Wanted to give everyone free electricity

Why though? because it sends energy all around instead of targeted areas?

NO

Listen– Tesla was a great inventor and scientist in his early life– but later on his personally changed drastically and he became incredibly unreliable and ceased producing any kind of science or engineering. He never had a death ray. He started coming up with wild inventions, collecting investments for them, and then handing over empty boxes and these ridiculous excuses when he was finally held accountable for them.

It's because he developed a brain tumor in his frontal lobe from his experiments with x-rays.

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Check it out, it has shit like $4800 USB cables.

it is technically feasible (even moreso since it wasnt known in tesla's time that there's even a whole ionized layer of the atmosphere to act as a conductive medium), but like i said, it's just so wildly inefficient, since you're radiating all this energy mostly into space rather than the device you're trying to power

this idea was applied on a very basic level for things like early radios, but by the laws of physics, it's just not useful for much more than that

which is completely superfluous for a cable that's carrying a digital signal of 1s and 0s, as opposed to analog

shit like this just revels how absurd and inefficient capitalism really is. there's an entire industry that invests meaningful amounts of labor and resources into making these "high end" HDMI cables

The question is, has there ever been an antenna built that harnesses the power of the earth's rotation itself? Could the earth itself provide enough enough wattage to power more than simple radios? Also, assuming it could provide a decent amount of power you could probably increase that by having your receiver hooked up to some kind of transformer.
With that said, I'm not an expert. I have a degree in this but it's only an associates degree and I wasn't exactly the best student tbh.

I think I read about some example of using long cables between spacecraft to induce current as it travels through the atmosphere. But I have a feeling this was some graphic in Wired and was never actually built or practical.

fwiw RFID chips can be considered "wireless electricity" since they are passively powered by electromagnetic waves.

That doesn't sound too farfetched although I'm not sure of it's feasibility. I can't really say one way or another because when you really get into the theory of these sorts of things you're getting into the physics of electricity which can be quite complicated. My question is, how would you harness the electricity in the atmosphere? Surely it can't be as simple as "putting a long wire into the air".

I'm pretty sure Tesla's work inspired a lot of those types of technologies.

He didn't really bother to try to profit much off his ideas so people just took it all the time. He was successful as an inventor but not financially successful.

Because air is not an efficient conductor I think.
And if you're just gonna send beta radiation as electricity, you'll get problems with that, yes. That and radiation poisoning.

Couldnt they limit the spread by covering it with somekind of energy resistant cover that would only release electricity towards the things you am thus have central power areas like for example a room?

Except the electricity is transmitted independent of air. We're talking about the electro-magnetic spectrum. A high frequency waveform can only travel a short distance but would provide much more potential power. A low frequency waveform (much like a radio wave) provides less power but is able to travel a much longer distance. The trick to Tesla's antenna would be to figure out a way to provide a lot of power will still allowing that power to be transmitted over long distances. Perhaps by networking smaller antenna's (or tesla coils) over a long distance that are connected to the main unit.