I’m sure he’d love that comparison. But Elon is responsible for PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and now Grok. I have a Starlink antenna on my roof because of him, and I take my kids to school safely and quietly in a car that, 15 years ago, someone willing to spend 20 million dollars would not have been able to buy. Sam? An iris scanning crypto scam. I think that’s all he ever got off the ground. With ChatGPT, he positioned himself at the right place at the right time. And by dubious means, too.
Actually, he was responsible for the competitor that PayPal bought out because the market wasn't big enough for two companies, and was forced out of PayPal because he was pushing ruinously bad ideas.
Depends on whose viewpoint you read. He was the biggest shareholder and received $176 million when PayPal was sold to eBay. He was there from the beginning. And he wasn’t the marketing guy. Whether you like him or not, that’s all very different from Altman.
He wasn't there from the beginning. PayPal was trademarked and was at MVP stage when they merged. He was the biggest shareholder, absolutely. His operational input to PayPal was four months in 2000, before being fired. Since then his involvement was "collecting shareholder dividends".
He wasn't the marketing guy. He was the guy who got fired because his tenure as CEO was "I don't understand this Java stuff, and I want to contribute to the codebase, so we really need to rewrite it in Classic ASP", problematic on so many levels.
No - this is all from Max Levchin (who actually did build the MVP of PayPal) in Founders at Work.
Musk made some amusing comments that he thought were insightful about this that showed how little he really knew:
He also suggested that PayPal should have written its front end in C++ (because C++ in 2000 was an excellent choice for front-end web development?!?), and later cited Blizzard writing WoW in C++ as proof that this was the correct decision that Max and the board never understood.
(Oh, and "Microsoft has a DLL library for anything you could possibly ever want to do, but you can't get Unix libraries for anything.")
He also said that Max "never really understood this" despite Musk's efforts to educate him, and that these decisions are also why PayPal "hasn't been able really add any new features".
He then complained about the Board's decision to fire him as making him "more careful about who he allowed to invest in his companies in the future": 1) he was the largest shareholder, but it was not "his" company, he only held a fraction of it, and 2) the idea wasn't even his! Really what he means here is "I want to make sure to hand-select a bunch of yes-men so I get what I want regardless of whose idea it is, how good the idea is, and what I want to do with it."
Bought PayPal because he couldn't do it, was the CEO for four months in early 2000 before being fired by the board the morning after he left for his honeymoon because he'd spent most of that four months trying to throw away a working Java build because he didn't understand Solaris or Java, so felt that it should be re-written in Classic ASP because he understood that.
