Confinity created its PayPal product in 1999 and Musk's company got merged into Confinity in 2000 because Thiel said they were both working crazy long hours and it would be more beneficial for everyone to join forces into a monopoly instead of compete with one another. Then Musk got kicked out of the company because they didn't think he was doing a good job, and he was fortunate to benefit financially when they sold to eBay. So it's a pretty classic case of survivorship bias, and the fact that he invested into an already innovative electric car company does not mean his taskmaster leanings are assuredly the key to success. For every one of Musk's companies, there are countless others enjoying a healthy amount of profit without the excessive hours.
Paypal is not some monument of success (how much did Adam Neumann make from WeWork?), nor is X, he just bought Twitter by borrowing against his Tesla shares at an inflated valuation (inflated by sentiment and hype). Is he good at slave driving people who mostly care about mission? Yes. Does that mean it is what we want to optimize for at scale? I argue no. Important to be mindful what we are and what is worth optimizing for collectively and how that changes over time.
If I drive my workers to various flavors (emotional, physical, etc) of failure to succeed economically, are you going to look up to me? If so, you've failed the litmus test. Progress is nice, but so is a reasonable balance for our short existence on this rock. Be Woz, not Jobs or Musk.
(high empathy human, early TSLA investor, own Teslas, know people at SpaceX, etc)
If Europe wants to be "more internal[ly] stable and international[ly] competitive", then its 40-hour-per-week, 5-weeks-holiday-per-year companies have to compete with Tesla, Spacex, Paypal, X etc.
Europe has SEPA for instant value transfer, they do not need paypal. AT Protocol can replace X, no need for Europe to have their own X ("protocols, not platforms"). Europe can eventually build EVs faster and/or better (~20 moving parts in a drivetrain) and improved space vehicles when they're ready, they're not trying to live on Mars.
What has US tech built that Europe needs? Europe has services and great quality of life, the US has performance art capitalism paperclip maximizing for shareholder returns and is a third world country [1] [2] [3], broadly speaking. The race is not what you think it is. What are you building for? To just keep grinding or building? Or for people to live happy, healthy lives at scale? Engineering is fun, and leads to progress, but it is a means to an end, not the point of life.
I don't disagree with this (love Bosch except my dishwasher IoT annoyances), but OP believes you need to be Tesla or BYD to be "successful." You can always succeed if you get to define success. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and life is meant to be lived, not brutish and short grinding for silly KPIs.
good luck getting Linus Torvalds back from us! Jokes aside, i think the EU needs to reach consensus on a new operating system if you want digital sovereignty. So far I know of a few nations doing so for law enforcement/military, and I know of Jolla or webos, but I am unaware of any efforts like Huawei and harmonyOS to create a sovereign unified ecosystem.
If you believe in optimizing for company success at a macro level from a mental model perspective, why are we talking? Go grind and be prepared to make peace how you wasted your life on your deathbed. I have attempted to show you a different perspective, whether you internalize it is up to you. I've been down that road, and caught myself in time with some life left to be lived. Never stop asking "why?" OODA loop style.
Old money is a toxic accretion of capital: because it optimizes for "not losing" as opposed to "maximally investing"
There's a reason the British industrial revolution was funded by new, sugar/slave-trade money -- because it went to people open to investing in this new, weird steam power thing.
this is a pointless argument as close to all US mega cops have been quasi subventioned until they became monopolies, not sure how you expect a proper competition there (specifically subventioned by a few very wealthy entities, not the state).
in addition many of them did end up where they are by taking advantage of a major technological change, while being quasi subventioned, while being in a huge country which has until recently exported it's culture and tech, while systematically breaking all kinds of (non employee protection related) laws and regulations (including US laws/regulations, through seldomly with consequences in the US)
there is little which indicates that mistreating your employees was overly relevant for them to get where they are in most cases
actually it's even the opposite to some degree, multiple of the US mega corps have been known to be quite good employers (e.g. MS, Google). Microsoft was also one of the first huge companies which tried out a 32h week in some of their offices (and the results of that study indicated that it was leading to improvements).
and in general I think most people have no issues with highly payed highly skilled people "working hard like crazy" if
- it's well payed (i.e. you work "crazily hard" a few years and then can lay back for years after
- it's fully free of your choice to end up there
- you are also fully free to leave if you realize it's hitting your health to hard
Like company founders working "crazily hard" at the start of their journey is as normal in the EU as it's in the US. And paying people which work "crazily hard" extra, often in form of annual Bonus payments, is also in some markets not that uncommon in the EU. Also jobs which people very often don't do for more then a few years, because it's just not healthy.
But what Musk is pursing is so far beyond that on the unhealthy spectrum.
And a more normal employees has to be able to work their job without larger gap for like what 50 years at least. That just isn't compatible with "working crazily hard".
But Musk is just an extreme example of what you see in in general more in the US:
Indirectly force people to work harder then long term substainable and when it start causing chronic issues take "medicine" to fix it.
And then be surprised if your country has pain killer/drug addiction epidemic which doesn't just affect the people which did fall through society but like all levels of society.
And wrt. internal stability, have you looked at the US recently!? It's more unstable then it ever has been since the civil war.
Musk's operational involvement in PayPal was 4 months (though he remained on the Board for a while, IIRC).
He didn't create it, it was a (pre-release) working thing when his company (which was failing at building an online bank) merged. He was made CEO, and spent his tenure trying to throw away the working app because it was Java on Solaris for ASP because that's what he knew.
Four months in, he gets married. The BoD attends his wedding on the Saturday, and on the Monday morning when he leaves for his honeymoon, they fire him in absentia. Not "other priorities", "family time", but "fired on your honeymoon".
Since then, most of Musk's "contribution" to PayPal has been cashing the dividend checks.
Yes. U.S. is way behind in banking tech. Even in poorer countries like many of those in latam, you can easily do direct bank transfers. It's pretty common to see e.g. street vendors with QR codes that you can scan to send money directly without the need for a non-bank intermediary.
I'm not sure that it's entirely that the US is behind, it's that they introduced credit cards so early that they've ended up with those dominating the space.
And now because of that, there's lobbying against direct bank transfers and capping of interchange fees.
That explanation makes sense to me, but I'd still consider it accurate to say that the U.S. is behind in this regard since credit cards are pretty ubiquitous in most of those countries as well.
True, but that's a lot more recent than US use of credit cards. Like, up till about 10 years ago most Irish consumers had non visa/mc debit cards and credit cards were rarer (mostly those Maestro debits).
I mean, the US should definitely improve their bank2bank stuff and implement FedNow (I think that's what it's called) but there's less pressure to do so as basically everyone has and accepts credit cards (not true in lots of Western Europe).
yes kinda, it's complicated (as in depends on country and in some countries is still can involve a 3rd party "middleman" even through you do auth with your bank and don't need an account with the middle man)
through what matters is that in the end you can pay on most EU sites without having either paypal or a credit card
so that use case really doesn't need paypal
and for the p2p money sending you need it even less
and if you buy stuff from outside of the EU you most times can pay with both paypal or credit card, so if you have a credit card you don't need paypal for that either
Umm, yes? Not sure about the rest of Europe, but here in Czechia most of merchants have a direct payment method based on QR code.
Basically: 1) you select your bank at the checkout; 2) you're redirected to the bank's payment page with a QR code; 3) you scan the code from your banking app and confirm it; 4) the bank redirects back the merchants page with the payment status confirmed/declined. No payment processor involved and the money goes straight from your account to merchant's account.
Because it’s directly related - the US’ political strategy is why PayPal exists. Politics is inseparable from economics.
We prioritize the private sector politically and there’s a lot of benefits, and a lot of detriments, to this.
One of the downsides is we have hundreds of more or less identical companies doing the same thing that don’t need to exist. This breeds inefficiency into systems we use, thereby opening the door for even more useless companies that just reduce friction. Friction that we decided we needed to have.
The most obvious example is healthcare in the US, but every industry experiences these detriments.
Edit: Then why did you put a question mark at the end of a statement of fact instead of a period? What he said was true, has been true for a long time in fact (not just Europe, but a lot of the rest of the world), and you can easily google for evidence if you don't believe him, without questioning his honesty. Were you honestly that surprised that you had to ask?
The US lags so far behind other so-called "third world countries" not only in banking, but also health care, freedom from gun violence and school shootings, and now also civil rights and freedom of speech and democracy. I don't think Canada or Greenland would vote to give up their advantages and freedoms to become US states, but if they did, they sure wouldn't vote for the current administration.
I didn't think anyone was lying. Not sure what you mean by that. I was wondering if what they were saying included that aspect specifically or not.
I am not even sure why you were putting words like shocking, surprised, skeptical seemingly into my response. None of these are accurate descriptions of my question and response.
Yes, at least in Poland. You can either use Blik (mobile payments integrated with your bank account) or get redirected to your bank website for fast wire transfer.
Working long hours is not a sign of success, it means things don't get done on a normal schedule so everyone has to bust their ass to meet the deadline. Working this way in perpetuity is wasteful and totally stupid.