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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 o
by 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 agoAnd 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 agoI 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?