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.
ceenote@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think this post is more about denigrating Elon than celebrating these two.
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
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!
RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ok. Show me how we collectively invest in R&D without IP and build a car company without profits.
Aaaaannnnd go!
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_power
Oh look! Government investment!
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
investment into worker owned companies is possible. Buying stocks is not the only way to invest and make profit.
zaph@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
So perform magic? Do you know how the company transferred ownership?
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
yeah turns out I was misinformed. my bad. But point still stands, they made a private company designed to exploit workers, and some asshole took it over.
Octavio@kbin.social 2 months ago
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.
daltotron@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.