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This meme hurts me physically every time it gets reposted. It is not a complete picture of anything, it's just easy to make people thoughtlessly accept stories if they shit on Elon, who to be clear deserves it. Those two guys were the first guys who started Tesla to bring the work of AC Propulsions to market. They are first and foremost tech millionaires (now quite likely billionaires) and do not deserve idolization either. The engineers of AC Propulsion ie Wally Rippel who also helped design the EV1 are the ones who actually made the technology happen.
The Tesla guys had the idea to put the tzero concept and tech into production shoved into a Lotus Elise and to market it to silicon valley investors as essentially a tech company. Elon was the main investor who went for it, also after speaking to AC Propulsion about putting the tzero into production. The rest is pretty well documented history of Elon being a huge asshole who accomplished very little if anything off his own merit while pushing out everyone around him.
But as far as "These are the real founders of Tesla" goes, the only things they did on their own was suggest AC Propulsions to put the tzero into production a bit sooner than Elon and deciding to create a tech startup to license the tzero technology and put it into a Lotus and style it as a tech company. If you want to inform people of the real heroes behind the electric car and Tesla, teach people about the tzero, AC Propulsion, Wally Rippel, and the other engineers who made the battery electric vehicle a feasible reality.
Perhaps, but the point stands that the specific thing called "Tesla" was founded by these guys, and Musk went through quite some headaches to be retconned as a founder of that thing, so it's on point to drive it home that he wasn't even that.
Fair point that "Tesla" isn't really the great brains behind the original core tech, but that's not the feather in the cap that Musk was going for, so it's a bit moot toward the end of undermining his status of "founder" of Tesla.
So the meme isn't "give the brilliant guy what he deserves" but just "let's shit on Musk".
More, "let's shit on rich assholes that pretend to invent shit that they had nothing to do with." Edison at least may have had one original thought with the incandescent light bulb filament, but even that one is debatable. Musk is just another rich fuck, like Edison, that has come along to buy and claim credit for tons of shit he never even tangentially thought of.
This meme isn't about who invented the technology though. Everyone with 0.25 of a brain knows business majors break out in hives when they get that close to actual work. This meme is about who founded the Tesla Motor Corporation, and who demanded credit for having done so despite having done nothing except show up with gobs of money once their business strategy was already proven.
The business strategy wasn't remotely proven though, it was still just an idea, no part of the car was designed yet. It was two people who had no idea how to design a car doing the groundwork to start a company working with Lotus and AC Propulsion and then a few months later it was three with Ian Wright lending some business work with the relationship between Lotus and AC Propulsion, then a few months later it was four with Elon who lent money and knew about as much about designing a car as the previous three, then a few months later it was five and they finally had a CTO at least.