How much do clothes cost in the Matrix?

This i like

I can't believe this is the first time I've heard this.

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.

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.

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."

source

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.

Vapid contrarian moral posturing with claims of Marxist purity? Surely, you jest!

Not only do you sound angry and full of an agenda, you are also wrong about your facts. Are you paid by Elon?

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

It really is incredible, the potential place in history he pissed away. But I guess you can’t end up a multi billionaire if you’re the type of person that knows when it’s OK to stop.

He was amazing at math and physics, but he was a grade A douchebag.

"They'll say, "Aw, Topsy," at my autopsy!"

Note that the lawsuit didn't "determine", it was settled out of court, so there was no determination of fact.

Instead the parties agreed to let Musk call himself a founder for undisclosed terms. Musk basically paid for people to let him use that title as part of the settlement.

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.