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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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