Thomas Edison was the Elon musk of his era

It's amazing that it's been 12 years since Elon had this image deleted from the internet:
- How much do clothes cost in the Matrix?
  
  I am thinking about getting robot legs. It’s a risky operation but worth it
  
  Cost? With the awesome Kung-Fu powers programmed into your mind you can manifest epic clothes like these at will. You just have to cross your arms into a super rad X-shape while you do it.
- Clearly not deleted.

What is the similarity between Musk and Edison?
They both fucked over Tesla
- This i like
- I can't believe this is the first time I've heard this.
- According to Tesla's autobiography, he said very good things about Edison.
  
  Yeah people are desperate to believe 'Edison evil, Tesla jesus' it's so weird. I get that it was like a cool fact online twenty years ago but there have been so many actual historical documentaries showing how complex and interesting the real story was.
  Truth is neither of them invented anything from scratch, - AC generators, motors (useless), transformers, and lights were in use before Tesla even began his big invention. He was a name in a long list of people who worked together understanding the newly emerging field of electronics - if Westinghouse or Barrington had made outrageous claims to allure conspiracy theories then they might have got the Tesla treatment by thy internet instead and we'd only hear of Tesla in the science museum while they'd be regarded at saintly heros of science.
  I like Tesla but there are so many interesting stories
  
  He just didn't understand their american humor

This meme hurts me physically every time it gets reposted. It is not a complete picture of anything, it's just easy to make people thoughtlessly accept stories if they shit on Elon, who to be clear deserves it. Those two guys were the first guys who started Tesla to bring the work of AC Propulsions to market. They are first and foremost tech millionaires (now quite likely billionaires) and do not deserve idolization either. The engineers of AC Propulsion ie Wally Rippel who also helped design the EV1 are the ones who actually made the technology happen.
The Tesla guys had the idea to put the tzero concept and tech into production shoved into a Lotus Elise and to market it to silicon valley investors as essentially a tech company. Elon was the main investor who went for it, also after speaking to AC Propulsion about putting the tzero into production. The rest is pretty well documented history of Elon being a huge asshole who accomplished very little if anything off his own merit while pushing out everyone around him.
But as far as "These are the real founders of Tesla" goes, the only things they did on their own was suggest AC Propulsions to put the tzero into production a bit sooner than Elon and deciding to create a tech startup to license the tzero technology and put it into a Lotus and style it as a tech company. If you want to inform people of the real heroes behind the electric car and Tesla, teach people about the tzero, AC Propulsion, Wally Rippel, and the other engineers who made the battery electric vehicle a feasible reality.
- Perhaps, but the point stands that the specific thing called "Tesla" was founded by these guys, and Musk went through quite some headaches to be retconned as a founder of that thing, so it's on point to drive it home that he wasn't even that.
  Fair point that "Tesla" isn't really the great brains behind the original core tech, but that's not the feather in the cap that Musk was going for, so it's a bit moot toward the end of undermining his status of "founder" of Tesla.
  
  So the meme isn't "give the brilliant guy what he deserves" but just "let's shit on Musk".
- This meme isn't about who invented the technology though. Everyone with 0.25 of a brain knows business majors break out in hives when they get that close to actual work. This meme is about who founded the Tesla Motor Corporation, and who demanded credit for having done so despite having done nothing except show up with gobs of money once their business strategy was already proven.
  
  The business strategy wasn't remotely proven though, it was still just an idea, no part of the car was designed yet. It was two people who had no idea how to design a car doing the groundwork to start a company working with Lotus and AC Propulsion and then a few months later it was three with Ian Wright lending some business work with the relationship between Lotus and AC Propulsion, then a few months later it was four with Elon who lent money and knew about as much about designing a car as the previous three, then a few months later it was five and they finally had a CTO at least.

Fuck them. Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn't make these guys great people. They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more. I'm not sympathizing with capitalists because of other capitalists.
- I think this post is more about denigrating Elon than celebrating these two.
  
  yeah fair enough. that still implies that there's something great about founding Tesla. Which could be great, if the founders had sold the company to its employees and made it a co-op!
- Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people.
  Engineering a practical prototype for an electric sports car in the year 2003 makes you pretty cool, if nothing else.
  Lacking the easy access to low-interest credit and being hedged out of the SUV-heavy American car market doesn't make them bad people.
  They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more
  The company had exactly three people in it when Elon Musk arrived with $6.5M in Series A investment cash. They were both forced out of the company in 2008, as the Series B funding was exhausted and Elon was leveraging his fundraising clout to monopolize control of the board. This was long before the Gigafactory and the big labor abuses we're familiar with today.
  I wouldn't call them geniuses or pretend they were irreplaceable. These were a couple of car hobbyists who stumbled into a cut-throat industry and got their work snatched out from under them.
  But then I wouldn't call the Tesla a particularly amazing piece of technology. Just something a couple of car hobbyists realized was possible with existing technology and made a (small) fortune scaling up.
  The real genius in the end was scamming the Department of Energy out of billions of dollars and helping gas guzzlers fake their EV quota.
  
  Engineering a practical prototype for an electric sports car in the year 2003 makes you pretty cool, if nothing else.
  Yeah that was AC Propulsion though, and in 1996, and a completely different group of people.
  The Tesla guys had the idea of shoving it into a Lotus Elise and marketing it as a tech company.
  
  Could you explain this more?
- Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people.
  Where are you coming up with your narrative about him selling?
  "The Tesla cofounder lost his role as CEO of Tesla about three years after Elon Musk began investing in the electric-car maker. Eberhard previously told Insider that Musk and Tesla's board had met behind his back and voted to replace him as CEO."
  source
  
  Ohhh, back-stabbing bitches. grabs popcorn
- For what it's worth, it's been suggested that Musk's takeover of Tesla was opportunistic, and against the desire of Tarpenning and Eberhard.
  From my research, Tarpenning was pressured into quitting, and Eberhard was fired by the board of directors for lying to the board. Since Elon was chairman of the board at the time, it's plausible (and even hinted at) that Elon played dirty to push through this firing.
  I cannot say for sure if they would have handled the company more ethically then Musk, but I am personally uncomfortable hanging them out to dry simply on what could have been.
  That said, I agree that employee co-ops are a top tier business organization structure.
- Vapid contrarian moral posturing with claims of Marxist purity? Surely, you jest!
  
  Contrarian moral posturing with claims of Marxist purity? Surely, you jest!
  I feel like I've read this before as a strategy in a COINTELPRO document
- Not only do you sound angry and full of an agenda, you are also wrong about your facts. Are you paid by Elon?
- That's not what really happened though. They needed an investor to get the company off the ground. Musk came in and screwed them out of the company
- They didn't sell it to Elon.
  Elon sued them and took Tesla over in court. https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-founder-twitter-land-of-the-giants.
  Elon beat them in the court of law, business tactics, and expertly took over the company. What, you think Elon paid for this? He's smarter than that.
  
  I mean he paid for Twitter and... well...
  
  Elon threw money at the problem and it worked, as it so often does. Conversely, the tactic failed in the Twitter scenario. That's his entire game plan for everything, a trait he shares with nearly every other person born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
  
  He bought founder title.

It's incredible. Musk held all the aces, Tesla, SpaceX, Crypto (debatable). He was viewed as a pioneer, as a philanthropist. But it seems social media fucks up every one of us. Image Nixon, it would have been immensely insightful if we had social media back then EDIT: Nixon would have been a smart Trump, fuck that timeline
- It really is incredible, the potential place in history he pissed away. But I guess you can’t end up a multi billionaire if you’re the type of person that knows when it’s OK to stop.
- Yeah, there were a few people who knew better that were telling everyone, but no one listened and everyone in the world was lining up to kiss his ass. Putting him in various popular movies and shows as the greatest luminary of our time. While people who knew him were writing credible reports that he is just a very lucky douche who is also a giant megalomanic.
  Can't imagine being his first wife and having her experiences and sharing those experiences and the world seeming to gaslight her that he's actually a brilliant flawless man.
- Nixon Foundation has been posting edits of him on their Youtube channel, tons of pro-Nixon comments

Ironic that the company is named Tesla.
Nikola is probably rolling in his grave. May that glorious man rest in peace.
- He was amazing at math and physics, but he was a grade A douchebag.
  
  Was he? As I understand it's he was not a bit mentally ill
- Nicola is spinning so hard in his grave, you can hook it up to a dynamo and supply electricity to a whole town.
- I wonder if the original founders named it in honour of Tesla and then elon had to come in and ruin it all
  
  And just like Edison, Elon swooped in and bought up all their IP and took all the credit for their inventions/work.
  Edison did it with Nikolas ideas when he was working for him, and now Elon did it with something that was named to honor the man.
  Tesla gets shafted yet again.
  I can't help but wonder what he could have accomplished if someone, literally anyone had continued to fund him, and help him continue his efforts for the remainder of his natural life. Maybe we would be flying around in wirelessly powered personal vehicles. Who knows? But the ideas he had led to some of the most significant advances in technology for years. Pretty much our entire modern life is thanks to Tesla's inventions, either directly or indirectly.
  Even something as simple as AC electricity delivery... What a genius. Easily on the top of my list of best inventors.
  His personal life and some of his opinions there may have been a bit problematic, but it would be difficult to deny that he was a brilliant inventor.

"You're a fuckin asshole, man. I'm out here creating electricity and you're just... Being an asshole!" - Nikola Tesla to Edison
- And idiots still think edison invented the light bulb
  
  Edison didn't even technically improve the lightbulb. He stole credit from a black man!
- "Nikola Tesla was the electric Jesus"
  
  I've also read a few claims that Tesla made an earthquake machine at some point but don't know if its true or false

Apparently Edison wasn't even the first historical tech bro, but some French dude that eventually killed himself with his "own" invention. And the very first modern techbro was Steve Jobs, who gets cited more and more often as an influence as Elongated Muskrat is becoming more and more far-right.
- Was Jobs really a techbro? I usually think of techbros as being fairly political/libertarian (or some interpretation of libertarianism, at any rate), while Jobs was afaik pretty apolitical.
  
  Jobs was the same ilk, he just had better optics at that time. If he lived today, he'd sell out to whatever party they let him to outsource the manufacturing (and coding) to the cheapest possible country. Maybe he'd even double down on the whole AI thing.
  
  Behind the bastards podcast did a four-part series on just how big of a piece of shit Steve Jobs was. We all knew that, but what I didn't know especially was just how fucking stupid a lot of his business decisions were, coming from his enormous hubris.

Would Elon have fried an elephant with a Tesla car battery nowadays just to make a point how bad the competition is?
Well I bet he would.
Edison had technically nothing to do with the killing of Topsy, it was a decade after the 'war of the currents'. It was distributed through Edison films though.
- "They'll say, "Aw, Topsy," at my autopsy!"

And Elon is the Musk of our times imo

Edison was a monster. Meme checks out.
- They say Thomas Edison
  \ He's the man to get us
  \ Into this century
  \ And that man is me
  
  🎵 They'll say, "Awwwwww, Topsy!" At my -- Auuuuuu-topsy And no one will be.... More shocked than me!🎵

They found Tesla but did they found TwitterCars though? And SpaceTwitter huh? DiggerTwitter? See? Not everyone can do 4D Chess like TwitterBoy.

So instead of one dumb guy founding Tesla and running it into the ground, TWO dumb guys gave everything over to another dumb guy to run it into the ground. Masterful gambit !

They still sold out so that Nikola's name could be dragged down to hell while they sip drinks on the beach. The cost to the rest of us is incalculable.

Just going to leave this here and y'all can do the reading: https://www.cnet.com/culture/tesla-motors-founders-now-there-are-five/
Long story short, one of these two guys was ousted and a lawsuit settlement in 2009 determined that there were five co-founders, including Musk.
- Note that the lawsuit didn't "determine", it was settled out of court, so there was no determination of fact.
  Instead the parties agreed to let Musk call himself a founder for undisclosed terms. Musk basically paid for people to let him use that title as part of the settlement.

My brain somehow read the title as "Tesla was the Elon Musk of his era," and I got so mad for a split second that I think I may have an aneurysm to deal with in 5 years.

Don't forget Marconi, he was also a deeply screwed-up individual who betrayed many along the way and thus was undeserving of the Nobel Prize he did receive.
Marconi basically used the patent system to raid British research institutes, violating each and every gentleman's agreement along the way. And he did it with money from the British postal or telegram offices, who he unceremoniously dumped on the eve of unveiling his wireless contraption.

Ironic, then, that he heads Tesla, named after Edison's biggest rival.
- He wasn't.
  The War of the Currents was Edison and Westinghouse. The elephant was executed by the ASPCA and filmed by the Edison Studios years after, that company had been sold by Edison years before. The payment argument was Tesla and a manager.
  Tesla and Edison wrote each other personal letters and spoke well of each other in public years later.
  Edison was an asshole. Tesla's 'legend' is weird.
  
  Here's a great in-depth video on Edison and his relationship with Tesla. It seems that Edison was actually remarkably progressive for the time in a lot of ways, and, while not perfect, he seems to have been a much better employer than many of his rivals.
  Edit: Lol and then like ten hours after this comment they dropped a four and a half hour video going into much more detail about both.
  
  Interesting, I even did quick search before posting that to see if I was right. Upon more searching, their rivalry does indeed seem to be more of an urban legend.
  
  Agreed on Tesla's legend. Telsa was terrified of fat women and talked to pigeons. He also didn't even understand the concept of transistors, let alone microchips. And yet we're supposed to believe he invented all these amazing things that approach magic in their abilities and utility?

Wow, that's a lot of upvotes
- Bots

And Ray Croc didn't invent McDonald's, but poured the foundation that McDonald's is built on. I place Musk in a similar, although not entirely the same, category.
- The main similarity between Musk's companies and MacDonald's is that they both involve clowns.
  
  Reasonable minds feel free to disagree, but I've got to admit that I'm shocked to see the lemmy community rally around the defense of Ray Croc of all people.

And?

Unpopular opinion: Edison wasn't nearly as bad as people are painting him to be.
Extra unpopular opinion: Musk is, very much, quite similar to Nikola Tesla, as he was an extravagant lunatic, that really liked talking about shit he had no idea about, a bitter loser that prefered playing the victim over accepting responsibility for his failures, and he also had fanboys that mindlessly gobbled up everything he said.
Edit: Hey, cowards, instead of just downvoting me, how about some of you try to help the one brave man that actually tried to prove me wrong, he seems to be bruised from falling flat on his face so many times
- Inaccurate opinion more like it. Dude pulled Trump shit and just refused to pay people he owed. Tesla died in poverty while Edison owed him tens of thousands of dollars, sure he isn't that bad..... Its like saying Henry Ford wasn't an absolute piece of shit.
  
  Source?

who cares about cars SpaceX is where the future is starlink and starship.
- A random person was just so upset that there was a post about a topic that they personally don't care about, that they decided to whine about it in said post.
  A lot of people care about cars. In some countries they are required to do anything.
  So, do you do this often?