From there he was able to sell 2Zip and invest in other companies. Co-founding X, later merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Musk was later removed for his incompetence however. From there is his history of buying companies and making profit off of them.
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Modern paypal is technology. Elons x.com merged with Confinity in 2000. Confinity had a rough e-mail payment system named paypal. After the merger the technology we know today as PayPal was hammered out with input from former employees and executive os x.com and Confinity and the name of the merged company which was x.com was changed to PayPal. This argument boils down to dumbass libs not understanding the difference between paypal the service and paypal the company.
Confinity owned a service called paypal, which is nothing like the service today. x.com merged with Confinity and eventually changed the name to PayPal.
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PayPal was a merger between Elon’s company and confinity. Elon took over Tesla before they even had a prototype. Elon has been the chief engineer at SpaceX since day one and worked directly in design teams. Thanks for showing how much of a brainwashed retard you are🤣🤡
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He didnt found paypal, he started some shittier version that got acquired by Confinity, the company that created PayPal, to get rid of competition.
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PayPal - Confinity, founded by Max Levchin, and X.com, founded by Elon Musk, merged to become PayPal.
Tesla - founded officially six months before Elon joined, but existed in name only before Elon’s funding allowed them to actually do something.
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Bartłomiej Grzebalski #PiS2027 ✝️🇵🇱❤️🔥 retweeted
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1998–2002: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek & Elon Musk build PayPal from Confinity X.com. Original mission (per Luke Nosek, Davos 2019)
"A global currency independent of interference by these corrupt cartels… that were debasing their currencies.”
Source: youtube.com/watch?v=hOeOzhOx… (0:46–4:03)
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Every part of that is false.
He began by founding Zip2, coding the platform himself and selling it to Compaq for $307 million(but had involved multiple investors, and given his brother and founder status as co-founders, so he ended up with only $22 million of that sum).
Then he started X.com, which became the world’s largest online banking solution with about 2 million users. That company merged with a smaller company called Confinity, forming PayPal. So he wasn’t just a “co-founder of PayPal”... PayPal inherited its user base, much of Musk’s code, and his ideas from X.com.
When PayPal was sold to eBay, he made around $180 million and used that money to start Tesla and SpaceX.
Elon Musk has been central to the design and engineering of every Tesla car and every SpaceX rocket from the beginning.
Tesla was founded by Elon Musk, Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright.
Musk suggested the name “Tesla Motors” to Eberhard while both were loosely involved in another EV project, the T-Zero. They didn’t own the name since a guy called Brad Siewert had already registered it.
Although Musk officially joined six months after Eberhard and Tarpenning registered Tesla, the company then existed only on paper… no staff, no office, no funding, no IP, no prototype, no design… just the idea of commercializing the T-Zero.
Musk’s first move after joining was buying the rights to the "Tesla Motors" name from Siewert. He was introduced to T-Zero by JB Straubel, who became Tesla’s first CTO. After experiencing it, Musk wanted to commercialize the concept, and AC Propulsion (makers of the T-Zero) connected him with Eberhard and Tarpenning.
Musk has been directly involved in the design and engineering of all Tesla vehicles since the start… the 2008 Roadster’s delay came from design and engineering changes he insisted on.
In Eberhard’s lawsuit, he sought recognition as one of only two founders (with Tarpenning), but the judge rejected this, struck that claim. The court argued that Musk, Straubel, and Wright were also integral to Tesla’s founding. The case was settled with all five recognized as founders.
Eberhard and Tarpenning left before Tesla’s first car hit the market. It was Musk who led Tesla to success with the Model S, X, 3, and Y
And you said SpaceX was successful because of Tom Mueller - Here’s what Thomas Mueller(top SpaceX rocket engineer) said about Elon Musk:
“Elon was the best mentor I've ever had. Just how to have drive and be an entrepreneur and influence my team and really make things happen. He's a super smart guy and he learns from talking to people. He's so sharp, he just picks it up. When we first started he didn't know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he's practically running propulsion there because he's come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He's always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he's a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he's picked up too.”
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Then he took his ~$22–30 million share from the 1999 Zip2 sale and put almost all of it into X.com (his online bank/financial services startup)
X.com merged with Confinity to become PayPal. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Elon walked away with roughly $180 million.
He then bet the overwhelming majority of that fortune on two extremely risky bets:
Founded SpaceX in 2002 (putting in ~$100M of his own money)
Invested heavily in Tesla starting 2004 (when it was near death)
He came very close to going completely broke multiple times especially during SpaceX’s first 3 failed launches and Tesla’s 2008 production hell. The book shows he essentially had almost nothing left by the late 2000s.
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Lad os holde os til fakta i stedet for venstrefløjs-myter.
Elon grundlagde X.com i 1999 som en online bank og finansplatform – det var hans idé og selskab. Det mergede med Confinity (PayPal-produktet) i en ligeværdig fusion, hvor Musk blev CEO og største aktionær. PayPal blev ikke 'opkøbt' af ham – han var med til at bygge det, der revolutionerede online-betalinger. Han solgte sine aktier og brugte næsten alt på at starte SpaceX (fra nul, med raketter der lander igen) og investere i Tesla (som han reddede og gjorde til EV-leder). Resultat?
Hundredtusinder af jobs, genbrugelige raketter, Starlink der forbinder fjerne områder, og nu trillionær-status fra reel værdiskabelse – ikke fra at omfordele andres penge.
Hvad har Pelle Dragsted (og du?) skabt ud over at kritisere succes?
En bog om 'nordisk socialisme'? En karriere i at kræve flere skatter og regulering?
Forskellen er enkel:
Nogle bygger fremtiden.
Andre brokker sig over dem, der gør det.
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20 STEPS ELON MUSK TOOK IN BECOMING THE WORLD’S FIRST TRILLIONAIRE
1. Left South Africa as a teenager, moved to Canada, then the US to chase bigger opportunities instead of staying comfortable.
2. Dropped out of his Stanford PhD program after just 2 days because he wanted to build something real right away.
3. Co-founded Zip2 in 1995 with his brother, an online city guide when the internet was still new.
4. Sold Zip2 in 1999 for around $307 million and actually got his hands on serious money for the first time.
5. Used that money to start X.com, an online bank/payment company, in 1999.
6. Merged X.com with Confinity to create what became PayPal and fought to make online payments mainstream.
7. Sold his PayPal stake when eBay bought the company for $1.5 billion in 2002, walked away with roughly $180–250 million.
8. Founded SpaceX in 2002 with $100 million of his own money because he wanted humanity to become multi-planetary.
9. Invested in Tesla in 2004 (became chairman), then took over as CEO in 2008 during the financial crisis when the company was dying.
10. Survived 2008 near-bankruptcy by personally pouring in his last money and convincing investors at the final hour for both Tesla and SpaceX.
11. Got the first successful Falcon 1 launch in 2008, the moment SpaceX stopped being a joke and started being real.
12. Took Tesla public in 2010 and kept pushing electric cars even when everyone said they’d never work at scale.
13. Forced SpaceX to develop reusable rockets (Falcon 9 first landing in 2015) when the entire industry said it was impossible and too expensive.
14. Scaled Tesla massively with Gigafactories, the Model 3 launch, and vertical integration, turning it from a niche car company into a trillion-dollar valuation beast at peaks.
15. Founded Neuralink in 2016 to work on brain interfaces because he saw AI as an existential risk that needed solutions.
16. Started The Boring Company in 2016 to fix traffic with tunnels after getting frustrated with LA traffic.
17. Bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, rebranded it to X, and turned it into his everything app vision despite massive backlash and debt.
18. Doubled down on Full Self-Driving, Optimus robot, and AI across his companies while most competitors lagged.
19. Kept growing Tesla stock value, SpaceX private valuation (Starlink, Starship progress), and other assets through constant execution even during market crashes and regulatory fights.
20. By 2026, the combined value of his stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, X, and other ventures pushed his net worth past $1 trillion — making him the world’s first trillionaire.
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Yall give him way too much credit for PayPal 😂😂
If you actually go back or are familiar with the history, he had little if any involvement in the PayPal product, and there’s a reason he was removed shortly after the merger between Confinity (the actual developers of PayPal) and X.com
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Yes to starlink,
But he had very little to do with the actual PayPal product lmao. That was developed under Confinity
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He founded x.com which merged with Confinity which owned PayPal. You braindead socialists have so much dogma that is simply wrong.
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It really is an example in extrapolation to absurdity. Something socialists do quite well. It starts with Musk owning and founding x.com in 1999 as an online financial services/payments company. x.com merged with confinity (which owned PayPal) in March of 2000 on roughly equal terms. This created the false claim that Musk bought PayPal, he didn't it was a merger.
Then Tesla, at that time a small company, needed investors for its model A Series in 2004. Musk invested around $6.5M which made him the majority shareholder. He didn't become CEO until 2008 which he did to lead it through bankruptcy (2008), and scaled it massively afterwards. He didn't buy a finished car company.
These two datapoints which these brainless socialist are already extrapolation to absurdity then get further extrapolated as they believe the just bought all his companies.
It's hard to argue with them because they are so fucking stupid and things like this are dogma to them.
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Elon Musk no fundó PayPal desde cero ni Tesla desde cero. Cofundó X.com, que luego se fusionó con Confinity y terminó convirtiéndose en PayPal. Fue expulsado como CEO mientras estaba de viaje. Y en Tesla entró después de fundada, como inversionista clave, hasta terminar desplazando a los fundadores originales y quedándose con el relato público de la empresa.
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PayPal nació de la fusión del banco X.com con Confinity. Elon Musk fue expulsado como CEO durante un viaje. Tesla no la creó el, si no que hizo lo que le hicieron a él en PayPal.
El propio Elon Musk es conocido por intentar describir la historia
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