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by mtzet 1164 days ago
As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why?

I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
1 comments
bostik 1164 days ago
At least in the book, PayPal Wars, there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense.

So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.

link
tim333 1164 days ago
The Book Founders at Work's first chapter is about Max Levchin at PayPal. One paragraph

>We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.

And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO.

>...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.

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