For the sake of some other folks in this thread, I'll say a bit about Tesla. I did my senior graduation project on his life and works and built a Tesla Coil for the final project. For starters, if you aren't already blatantly aware, in a capitalist society, the worth of a good or service is entirely determined by the money that other people are willing to pay for it. If that amount is zero, you aren't making money, and unless you somehow start making money again you will starve and die. Money is used for everything: it can buy food, water, clothing, medical help, even be used as bribes to protect yourself from bad people. If you don't have any YOU ARE IN DEEP SHIT. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that when Nikola Tesla's alternating current threatened to completely obsolete Edison's direct current transmission, Edison and his friends set out to kill AC electricity before it changed them from rich men to has-beens.
In short, capitalism ascribes a monetary value to everything and thus makes the pursuit of money a primary goal for everyone at all times even if they want to claim altruistic motives for a time. This often means that in order to combat the fear of starvation, dispossession, etc. people do counterproductive, dishonest, BAD things in order to preserve their own necessity to society and continue making money. In this case, he set out on a campaign to convince Americans that AC electricity was a deadly, unsafe technology that would kill them in their homes if they dared flirt with its use, and they leveraged appropriate politicians. If you didn't already know T. Edison was a huge shit-bag, didn't invent the light bulb or the phonograph or the motion picture camera or the radio; he was a businessman, a perfect example of the modern American businessman whose priority is to receive the benefit for other peoples' work. Stuck his hand in other peoples' pockets his whole life, even if he did invent a lot of things. He became the first bootlegger when he bribed a theatre owner into selling him a copy of To the Moon and Back and then charging admission at his own theater and not paying royalties.
Suppose you own a shit-load of stock in a company that is rich because it sells product_or_service_x to america. Another company has just risen, selling a better, safer, cheaper product or one that otherwise obsoletes yours. Their idea is flatly superior, and your company is about to go down in flames and will not get 1 dime for the work of the newer company. In our society, the answer is to tell the people of company A "too bad, better go back to school". The answer of company A's executives and stockholders is to try and prevent this, even if it means making things worse for everyone else on the planet by suppressing a competitive new technology via obfuscation of the truth.
Someone said it earlier, follow the money and all of human history makes black-and-white sense. For example, both the allies and axis purchesed petroleum products from the SAME CONGLOMERATE. What the fuck? We should have just attacked this conglomerate and then laughed when the nazis had no gas for their tanks. "Free market" my ass ... D: