I bet that rich dumb ass would love this comparison.
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!
Ok. Show me how we collectively invest in R&D without IP and build a car company without profits.
Aaaaannnnd go!
I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the worker-owned cooperative model to take over for the capitalist model for a long time. It just seems to be a better outcome for everyone. You can’t squeeze the worker to extract wealth for the shareholders if the only shareholders are the workers. No need to squeeze the customers if there’s no hedge fund bros expecting a 20% return on their capital. But how often are workers going to have the money lying around to buy their company?
The workers may not have been interested in buying and as much as we may hate exploitation by capitalist pigs, it’s unrealistic to expect entrepreneurs to just give it all away. I think we’re still a ways off from the appetite for revolution is large enough to just take it from them. And I’m not sure that would be the right thing to do anyway. We do need people with the skill set to organize businesses and envision products and services. We just don’t need to keep treating such people as demigods. That would be enough revolution for me and they could still be the rich people, just not so grotesquely wealthy while people who make it all possible are struggling.
What I’m thinking of is like an investment fund that provides low-cost financing for groups of employees who are looking to buy their boss’s business, or for start-ups that are looking to organize their business as a worker-owned cooperative. Of course by definition this fund would earn less than market rates. Providing low cost financing is just providing low return investment opportunity from the other side. So investing in it would be more of a charitable contribution than an investment. But I don’t think the system is in place to facilitate financing of worker-owned cooperatives at present. I think a better use of our energies would be to figure out how to make such a framework than just screaming at capitalists. Just my take.
if the founders had sold the company to its employees and made it a co-op!
So perform magic? Do you know how the company transferred ownership?
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.”
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.
Only after the Delaware court forced him to.
Elon is a jackass who runs over all normal senses of decency while repeatedly getting away with it. And he will continue to do so as long as his legion of asshole internet followers continue to worship him on a wide scale, giving him large benefits in our cultural zeitgeist.
I am happy that people are finally understanding how much of an asshole Elon is today. But he’s been pulling this shit since the dawn of Tesla, as the Tesla takeover court cases proved in the 00s.
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.
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.
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
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.
It’s amazing that it’s been 12 years since Elon had this image deleted from the internet:
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.
I am thinking about getting robot legs. It’s a risky operation but worth it
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.
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.
It’s definitely at least “Internet Lore” at this point? I mean the car company isn’t a namesake for no reason. I don’t want to give The Oatmeal too much credit but it seems to have been the meme generator for a lot of ‘the legend’ on the web, though it’s been kind of a counter-culture staple basically since he died.
IDK, just one of those things that I got interested enough to read actual books about awhile ago and it’s kind of scary how much “common knowledge” is more “common mythology”.
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?
What are you on about?!
Tesla died a poor man 4 years before bell labs created the first transistor.
The microchip was invented about 15 years after he died.
Perhaps he would have understood or even created these concepts if he had the funding he probably should have given his remarkable successes and contributions to the entire field of electrical engineering when he was still able to contribute. But unlikely sure. Not why you sre saying these weird things
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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