Would Nikola Tesla have approved of Elon Musk? A historian’s verdict might surprise you

Nikola Tesla’s terrific achievements and tenuous claims

Tesla lived in the age of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, in a world newly electrified by scientific revolution. The Serbian-American inventor, engineer and showman was born in 1856 and became one of the most iconic figures of the Victorian scientific imagination.

He emigrated to the United States in 1884 and quickly became embroiled in the so-called War of the Currents, championing alternating current (AC) over Edison’s direct current (DC). His collaboration with industrialist George Westinghouse saw AC become the dominant form of electrical power in the US – a critical victory in Tesla’s career and in the development of modern infrastructure.

His pioneering work laid the foundation for modern electrical systems, and his polyphase motor transformed the industry. But Tesla was also notorious for grand claims, often overstating his role in technologies he didn’t fully invent, from X-rays to radio waves.

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So, it’s not hard to imagine Tesla asserting credit for the electric car – a technology already in development in the late 19th century – let alone one bearing his own name.

“He claimed to have invented everything that [was already] on the go,” says Morus. “He would have seen it as his due.”

Early electric vehicles were already on roads during Tesla’s lifetime. By the 1890s, electric taxis were operating in cities like New York and London, though internal combustion engines would soon dominate the industry. Tesla, however, was always more interested in visionary leaps than in commercial viability.

Elon Musk and Nikola Tesla weren’t so different

Though he didn’t found the company or choose its name, Musk has since become the public face of the Tesla brand. And the links between Musk and his company’s namesake go beyond the surface level. Musk has cultivated an image as a maverick entrepreneur: launching rockets, disrupting industry – and government – and professing ambitions to colonise Mars.

“Musk, I think quite clearly and in lots of ways, does see himself as a Tesla-like figure,” Morus explains. “Somebody who has that capacity to innovate, supposedly, to break moulds, to kind of change the world single-handedly.”

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It’s a powerful narrative. Both men are often mythologised as the solitary genius, capable of reshaping the future through sheer force of vision. For Tesla, that reputation was built not just through his inventions, but through dramatic public lectures and media performances that made him a celebrity scientist in his own lifetime.

Tesla’s public demonstrations – including lighting lamps wirelessly, or channelling electricity through his body – earned him the nickname ‘The Wizard of Electricity.’ Newspapers lapped it up, and Tesla actively shaped his own myth, portraying himself as a conduit to the future.

But this image, says Morus, glosses over a more complicated reality.

“It's deeply ironic that Tesla is inventing this myth of a sole iconoclastic, disruptive genius inventor, at the moment when the real triumphs of late Victorian engineering lie in huge collective work,” says Morus. “Yes, Victorians reinvent the world through engineering and technology. But it’s through huge collective work.”

The preservation of a fantasy

Morus argues that this persistent ideal of the world-changing individual – whether it’s Tesla or Musk – is misleading.

“There’s something very seductive about that kind of notion of disruption,” says Morus, “because it makes [progress seem to] happen tomorrow.

“But that’s not the way it goes … disruptions in the real world take decades, take centuries maybe to work themselves out.”

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Tesla himself died impoverished and largely forgotten in 1943, after a lifetime of struggling to monetise his ideas. He became increasingly eccentric in his final years, making fantastical claims about death rays and wireless energy while living in a New York hotel room.

So, would he have been proud to see his name on a fleet of electric cars? Undoubtedly, according to Morus. And he quite possibly would have claimed to have invented them.

Iwan Morus was speaking to Ellie Cawthorne on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.