There is a person on twitter who went to school with him who is "99% sure" the project came from a subject they had were they had to come up with a fictional product.
Well, there is nothing a priori wrong with that.
Many unis, including the ones I have studied at and the one I taught at have students do projects like that as a part of their coursework. Some of these students then decide to found a startup, trying to turn their idea into a real product. I alone had at least 3-4 such startups spring up among my students over the 4 years I was there, some even winning various innovation prizes and what not. I think one or two are still around. On the other hand, they were not trying to do things that are against the laws of physics, so there is that ...