Nikola Tesla, whose 170th birthday is approaching, was a brilliant inventor. But brilliance in ideas doesn’t guarantee competence in business, and that failure cost him.
Tesla should have died honored. Instead, he died alone, broke, and quietly surveilled. Two days after his death in January 1943, the U.S. government sent agents. His hotel room at the New Yorker was emptied, his papers seized, his effects catalogued like contraband. It was wartime—but plenty of people died during World War II without having their life’s work vacuumed up by the state.
Tesla had become inconvenient—dangerous to the state. A relentless eccentric who spoke openly about wireless energy, particle beams, and technologies that made borders irrelevant, he no longer fit safely inside official channels. He was old, foreign-born, and no longer useful to the financiers who once indulged him. Nervous power seeks closure. Tesla refused to provide it.
Enter John G. Trump.
A respected physicist. An MIT electrical engineer. And, not incidentally, the uncle of Donald Trump, a president now intent on engineering absurdity as a governing style. In 1943, John Trump was charged with reviewing Tesla’s seized papers and deciding whether they posed any risk to national security. His verdict was swift and devastating. Tesla’s ideas, he concluded, were speculative, promotional, and of no practical value. The files were safe, the public was reassured, and history exhaled. Except it didn’t add up then, and it adds up even less now.
John Trump was no fool. He worked on high-voltage systems, radar, and advanced physics. He understood emerging technologies. He also understood which conclusions kept doors open and which ones slammed them shut. His assessment didn’t just neutralize Tesla’s reputation. If anything, it laundered a seizure.
The FBI would later declassify portions of its Tesla files. Portions. Hundreds of pages released decades later. There was just enough transparency to claim openness without actually delivering it. The headline was always the same. Nothing important was taken, nothing meaningful was hidden, nothing worked anyway. And yet the inventory never reconciled. Eighty trunks logged. Sixty delivered.
The government that insists Tesla built nothing dangerous went on, in later years, to explore particle-beam weapons, missile defense shields, and directed-energy systems that sound suspiciously like upgraded versions of ideas Tesla was mocked for proposing.
Power dynamics matter here. Tesla had no family dynasty. No institutional shield or leverage. The Trump family, by contrast, would later become one of the most politically resilient brands in modern American life. John Trump’s role in closing the Tesla file reads differently when his nephew repeatedly cited him as proof of intellectual pedigree. “My uncle was a great scientist,” Donald Trump liked to say. He wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t telling the whole story either.
This isn’t about accusing John Trump of stealing inventions or Donald Trump of orchestrating cover-ups across time. That would be lazy. What deserves scrutiny is something more structural. How expertise is mobilized to calm the public. How authority is borrowed to bury discomfort. How families with proximity to institutions rarely suffer the consequences those institutions impose on outsiders.
Tesla was inconvenient because he refused to be manageable. He didn’t patent defensively. He didn’t simplify for committees. He didn’t stop talking when funding dried up. So the state stepped in, called it security, and let an insider write the epilogue.
There should be louder calls for what’s still missing. Not in the breathless tone of conspiracy forums, but in the sober language of accountability. If the files were worthless, show them. If the trunks were consolidated, document it. If Tesla’s ideas were fantasy, explain why later programs mirrored them so closely.
History’s a ledger. And Tesla’s account still doesn’t balance. As his 170th birthday approaches, the question isn’t whether Nikola Tesla was right about everything. He wasn’t. The question is why the most powerful government on earth felt the need to rush his silence, and why it trusted a future presidential uncle to certify it. That alone should make us curious.