In 2000, according to Peter Thiel, he met with the E-Gold team in Anguilla.
Around 2001, Elon and Peter were at PayPal, and they had plans to build a similar digital currency.
In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
By 2004, there were over a million E‑Gold accounts. Banks weren’t happy about it. Meanwhile, Elon and Peter understood exactly how much potential this new kind of digital currency had.
In 2007, the banks took the founders of E-Gold to court for running an unlicensed money‑transmitting business. That same year, the E-Gold engineers were out of work.
Bitcoin was invented in 2008, the same year Elon was broke and busy trying to save both SpaceX and Tesla from going bankrupt.
His theory is that Elon and Peter hired the smartest engineers from the E-Gold team and asked them to build blockchain so they could create their own version of E-Gold. The team worked on Bitcoin from 2007 to 2010 under the alias of Nakamoto.
> In 2002, PayPal was sold, and that pretty much ended the digital currency plan. Instead, PayPal let users link their bank accounts and cards to make payments. This created a bigger dependency on banks.
This doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Except PayPal wasn't invented by Elon or Peter. It was Elon's company's plan to build the digital bank but they were failing quite spectacularly at it.
They merged with Confinity who'd already built PayPal, had a working prototype, etc.
Elon lasted four months as CEO of PayPal, trying to convert it from Java to ASP until the Board didn't ask him to resign, but fired him, the morning he left on his honeymoon after getting married.
PayPal is a complete red herring there. Elon had no participation in ideas on digital currency there.
Interesting, need to read about it. So similar story as with Tesla? Existing opinion nicely confirmed.
Among other things it happens to spotlight Musk's fascination with having "X" as the company name, especially for a bank.
Elon seems to need to finish a vision he didn't get a chance to finish back then.
Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Ken Howery, Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel Simmons.
Elon was removed as CEO in 2000, but he remained the largest individual shareholder when PayPal went public.
How is that similar?
Tesla was 2 dudes and an office with no IP and no product when Musk became the lead investor and chairman of the board.
Whereas when Cofinity and X.com merged it was as two functioning companies operating in the same market.
What similarity do you see?
Why should we believe you and not the person who created PayPal?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/paypal-originally-aimed-creat...
Elon was working on a digital bank, not a global currency. His company was failing miserably.
Confinity, who made PayPal, and had a first version working, merged with them.
Elon gets no credit for a 'global currency' idea (nor do I think he and Thiel invented Bitcoin[1]), because Confinity was already working on that idea when they merged and became PayPal properly, in the four months before he was ousted.
My argument was that Elon wasn't all about the global currency.
[1] And Elon definitely didn't invent BitCoin. His ego would never permit him to have kept that a secret for a month, let alone a decade plus.
The PayPal mafia (Musk, Nossk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, and the rest) spent years working closely, obsessing over banks, money, payments, and how to move value on the internet, questioning everything: What is money? Who controls it? How do you make it more efficient, global, and digital?
There's no way, even if it was a single-digit number of people team that they would remain silent. If it was just Elon/Thiel I could perhaps believe it.
Also keep in mind that there were some very desperate years for Elon where his companies were extremely close to bankruptcy, wouldn't he have tapped into that bitcoin if he had access to it?
Stop glazing him sheesh.
That's not how business works. You borrow, then borrow some more, and focus on having a long term plan to cover the interest, so you don't upset the banks or end up broke again.
Doesn't Elon sell Bitcoin whenever he needs a few hundred million these days?
The fact that we don't understand how someone could've come up with something like PayPal or Bitcoin might be exactly why Elon and Peter are the richest people on the planet.
What are they going to do? Whack him mafia style and make it look like an accident? Here’s a more realistic rule: “ If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem”.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/214064-if-you-owe-the-bank-...
> So why would the richest person on earth do that? He's not crazy.
You mean the guy who is so insecure he constantly lies, even about the most inconsequential things…
https://archive.ph/20250127023632/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
The guy who is so uninformed and gullible he falls for any conspiracy theory…
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/25/lies-damned-lies-and-elo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u8_fp1TtJE
The guy who jeopardised billions by buying into a random tweet accusing a business partner without proof…
https://voz.us/en/world/250308/21932/mexican-tycoon-carlos-s...
The guy who invested all his time and energy electing someone like him, only to then (predictably) have a falling out…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Musk_feud
I mean, maybe he isn’t crazy, but that isn’t really saying much. At least crazy people have an excuse.
All we know is that Elon and Peter revolutionised the finance industry with PayPal.
https://kqmarkets.co.uk/article/did-peter-thiel-meet-satoshi...
https://protos.com/is-peter-thiel-inner-circle-behind-the-sa...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/peter-thi...
"Peter Thiel met with the e-gold team in February 2000 on the Caribbean island of Anguilla to discuss making PayPal interoperable with e-gold. The goal was to challenge central banks by creating a system where PayPal and e-gold could work together. Thiel believed this collaboration could spark a revolution against traditional financial institutions."
Actions speak louder than words.
- Thiel met with digital currency pioneers in 2000.
- Thiel chose not to partner with E-Gold because he needed to stay compliant and bank-friendly.
- A few years later, Bitcoin quietly appears, solving the exact problems E-Gold ran into.
- No names. No funding trail. No way for banks to know who the enemy is. Just Bitcoin wallets full of money.
It doesn't sound like a bunch of idealistic cypherpunks building tech to save the world. It sounds like a few smart, well-connected people who understood how money moves, got frustrated with the banking system and their fees, and built a way to create wealth and move value without paying commissions.
The cypherpunks laid the groundwork for the encryption banks, governments, and corporations now depend on. They were never interested in dodging taxes or avoiding bank fees.
Then I go down the elevator in my building and there is a huge crowd of people. It ended up being 50 cent the rapper and a few other famous people.
It was so surreal and unexpected I completely forgot about Bitcoin for a few months. And by then I could stand the fact it had tripled (or something) and I had missed it.
Would have been hundreds of millions. Could have lost the hdd or had sold later but I'd always hold some.
Lol so now I blame 50 cent that I didn't buy Bitcoin
One of the doge creators sold all his early doge for a used car. He'd hit the jackpot, a $5k return on something he rolled out in under a day's work, for fun.
He didn't make the wrong decision. All his coin was worth 5 bucks, then 5900. What would you do?
> Musk and Thiel being true cypherpunks?
Cypherpunks also had to pay the rent.
And who was hiring in 2007? The same people who disrupted the banking and oil industry with PayPal and Tesla.
Conspiracies are impossible to maintain, once more than one or two people are involved.
Almost all of those remained secret longer than the 17 years we're talking about here, and due to selection bias, I am forced to omit the much more successfully kept secrets, because I don't know about them yet.
People go to jail, are caught out, fired, relationships break up, governments fall, because conspiracies of even a few people fall apart. It's a regular thing.
You're mentioning some things, of which some were known during the time. The FBI had reports of the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Cosby was known by many but the women were paid off with cash or jobs (until they rightfully went public), and things such as the CIA and the Manhattan project are laced with highly patriotic people, and the death penalty or life in jail, along with people sequestered and watched by immense security.
Secrets are very difficult to keep.
The things you think of were enormously unusual in that they were kept.
They were the exception to the rule.
Secrets are very difficult to keep, but much of modern society is built on institutions that are very good at keeping them: armies, intelligence agencies, and even companies with trade secrets.
So your initial position is much too extreme to be justifiable.
I think the mindspace here is what I was taught. A shared secret is no longer that. That the more people which know, the more impossible it will be.
As humans, we must conceptualize different sides of the problem, differently. As a person attempting to maintain secrecy, the impossible nature must be kept in mind at all times.
This is doubly true with some personality types, which think everything is a game. I've often wondered if some people feel mental pain, when held to their word.
So framing is important.
But from the other side, one can point to exceptions to the rule.
He got a straight A.
E-Golds most talented 1-2 engineers weren’t poor people, and could definitely afford a 5 year career break.
If there was say a vulnerability in a specific wallet version it would be quite possible to narrow down search space to only the wallets/addresses around that point in time etc as well, making it easier to target your brute-forcing efforts.
It will be interesting to see if any other dormant wallets from around the same era wake up too.
Or some other flaw found in a wallet’s key generation?
Kinda like what happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195493
(Or exactly that but nobody tried to attack this again with moar power?)