Not to mention how much attention Nikola Tesla got from pseudo-scientific interpretations of some of the ideas he posed. In the sensationalist world of fringe beliefs, he's said to have invented machines that can cause earthquakes and control the weather, and apparently had ideas about a system from global wireless power transfer. Possibly there's some truth to some of them, but odds are his ideas didn't quite pan out.

He's essentially a poster child for the "independent genius cut down and buried by industrial titans" perspective which is quite a romantic perspective for the conspiracy spaces on the internet. Not to say he wasn't treated poorly, but I also doubt he'd solved all the theoretical problems of wireless power transfer over great distance, for example. And if he had a machine that made earthquakes, wouldn't networks of seismometers detect aberrations?

I value your finger.

But, joking aside, I see what you mean. I get the impression that in the effort to be too general, they under-specified the criteria for what X is in that statement.