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?
> 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.