I bet that rich dumb ass would love this comparison.

  • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 months ago

    Fuck them. Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people. They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more. I’m not sympathizing with capitalists because of other capitalists.

    • ceenote@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I think this post is more about denigrating Elon than celebrating these two.

      • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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        6 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!

        • zaph@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          if the founders had sold the company to its employees and made it a co-op!

          So perform magic? Do you know how the company transferred ownership?

          • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de
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            6 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
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          6 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
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            6 months ago

            We do need people with the skill set to organize businesses and envision products and services.

            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.

            • Octavio@kbin.social
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              6 months ago

              It may not describe financiers. I’d say it’s a fair description of entrepreneurs. Just because some people do it poorly doesn’t mean it’s not a skill. Kind of argues that it is, actually. I wholeheartedly agree that having the most money is a horrible qualification for the job. But I maintain that it does need to be done. Myself I would prefer more of the decision making to be collectivized but I don’t think the concept of having business leaders is entirely outmoded.

              Edit: plus I was on a bit of a tangent when I wrote that sentence anyway. I need to get better at self-censoring. The point was about how best to be able to serve society’s needs without relying upon rentiers to furnish the means.

            • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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              6 months ago

              People often imagine things they don’t do can’t be that hard. Marketing is important because no one will be interested in your product if no one knows about it. Being able to envision products that the average person will want is another one that good business leaders often do.

              Steve Jobs, for example, was very good at envisioning what people would be interested in. From the Apple to Macs to the iPod to the iPhone, he hit a lot of winners. This isn’t an endorsement for him owning the company, or even as a person, but he undeniably had a skillet that others around him often lacked.

              • daltotron@lemmy.world
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                6 months ago

                I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.

                • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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                  6 months ago

                  Steve Wozniak was an amazing computer geek, and designed an incredibly useful computer for the time. Steve Jobs popularized and marketed the idea. He didn’t do a lot on the technical side. There was the Blackberry and resistive touch phones before the iPhone, and they had serious problems. Anyone could have made the first smartphone - Windows Mobile was released in 2003 and certainly had the money to take on this project - but Apple did. And yes, Apple did a lot to make it painful for their customers to stray from the Apple ecology to the company’s benefit, and the detriment to the market as a whole, which is pretty on-brand for Jobs.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Engineering a practical prototype for an electric sports car in the year 2003 makes you pretty cool, if nothing else.

        Yeah that was AC Propulsion though, and in 1996, and a completely different group of people.

        The Tesla guys had the idea of shoving it into a Lotus Elise and marketing it as a tech company.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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

    • TeddE@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

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

        I feel like I’ve read this before as a strategy in a COINTELPRO document

    • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

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

    • RattlerSix@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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

        • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Yeah, I was gonna say, playing dirty is one thing. Making great business decisions without stepping on people for profit is another thing entirely.

        • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Only after the Delaware court forced him to.

          Elon is a jackass who runs over all normal senses of decency while repeatedly getting away with it. And he will continue to do so as long as his legion of asshole internet followers continue to worship him on a wide scale, giving him large benefits in our cultural zeitgeist.

          I am happy that people are finally understanding how much of an asshole Elon is today. But he’s been pulling this shit since the dawn of Tesla, as the Tesla takeover court cases proved in the 00s.

      • Signtist@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Elon threw money at the problem and it worked, as it so often does. Conversely, the tactic failed in the Twitter scenario. That’s his entire game plan for everything, a trait he shares with nearly every other person born with a silver spoon in their mouth.