

Does Elon Musk come from a banking family? - hackaflocka

He somehow got banks to accept PayPal (if I have his biography correct.)<p>No matter how great a programmer you are, you know that banks are probably going to say no to something like PayPal (at least back in the mid-nineties).<p>So, this question has been nagging me for a while. How did he get them to accept payment transfers in and out of PayPal?
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dangrossman
Not that I know of, but Musk wasn't part of PayPal at the beginning. He was
off using the millions and VC connections he had from building and selling
Zip2 to AltaVista/Compaq to start X.com, his own online banking company. Its
early investors included banks; they were onboard from the start.

PayPal started as Confinity with Levchin/Thiel/Nosek/Howery and had its own
set of finance industry investors. Thiel was from finance himself, so he's
probably the source of their early connections.

It wasn't until 2 years after PayPal was founded that it was acquired by
Musk's X.com, and the merged company kept the PayPal brand. Immediately after
the acquisition, they raised another $100 million with investors including
Deutsche Bank, Vertex and Development Bank of Singapore and JP Morgan.

I don't share the same assumption that banks would be especially hesitant to
process transactions for a well-funded tech company in 1999, though. I think
the fact that they were investing in these companies readily is evidence
otherwise. I'm not sure I can ignore what I know today to say whether it was
obvious or not 15 years ago that if person-to-person online payments got
popular, they'd become a significant target for international payment fraud.

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_delirium
I would guess Peter Thiel, who was already heavily connected in the financial
industry, was the one who made that part happen. Before co-founding PayPal in
1998, he had already founded a hedge fund in 1996, and before that worked at
Credit Suisse.

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sidcool
Doesn't matter. He has created Tesla and SpaceX.

