He is pretty cool. I read a few books about him and watched a couple films on him.
Nikola Tesla was undoubtedly the greatest genius of the past 200 years, on par with Leonardo da Vinci. There is no other person in history in his league.
This is undoubtedly a product of Serbian propaganda, social bias towards inventors and scientists, and mostly guilt for forgetting him due to his mental problems and conflicts with contemporaries.
Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, James Maxwell, Marie Curie, Allen Turing, Stephen Hawking, Michael Faraday, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, Carl Friedrich Gauss are a few scientists who've lived in the past 200 years. I'm forgetting a few more famous and accomplished math and science people probably. Then we have writers, philosophers, artists, composers, statesmen, entrepreneurs.
We feel bad because of his famous war of the currents, but considering he tried to marry a pigeon and was a complete weirdo, is anyone really surprised that he wasn't easy to work with and thought of as mad?
He was no doubt amazing and had a mad scientist appeal.
I like him more than any other genius so far because he displayed mystical skills, like photographic memory, the ability to see his visions or to visualise his ideas, his ability to get answers in his dreams, his acknowledgment of the Vedas, etc. He was a mystic, as well as a scientist so might have acted oddly. His abilities were supramornal. Few others had these abilities that he displayed.
He is definitely unique and worth studying. Although if you go back as far as Davinci, Newton was another interesting character in between the two with massive contributions to science who basically invented modern science, but also tried to explain divine powers.