But it's worse he also goes into these companies and has them retroactively make him a founder so he can bullshit to people that he founded the companies to sell his bs origin story of being a genius entrepreneur when in reality he is just a rich con artist.
He continually proves to be nothing more than a profiteering parasite instead of the genius entrepreneur he wishes he were and and that he wishes everyone else to see him as!
Edison hired a bunch of technicians in a lab to solve problems.
Elon plays financial tricks to move money between his concerns propped up with air and hype and plays the shell game fast enough he hopes nobody notices federal subsidies sliding around and landing right in his pocket in the form of cold hard cash. He's been compared to Ellison, but Ellison kept all his capital in his company and actually got in trouble for borrowing too much against it to fund his lifestyle. Elon is a con man and a grifter who has played the Wall Street game very well in our era of fools begging for haircuts. Edison did have his heel turn when he tried to sell DC power distribution at scale which just wasn't technologically going to work (it does work on a small scale, I mean look at electric street railways operating at 600V DC). But most of his career was more similar to Steve Jobs than Elon Musk. He knew what products he wanted to sell, and he hired the right people to make them exist. He also had the capital and the patience to fund the R&D. Jobs was good at talking people into funding his startups and I assume Edison was the same. But Elon's constant puffery of Tesla is kind of something else, it involves not just selling dreams but a lot more straight up deception because going concerns have balance sheets that are subject to shareholder scrutiny.
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u/ManiaGamine 1d ago
But it's worse he also goes into these companies and has them retroactively make him a founder so he can bullshit to people that he founded the companies to sell his bs origin story of being a genius entrepreneur when in reality he is just a rich con artist.