rowark:

Elon Musk tried to correct Bernie Sanders about insulin, and ended up getting fact checked by his own platform 🤣🤣

(Oh and… note that Bernie says the patent for insulin was sold in 1923, which is true, and Elon “corrects” him by saying insulin was discovered in 1921… that’s also true, but shows that Elon Musk lacks basic reading comprehension lmao)

Oh! And, the reason the patent for insulin was originally sold for $1 had nothing to do with the price of insulin… it was because Sir Frederick Banting, the scientist who discovered insulin, intended for it to be free. He famously said that insulin does not belong to him, it belongs to the world.

He sold the patents to the University of Toronto for $1 because under Canadian law, $1 is the minimum anything can be sold for, when legal ownership changes hands. If you want to gift a car to someone, you have to sell it to them for $1 in order to legally transfer ownership. Same rule applies to patents.