Just going to leave this here and y'all can do the reading: https://www.cnet.com/culture/tesla-motors-founders-now-there-are-five/

Long story short, one of these two guys was ousted and a lawsuit settlement in 2009 determined that there were five co-founders, including Musk.

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.

"You're a fuckin asshole, man. I'm out here creating electricity and you're just... Being an asshole!" - Nikola Tesla to Edison

Ironic that the company is named Tesla.

Nikola is probably rolling in his grave. May that glorious man rest in peace.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is the similarity between Musk and Edison?

They both fucked over Tesla

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.