Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story:
Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.
Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.
The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.
Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.
Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com.
This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking:
Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well.
Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk.
So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO.
He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java.
The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence.
Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon.
Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks.
I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.