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:
How much do clothes cost in the Matrix?
Clearly not deleted.
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.
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]
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.
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.
I think this post is more about denigrating Elon than celebrating these two.
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.
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.”
