I bet that rich dumb ass would love this comparison.
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.
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 !
“You’re a fuckin asshole, man. I’m out here creating electricity and you’re just… Being an asshole!” - Nikola Tesla to Edison
“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
I don’t think he actually made one, but he supposedly had an idea for one.
And idiots still think edison invented the light bulb
Edison didn’t even technically improve the lightbulb. He stole credit from a black man!
This one is new to me. DDG isn’t helping much. What was the man’s name?
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?
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.
They found Tesla but did they found TwitterCars though? And SpaceTwitter huh? DiggerTwitter? See? Not everyone can do 4D Chess like TwitterBoy.
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 main guys who made Tesla and decided 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.
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.
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”.
Ironic that the company is named Tesla.
Nikola is probably rolling in his grave. May that glorious man rest in peace.
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.
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
He was, but not due to his OCD. He just straight up hated women. A bit more so than every other man at the time. His autobiography gives his opinion. He hated women, especially if they wore pearls. Which may have been his mental illness flavoring the hate. He also fell in love with a pidgeon. Can’t really blame the fella. Pidgeons are very social animals. Best bird to have as a pet.
Nicola is spinning so hard in his grave, you can hook it up to a dynamo and supply electricity to a whole town.
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.
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?
EducationEdison owed him 50k, roughly 1.2 million dollars in today’s metrics.Several months after Edison employed him, Tesla announced that his work was successfully completed. When Tesla asked to be paid, however, Edison seemed astonished. He explained that the offer of $50,000 had been made in jest. “When you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke,” Edison said. Shocked and disgusted, Tesla immediately resigned.
Not just a shitty person but a literal bigot that likely would have followed ford in aligning himself with Hitler, he simply didn’t live long enough and missed it but like 7 years.
I’d really like to see where you got that quote, because it’s complete bullshit. This story originally comes from Tesla’s autobiography:
The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke.
But you see that? He never said it was Edison, just ‘The Manager’.
Btw in that same book Tesla calls Edison “a wonderful man”.
Edit: nvm, I found what you quoted. It’s this fucking pile of garbage
Where did you find that. I’ve got multiple sources who say the same, you’ve got “nuh uh” for a subject better you not I were alive to know first hand.
How is sourced PBS publication “a fucking pile of garbage” you never even offered actual criticism.
Ed: another, this one from 1919.
Where did you find that
I told you. In Tesla’s literal autobiography called “My Inventions”, full text of which you can find here.
I’ve got multiple sources who say the same
None of them are Tesla though. It’s all just a giant echo chamber all quoting each other, sometimes changing it slightly, but noone ever can be bothered to actually check the primary sources.
you’ve got “nuh uh” for a subject better you not I were alive to know first hand
Wha?
How is sourced PBS publication “a fucking pile of garbage”
It doesn’t seem to contain any sources whatsoever. They also say that “Tesla claimed” those things, yet they never say where or when he supposedly claimed that.
The link you sent doesn’t seem to contain anything, but it looks like it’s supposed to link to the magazine “Electrical Experimenter”, so I went ahead and checked its every 1919 issue. Couldn’t find what you’re claiming. In fact I couldn’t find anything negative about Edison at all. Curious.
The earliest source I could find of that claim is a book called “Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla”, released in 1944, so a year after Tesla’s death, and it also doesn’t say where that quote is actually taken from. Interestingly, the author of this book claims that upon hearing the request for payment Edison said: “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor”. So quite different to what the PBS article claims. In fact, it seems like the newer the source, the more villainous and bigoted that alleged quote becomes.
You’re welcome to prove me wrong though. If you show an actual, trustworthy, primary source, I will change my mind.
Biography not autobiography, big difference.
Yours isn’t either.
You didn’t provide a source, it’s not hard to figure out.
They’re at the bottom boss.
It does check again, I linked it directly it just didn’t preserve the highlight.
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!
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.
We do need people with the skill set to organize businesses and envision products and services.
That doesn’t really describe capitalists, though. The point about the ownership class is that they’re not really skilled in doing any of this, which is why the economy is organized in the eclectic and idiotic way that it is. I also don’t understand what “envisions products and services” is, as a skill. I think we can all do that, it doesn’t really make it a good or valuable service. Owning class dipshits envision services all the time, are awful at it, and they never end up getting made or doing anything useful.
It may not describe financiers. I’d say it’s a fair description of entrepreneurs. Just because some people do it poorly doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. Kind of argues that it is, actually. I wholeheartedly agree that having the most money is a horrible qualification for the job. But I maintain that it does need to be done. Myself I would prefer more of the decision making to be collectivized but I don’t think the concept of having business leaders is entirely outmoded.
Edit: plus I was on a bit of a tangent when I wrote that sentence anyway. I need to get better at self-censoring. The point was about how best to be able to serve society’s needs without relying upon rentiers to furnish the means.
People often imagine things they don’t do can’t be that hard. Marketing is important because no one will be interested in your product if no one knows about it. Being able to envision products that the average person will want is another one that good business leaders often do.
Steve Jobs, for example, was very good at envisioning what people would be interested in. From the Apple to Macs to the iPod to the iPhone, he hit a lot of winners. This isn’t an endorsement for him owning the company, or even as a person, but he undeniably had a skillet that others around him often lacked.
I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.
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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?
Ok. Show me how we collectively invest in R&D without IP and build a car company without profits.
Aaaaannnnd go!
Show me how we collectively invest in R&D without IP and build a car company without profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_power
Oh look! Government investment!
No government can exist without surpluses generated by the population. There have never been surpluses, except maybe in a few golden areas of abundant rain, without some form of trade and profit i.e. capitalism
investment into worker owned companies is possible. Buying stocks is not the only way to invest and make profit.
If nobody has profits, what is there to invest?
You can make contracts that guarantee a certain percentage of revenue for a certain number if years, or you know, just loans with interest.
Loan what? Banks can only work if someone has already made a profit that they can invest.
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.
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.
Could you explain this more?
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.
Not only do you sound angry and full of an agenda, you are also wrong about your facts. Are you paid by Elon?
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
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
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.”
Ohhh, back-stabbing bitches. *grabs popcorn*
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.
He bought founder title.
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.
I mean he paid for Twitter and… well…
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.
Yeah, I was gonna say, playing dirty is one thing. Making great business decisions without stepping on people for profit is another thing entirely.
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:
Clearly not deleted.
How much do clothes cost in the Matrix?
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 forgot it was a direct quote but yeah I had J.P. in mind lol
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I am thinking about getting robot legs. It’s a risky operation but worth it
please. SIT. on my FACE
Oh shit it’s a new high score. What does that mean?.. did I break it? Cue obnoxiously loud techno
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.
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
Why would he have understood those concepts before they were invented just because people gave him money?
He was not able to effectively continue to experiment and research. Because he may have worked with some of the people who worked on those projects, or at least had a connection to them, and also he may have lived a hell of a lot longer if he wasnt poor. Its not good for your health
So if he didnt get screwed over the way he did he would have lived differently.
Also a concept can exist decades before it is proven.
Dude had a brilliant mind and was a genius. Money allows you to persue the things you want in a way that being poor simply does not allow.
Is this really something you needed explained?
And how was Tesla ‘screwed over’ exactly?
He WAS rich for a long time. He died poor because he lost all the money on his ‘wireless electricity’ idea that noone wanted to fund, because they knew it’s not going to work. Tesla didn’t know that. You know why? Because he sucked ass at physics. That’s also why he would have never understood the concept of a transistor.
Please stop spreading misinformation about Tesla being some misunderstood genius screwed over by greedy corporations. He was not. He screwed himself over.
I dont believe i am spreading misinformation
Marconi became rich and famous, the “inventor of the radio.” It didn’t matter that he had been using Tesla’s technology. After Tesla’s death, the Supreme Court would even rule that Tesla had a better claim to the patents — but it was too late.
His loss in the race for the radio would send Nikola Tesla on a long downward spiral from which he would never recover. Combined with his other failures and his struggles with what we would probably identify today as obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tesla descended into a tailspin at the end of his life.
My opinion about him getting screwed is this. You will have to show me this is misinformation if you want me to change my mind as believing this is my kyptonite if im wrong. But I havent seen anyone prove this wrong yet.
You honestly have a chance to change my mind here if you are willing to help me out, but ive put what i consider a reasonable effort into forming my opinion so its now on you to show me the error of my ways and im giving you the spot I think is easiest.
Ball is in your court friend
Edit: adding source i quoted from. Fyi its just the first article i found after the above reply to quote with, it is not the only reading that forms my opinion
“He was a genius” does not equal “he would have invented something that hadn’t been invented yet if he had the money to do so.”
Do you even have any evidence that he was working along those lines?
I said perhaps understand the concept, not invent it. So no i dont have any evidence for something i never claimed.
Wtf is wrong with you.
“Lets turn the Ionosphere and the Mantel into the halves of a capacitor! Free energy!” is Bond villain territory.
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.
He was terrible as an employer by modern standards but at the time he was among the best, the gilded age sucked.
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