I bet that rich dumb ass would love this comparison.
It’s amazing that it’s been 12 years since Elon had this image deleted from the internet:
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.
What is the similarity between Musk and Edison?
They both fucked over Tesla
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
electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record
that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]
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
Hey now, you get to hear about Westinghouse plenty in the railroad museums. A variation of the Westinghouse brake design is still in use on modern trains to this day
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”.
More, “let’s shit on rich assholes that pretend to invent shit that they had nothing to do with.” Edison at least may have had one original thought with the incandescent light bulb filament, but even that one is debatable. Musk is just another rich fuck, like Edison, that has come along to buy and claim credit for tons of shit he never even tangentially thought of.
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!
Ok. Show me how we collectively invest in R&D without IP and build a car company without profits.
Aaaaannnnd go!
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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
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.
