• TehBamski@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This isn’t entirely accurate.

    X.com was the name of the online banking company that Elon Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho, cofounded in 1999.

    They merged with competitor Confinity Inc, which was cofounded by Ken Howery, Max Levchin, Peter Theil, Yu Pan, and Luke Nosek.

    What’s accurate however, is that they did pull a board meeting while Musk was in Hawaii, to kick him out and rebrand from X.com to PayPal

    • Raltoid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Musk wasn’t kicked out over the name though, well not just the name.

      The board removed him as CEO because Thiel literally quit the company. Since Musk demanded he rewrite Confinity from unix to windows(since the x.com backend and it’s stupid e-mail based banking was made for windows and Musk doesn’t understand unix/linux…(that’s why he doesn’t know about x.org for instance.)).

      Confinitys better method and code-base was basically what Musk bought when they “merged” the companies. And everyone else on the board knew that PayPal wouldn’t get anywhere if they did what Musk said. So they had “secret” board meeting and replaced Musk with Thiel, and the rest of PayPal is history.