[labrador]

It's unfortunate that the author mentions Elizabeth Holmes in the same sentence as Musk and Bezos.

Never mind that, Tesla is more revered than Edison because Edison had an army of men [1] working for him and often took credit for their work. Afaik, Tesla invented on his own from the fruits of his amazing brain.

[1] Even Bill Wilson of Alcoholics Anonymous was offered a job by Edison:

"It also led to his first brush with fame when he was featured in a New York Times article discussing a test given by Thomas Edison to prospective employees. Bill Wilson was one of the few applicants to be offered a position with Edison, but for reasons known only to Wilson he opted against taking it"

https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&co...

[ubertaco]

Musk didn't even create Tesla. Or PayPal. Or SpaceX. He just dumped daddy's apartheid-diamond-mine money into them, and then sued the founders to get an injunction against the founders being able to claim that they were the founders instead of Musk.

Edison is a spot-on reference point for Musk.

(Okay, PayPal actually bailed him out, so I guess he didn't put money into them, they put money into him).

[panick21_]

Zip2 was founded by him. PayPal was a merger of two companies doing the same thing, Musk founded one of them. SpaceX was founded by Musk.

Tesla was fully financed by Musk and before Musk took over as CEO Tesla was essentially a disaster that was heading straight into the trash heap. He didn't found Tesla and wasn't CEO during the time when Tesla did really, really badly and Tesla blew around 80M he gave them. He then stepped in as CEO invest more of his own money and turned Tesla from a literal trash-fire into an amazing success story. So he took over a trash-fire and turned it into a success, that is harder to do then found a new company.

And all this apartheid-diamond-mine is so much nonsense. His father was a successful engineer, his family was pretty wealthy sure, but people act like his father was the CEO of GE and his mother was president of Harvard business school. And of course he had a really bad relationship with his father and his father cut him off when he went to Canada.

Pretending its not a lot to overcome because his family was upper middle class is just an insane bar for earning credit. Like, ok, so you have to be a crack baby found in a trashcan outside of church in the congo, otherwise nothing you do is worth anything.

But I guess he is a billionaire, so we just need to hate him. And Edison btw was also a pretty damn smart guy. Not investing in Tesla idiotic scheme was actually the correct thing to do, as we all know, there are no towers shooting electricity threw the earth.