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Perhaps a more accurate statement would be: "Tesla wanted to be a businessman....."
Tesla's pure intellectual capability is indisputable.
However:
He was very old world in his attitude and hoped the scientific value of the discovery would transmorph into actual money.
He was urbane, cultured and completely out of his depth when it came to commerce, American or otherwise.
He was also arrogant and did not play well with others.
Edison was an inventor and an extremely hard driving businessman. Perhaps more than anyone he saw the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st.
He was raised on the idea of work as virtue and profit as reward.
He liked money and was not afraid to compete for it.
Both were geniuses in their own right.
Those who claim Edison stole ideas from this or that individual, ignore the fact that Tesla pinched much of Marconi's early theory.
At any rate, its not who has the IDEA. Any idiot can have a bright idea -I "invented" the internet in 1975, digital TV in 1980 and rechargeable mobile phones in 1992 and I'm an idiot - but it takes that different type of genius to develop the idea into a workable form. And a workable form that the money-carrying public will want to purchase.
One had it, the other didn't.
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