To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal. And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist. Here's how that happened. 1/ - ThreadSky

garius.bsky.social • 627 days ago

To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.

And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.

Here's how that happened. 1/

Comments

grumqa.bsky.social•627 days ago

I will never get past the part where he insisted on redoing it all on Microsoft. Fits with his attempts to portray things as cool when a lot of us are cringing.

I want Steve Ballmer back. He was more entertaining and less destructive.

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

Levchin's team worked out that the memory leak issues in MSSQL at the time would have meant having to reboot the servers every 13 seconds.

grumqa.bsky.social•627 days ago

Given how long SQL Server takes to come up, that'd take a *lot* of servers!

I am beginning to suspect he might be a doofus.

shervyn.bsky.social•626 days ago

So glad that you’re over here and that I don’t have to rely on the site formerly known as Twitter for your history threads!

garius.bsky.social•626 days ago

Well depends slightly on whether I'm able to build up enough followers here to make crossposting them worthwhile (or shifting to main here), but hopefully!

dreadships.bsky.social•626 days ago

Suspect the invite thing makes a difference with who's around to interact with. Don't know if you've noticed any difference in demographic?

garius.bsky.social•626 days ago

Yeah, I deliberately give mine to randos on twitter with sane timelines.

Improves the BlueSky gene pool.

shervyn.bsky.social•626 days ago

All the things crossed. Obv I follow you over there too and will do so until the whole site crumbles under the aspiration of the very mediocre white man running the place.

professorshyguy.bsky.social•627 days ago

Im on the “I hope Elon fails” boat & after reading this I think he will. As far as I can tell all successful things he’s been involved with weren’t his ideas, but he still thinks his ideas are genius and not just his investments. I’m gonna be real happy to watch X fail. I hope he goes legit broke.

innocence.com•627 days ago

It just amazes me how often people overlook the role of luck in Musk’s career. The Zip2 sale never happens if Rod Schrock isn’t hellbent on AltaVista challenging Yahoo as a general purpose portal, a decision which also gave Google a major opening. And Zip2 was a PITA that never made a dime for AV.

innocence.com•627 days ago

Zip2: also ran on Windows.

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

Yup. Zip2 was a 'right time, right large corporate idiot' sell. Fair play to them, but Musk learned the wrong lessons from it in many ways.

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

In early 1999 Zip2, the newspaper online directory service Musk had co-founded, was sold to Compaq for $300m. Elon's share of this was about $20m.

Elon begins hitting up old connections from his time at ScotiaBank.

He says he wants to launch "A Financial Superstore" /2

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

Having drummed up support, he founds a new company to take this forward. He immediately buys the https://x.com domain off Pittsburgh PowerComputer for 1.5 MILLION shares of A-Stock in his new company, X.

Advisors express concern over X as a brand. Elon loves it. /3

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

He describes https://x.com as "the coolest URL on the internet". X, he says, marks the spot for treasure. That's how people will see it he insists.

He invests $12.5m of his own cash into X and begins trying to build an 'online bank'. /4

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

Musk's obsession with speed and disdain for regulation means X developers love him, but causes worry with the financial expert side.

First Western, the banking partner, discover that accounts are being opened under fake names.

The finance peeps try (but fail) to coup Elon out. /5

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

In early 2000, X hits the news for a vulnerability that allows money to be moved between accounts with just account details. This is fixed, but spooks investors.

Elon agrees with investor Mike Moritz from Sequoia to become CTO while Bill Harris (ex-Intuit) becomes CEO. /6

garius.bsky.social•627 days ago

Meanwhile, over the road (literally), a startup called Confinity is making waves. It's funded by Peter Thiel, who is also its CEO, but is the brainchild of Ukrainian Max Levchin its CTO.

Backed by Nokia, Confinity is making a way to 'beam' money between PalmPilots by infrared. /7

sheofsea.bsky.social•52 days ago

📌

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply