I had a coworker who turned beet red when I put Musk and PayPal in the same sentence. You know that feeling when your parents didn’t yell and you wished they would? I was too afraid to ask for the full story.
His PR makes him sound like a founder but he was not.
“X.com was … founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Elon Musk, and Christopher Payne … It merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to PayPal in 2001.”[1]
I’m sure individual usage will vary, but I would call him a cofounder.
Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.
Co-founder is just a marketing name and has no meaning in reality, actions do. Looking at this he provided in money which was likely to ruin his business by overspending it and greater minds prevailed in the end (I'm not saying paypal is a good thing or not). Why they made him CEO I cannot fathem but it has probably something to do with the bullying behaviour he is known for.
I've been named co-founder once but as soon as its usefulness ran out it got removed from the website (nothing else changed).
Wow, I can’t believe this is so controversial. When companies A and B merge, what would you describe the A-founders as, in relation to the resulting company?
His PR makes him sound like a founder but he was not.