Quote (KrWWW @ May 21 2022 11:39pm)
he co-founded paypal.. that's where he got his money
lol no
He co-founded Zip2, from which all the code he wrote was scrapped when they had to make a working product so they could get acquired. Zip2 was sold to Comex and he got 22m from it. Basically failed upwards as his investors bailed him out to recover their money.
Then he took that money and co-founded X.com. Same thing. He wrote a bunch of spaghetti code, and when it was clear they weren't generating a product one of his investors brought in outside coders to build a minimal product they could use to get acquired. Paypal acquired X.com. Elon was never associated with Paypal except for the fact that he was booted when Paypal acquired his failing website at the height of the dotcom boom.
He took his money from the X.com acquisition and bought part of solar city, tesla, and Spacex. He didn't found any of them, he just bought a large stake in a bunch of very early companies and got lucky that Tesla was successful enough to fund them all.
If Elon was any time but the dotcom boom where all of his failures could get sold becuase they were related to the internet he would have crashed and burned a long time ago. Similarly, if he didn't have rich parents with connections he wouldn't have even been able to start those companies or get them acquired when they failed.
This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on May 21 2022 11:18pm