Elon Musk Donates $1 Million To The Oatmeal’s Nikola Tesla Museum


Back in May, cartoonist The Oatmeal (or, as his momma named him, Matthew Inman) publicly reached out to Elon Musk and asked for help in his mission to build a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Musk had named a company after Tesla; surely he’d want to help with a museum in his honor, right?

Yep! At 2 A.M. the next morning, Elon responded by tweet: “I would be happy to help”.

Two months later (on Nikola Tesla’s birthday, no less!), we now know what Elon’s help looks like: a cool million bucks.

According to a blog post by Inman, Musk called him up last week and pledged two things:

  1. A Tesla supercharger would be built just outside of the museum, making the museum a part of his nationwide Tesla recharging network.
  2. A million dollars for the development/construction of the museum

This isn’t the museum’s first big cash injection, though it’s almost certainly the largest made by an individual. The whole thing started when The Oatmeal decided to use Indiegogo to buy Tesla’s old laboratory to save it from being torn down, managing to raise roughly $1.3 million. That was enough to save the lab — but to turn it into a museum? They’d need to find roughly $8 million more. Elon’s contribution doesn’t get them all the way there, but it’s one helluva start.

Happy birthday, Nikola Tesla!