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> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder

by ep103 3y ago

> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.

colpabar 3y ago
can you post a link to one of the "all accounts" you're referring to?
- hardwaregeek 3y ago
  I wouldn't say awful but it's clear that he and Max Levchin did not see eye to eye, at least judging from Levchin's interview in Founders At Work. Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move. Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
  - belter 3y ago
    Max Levchinin in Founders At Work pag 7: "...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..." "...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”... ...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going..." "...At the time, already I had hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."
prepend 3y ago
> considered an awful coder in this Paypal position This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.
- sulam 3y ago
  He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal. So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
  - scottiebarnes 3y ago
    And then he failed his way up with Tesla and SpaceX, two companies which were better off without his presence. I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder. It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills. I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed. > Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.
scottiebarnes 3y ago
lol, where did you learn your Elon Musk history? He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Except even that also implies that Elon had some say in PayPal, when in reality, Confinity had already developed what would become PayPal, including filing trademarks and such, at the merger. Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO. Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
concordDance 3y ago
I'd love to hear what people who talk about these family connections actually think they were and where they got this idea from. I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...

by ep103 3y ago

colpabar 3y ago

can you post a link to one of the "all accounts" you're referring to?

hardwaregeek 3y ago
I wouldn't say awful but it's clear that he and Max Levchin did not see eye to eye, at least judging from Levchin's interview in Founders At Work. Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move. Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
- belter 3y ago
  Max Levchinin in Founders At Work pag 7: "...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..." "...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”... ...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going..." "...At the time, already I had hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."

prepend 3y ago

> considered an awful coder in this Paypal position This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.

sulam 3y ago
He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal. So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
- scottiebarnes 3y ago
  And then he failed his way up with Tesla and SpaceX, two companies which were better off without his presence. I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
- prepend 3y ago
  I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder. It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills. I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed. > Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not? It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.

scottiebarnes 3y ago

lol, where did you learn your Elon Musk history? He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

FireBeyond 3y ago
Except even that also implies that Elon had some say in PayPal, when in reality, Confinity had already developed what would become PayPal, including filing trademarks and such, at the merger. Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO. Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.

concordDance 3y ago

I'd love to hear what people who talk about these family connections actually think they were and where they got this idea from. I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...