Elon Musk, Nicola Tesla and the Oatmeal

ElonTesla

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has open-sourced all of Tesla Motor’s patents. This means a lot to other manufacturers who want to get in on electric vehicle development. And the less we rely on limited fossil-fuel transit, the better for everybody and everything. Compare this to other technology leaders of today such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung who sue each other for millions or even billions of dollars, and spend millions to purchase smaller companies over patent infringement.

What many people who do not know, if they don’t know who he is, is that Nicola Tesla, Mr Musk’s inspiration and namesake of the company (and also of a 1980’s hair band), also let his patents be used freely. Although he was also taken advantage of, he let others use many of his ideas for the common good.

The 21st century may belong to Nicola Tesla. Read about The Oatmeal‘s campaign to buy Tesla’s Wardenclyffe property and appeal to Elon Musk to fund museum construction. Read the Oatmeal’s comic on Nicola Tesla here.

Let’s only hope nobody finds his Death Ray research…

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Leave The World Better Than We Found It

It’s 2014 and against all odds, in a true underdog story, Apple, Inc. has celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Mac and is the biggest company in the world by a couple of metrics.

Apple had their annual shareholder meeting, and here‘s what AppleInsider had to say about the company’s reporting on social obligations:

Apple’s aim in environmental issues is to “leave the world better than we found it,” [CEO Tim] Cook said, detailing plans to achieve 100 percent renewable power across the company, including the construction of the largest solar installation built and owned by a private, non utility company.

Cook said Apple’s environmental efforts also made economic sense, but when challenged by conservative shareholder activism group to pledge that Apple wouldn’t do anything related to the environment that didn’t follow a clear profit motive, Cook bristled with a reply that “we do a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive,” and recommended that anyone who had a problem with that “should get out of the stock.”

The rest of the top companies in the world could learn a lot from these simple principles.

Leave The World Better Than We Found It

More About Us

We say “Our mission is to present stories at the intersection of human spirit, culture and technology.”

Why is that?

We all come from different cultures, and many of us live in different ones than we were raised in. However, if humans as a species are to have any future of significance, it lies in working together and rising above our preconceptions and biases for the greater good.

Damage has already been done. Living on Earth is no longer predictable with reliance on finite resources to feed our current lifestyles and unpredictable global climate changes.

Even if humankind were to resolve fossil fuel issues and rely on wind, solar and other sustainable power resources to come, we still face colony collapse disorders and rogue asteroids from space. Billions of years from now, our sun will turn into a red giant and make Earth uninhabitable.

Pale Blue DotOur pale blue dot in space, despite what we think from living on it, is extraordinarily fragile. So we now turn to the rest of the solar system.

We come from stardust, billions of years ago, and one day we will return to the stars. And human spirit will drive us there, because above all else, we want to survive.

The stories we tell will be the ones that join these elements as we explore making our future.