Elon Musk named his electric-car company after the engineering genius Nikola Tesla, but the sweeping nature of his vision to replace fossil fuels is reminiscent of Thomas Edison, Tesla’s arch-rival. After creating the incandescent bulb, the home electric meter, and one of the first alkaline batteries, Edison spent much of his personal fortune building factories to produce them—all in the service of a grand plan to electrify society using his direct-current transmission technology. Eighty years before Musk was born, Edison was urging U.S. cities to set up networks of charging stations so those newfangled horseless carriages could run on electricity rather than gasoline.
For Musk’s fans and investors, the comparison should not be entirely comforting. In the course of a few short years, the Wizard of Menlo Park was unceremoniously forced out of the electricity game. After he stubbornly refused to embrace the transmission technology that became the foundation of the U.S. grid and focused increasingly on developing inventions such as the phonograph and the motion picture, his board of directors merged his Edison General Lighting with a rival to create today’s General Electric—leaving the 46-year-old Edison with no management role. “Many great innovators are great at introducing new things but not so great at adapting to market changes,” says Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, an archive at Rutgers University. One could argue that he “got too distracted” from his power plan, Israel adds.
Many Tesla Motors investors are wondering if Musk, 45, has begun to lose his way as well. This summer the company was already burning through billions of dollars as it constructed a battery factory in Nevada that will be the largest building in the world and prepared to deliver its first electric car for the masses, the Model 3. Then in July he announced that Tesla would buy the solar-panel provider SolarCity for $2.6 billion in stock. As he wrote in a blog post titled “Master plan part deux,” the combined company will generate power for customers on stylish roofs with embedded solar panels, store it in Tesla battery modules, and, of course, use some of it to power Tesla vehicles. The company won’t just sell traditional cars, mind you; it plans to introduce an expanded portfolio of autonomous models, including a new type of small bus and an 18-wheeler. Musk has also described a ride-sharing service, in which Tesla customers make their self-driving cars available when not using them.
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