[pinkmuffinere]

“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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)

[dangrossman]

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.

[consp]

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).

Edit; needed to be response to parent, sorry.

[daemin]

Wasn't he also in the USA illegally because he was in violation of his student visa?

[jaimex2]

yeah yeah, and something about a slave labour diamond mine which is just as relevant to Musk having a team capable of cleaning up.

[pinkmuffinere]

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?

[hinkley]

Reverse merger makes it an acquisition not co-founding.

[buffington]

> This article is about the defunct online bank.

Assuming you meant X.com (formerly known as Twitter) - in no universe is there a Twitter cofounded by Musk.

[dboreham]

No, parent presumably meant the original x.com

[hinkley]

Musk has been sitting on that domain name since PayPal. We are talking about companies, not domain names.