I’m trying to remember the Tesla story when he quit his job with Edison. Edison offered $50,000 to anyone who could come up with a more efficient motor I believe. After much work, Tesla came up with the AC motor but Edison said he was just kidding about the $50K and gave him like a $5 raise. Tesla quit on the spot and became a competitor. I think he had something like 22 cents in his pocket when he came over from Europe.
My boss told me once that after a couple million dollars its just score keeping (more like 5 million adjusted for inflation). There’s nothing you can do with ten million that you can’t do with five, so it just becomes a score keeping issue to show how good you are at the game.
There's nothing you can do with ten million that you can't do with five, so it just becomes a score keeping issue to show how good you are at the game.
Dunno about that…$5 mil will get you the yacht or gulfstream, but not much else…it certainly won’t give you one of each! If all you want to do is one-up your middle-class friends, then yes, $5million is plenty…but if you aspire to the “private jet/house on the riveria” lifestyle, $5,000,000 is rather pauperish…
And frankly, I’d rather take $5 mil and be the richest guy the trailer park’s ever seen…than be the ne’er-do-well magnate, always asking the neighbors to “loan me some Moet and Beluga until next payday.”
I hear that it was more George Westinghouse than Tesla who was Edison’s rival when it came to AC or DC power distribution. Edison was a brilliant inventor as well as an astute businessman, two things that aren’t always found together. In a way, you could say that Edison invented modern inventing, he effectively ran a large research and development firm.
Tesla invented the AC induction motor but he spent most of his time chasing the dream of wireless power transmission and he could not see how the idea was basically doomed because for all the power that is transmitted as electromagnetic waves by the power plant, most of it misses the distant antennas that capture it.
It took another visionary genius, Guglielmo Marconi, to recognize that Tesla’s attempts to transmit power wirelessly was better suited for wireless communication.
I believe Michael Faraday actually invented the first AC generator and then made a switching device to make it put out DC.
Since the Tesla automobile uses polyphase AC induction motors for propulsion, maybe the Tesla name is suitable.
I thought tesla and Westinghouse worked together. tesla s vision westinghouse s money. tesla gave away his patent rights or his profits too, I believe, in order to help Westinghouse succeed
.
i don t see him as a huge self promoter like Edison or Donald trump. wasn t he already rich without risking so much on tesla and his other big vision type projects?
I wish I could just shut up but thats the problem Barky, there has been no profit outside of a quarter or two. So if you make one car and lose $10,000, making 1000 of them puts you in the 10 million loss category. My old accounting prof always cautioned to make sure you have a plan for a loss as well as a profit if you go into business. Kinda like the farmer losing money on 100 chickens but next year is increasing his volume. I just contend that it is a niche market and attempting to go world wide in a niche market will only increase the overhead for dealers, charging stations, repair facilities, etc. without the volume to make it profitable. Been wrong before though. The market will decide.
^Didn’t Tesla’s “profit” come from selling all the carbon tax credits they earned as a result of how EV mileage is computed? Meaning, even at their best, cars were their “loss leader” that they needed to cash in.
Gotta love it when the gov’t chooses winners and losers…
Remember when Apple sued Microsoft over “look and feel” of the Windows GUI? That prompted a suit from Xerox, who actually designed the first GUI. The CEO of Xerox was asked why he did it. The response was that he owed it to the shareholders. He also said that if he had not brought the suit, the board of directors should have fired him for not looking out for the shareholders best interests. Something like that is at play here, too. While Musk has a lot of his own money tied up in Tesla Motors, he undoubtedly has other investors involved, too. He should try to soak the taxpayers for as much money as he can extort out of them. That’s the American Way. At least it seems that is the case in the last 20 years.
The rich are rich because they see the bigger picture, do the work needed to exceed and surround themselves with those that can provide skills they do not posses.
Musk sees the big picture. He has earned enough to be rich, now he wants to be seen as a visionary. Musk wants to leave a legacy that will have people discussing his name as we do with Da Vinci, Edison, Tesla, Henry Ford (or P.T. Barnum for that matter!)