons I appreciate that Walt Disney invested in trains and monorails. While Disney's train-oriented Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow vision never got properly built, it was still such a cool disruptive vision to explore. Also, not just the Epcot theme park that borrows the name but not the concept/ideals, all of the Disney Parks owe their existence to Disney's interests in trains. (The first theme park ride Walt Disney was involved with was building a rideable model train in his own backyard.) I don't expect Apple to build theme parks either, but if investments in train technology and vision pay off with similar secondary effects that maybe the trains don't get built but other cool things do, Disney offers the precedent that an interest in trains by a company that isn't supposed to be in the train business can produce interesting results.
