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Does Elon Musk come from a banking family?
He somehow got banks to accept PayPal (if I have his biography correct.)
No matter how great a programmer you are, you know that banks are probably going to say no to something like PayPal (at least back in the mid-nineties).
So, this question has been nagging me for a while. How did he get them to accept payment transfers in and out of PayPal?
- _delirium 13y agoI would guess Peter Thiel, who was already heavily connected in the financial industry, was the one who made that part happen. Before co-founding PayPal in 1998, he had already founded a hedge fund in 1996, and before that worked at Credit Suisse.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dangrossman 13y agoNot that I know of, but Musk wasn't part of PayPal at the beginning. He was off using the millions and VC connections he had from building and selling Zip2 to AltaVista/Compaq to start X.com, his own online banking company. Its early investors included banks; they were onboard from the start. PayPal started as Confinity with Levchin/Thiel/Nosek/Howery and had its own set of finance industry investors. Thiel was from finance himself, so he's probably the source of their early connections. It wasn't until 2 years after PayPal was founded that it was acquired by Musk's X.com, and the merged company kept the PayPal brand. Immediately after the acquisition, they raised another $100 million with investors including Deutsche Bank, Vertex and Development Bank of Singapore and JP Morgan. I don't share the same assumption that banks would be especially hesitant to process transactions for a well-funded tech company in 1999, though. I think the fact that they were investing in these companies readily is evidence otherwise. I'm not sure I can ignore what I know today to say whether it was obvious or not 15 years ago that if person-to-person online payments got popular, they'd become a significant target for international payment fraud.
- sidcool 13y agoDoesn't matter. He has created Tesla and SpaceX.