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How did you come to terms with how he failed upward with X.com and Paypal? He tried to ruin Paypal but was rewarded with $180M. SpaceX and Tesla being Elon’s wo
by skinnymuch 4y ago
How did you come to terms with how he failed upward with X.com and Paypal? He tried to ruin Paypal but was rewarded with $180M. SpaceX and Tesla being Elon’s wouldn’t be a thing.
- lokimedes 4y agoI think it’s basically my internal valuations of the endeavors. Building a payment facilitator seems like a side hustle compared to the space/energy initiatives. That said, X/PayPal certainly helped a good number of people bootstrap more ambitious companies.
- pwinnski 4y agoThe emphasis in that comment was on Musk's failure with X; he was kicked out of PayPal and only collected the money after he was long gone.
- tim333 4y agoThat's a bit unfair - he had shares in the combined X.com and Paypal which did well and so he made money when it was sold. Fair enough he was replaced as CEO after a brief stint but it doesn't really matter that much.
- jacquesm 4y agoI'll be happy to bet that there were quite a few ordinary employees of Paypal that had more of a positive effect on that outcome than Elon but that were compensated to a very small fraction for their efforts.
- skinnymuch 4y agoCapitalism is more than a bit unfair. Having the most stake in PayPal because he merged a different entity with its parent company while being lucky enough to be fired before he could ruin the company doesn’t seem like it deserves positive recognition.