So the real turning point in his riches to more riches story was Zip2. People have never heard of it because it was never anything even vaguely important, but it was a website in the midst of the dot-com era and Compaq, desperate to be “in” threw a bunch of money at it. Elon basically won a lottery.
His next stop was to roll his winnings to try to get X (not the current one, an online payment platform) going. By all measures, it didn’t get anywhere, pretty well stomped by Paypal.
In the midst of that competition, X folded into PayPal. Against all reason, they made Elon the head of the now joined PayPal/X, despite being on what was obviously the losing side of the business. It was a disaster and they ultimately sidelined him to save the company because he was so bad.
Ok, so now he’s on the sideline but a large shareholder in PayPal… And there came $1.5 billion from eBay to acquire, and that got him to about a quarter billion, just for being there.
Then the next significant stop was to jump on Tesla, rewrite their history to declare himself founder and largely let them do what they will while he collected the money. Sounds like in recent years he’s started to believe his own mega-genius hype, and has been imposing his direction more, and not to Tesla’s betterment.
Like every step of the way, he either fell into lucky circumstances and managed to get everyone to feed his ego. I suppose his “skill” was taking credit for Tesla despite only being a source of funding way early on.
So the real turning point in his riches to more riches story was Zip2. People have never heard of it because it was never anything even vaguely important, but it was a website in the midst of the dot-com era and Compaq, desperate to be “in” threw a bunch of money at it. Elon basically won a lottery.
His next stop was to roll his winnings to try to get X (not the current one, an online payment platform) going. By all measures, it didn’t get anywhere, pretty well stomped by Paypal.
In the midst of that competition, X folded into PayPal. Against all reason, they made Elon the head of the now joined PayPal/X, despite being on what was obviously the losing side of the business. It was a disaster and they ultimately sidelined him to save the company because he was so bad.
Ok, so now he’s on the sideline but a large shareholder in PayPal… And there came $1.5 billion from eBay to acquire, and that got him to about a quarter billion, just for being there.
Then the next significant stop was to jump on Tesla, rewrite their history to declare himself founder and largely let them do what they will while he collected the money. Sounds like in recent years he’s started to believe his own mega-genius hype, and has been imposing his direction more, and not to Tesla’s betterment.
Like every step of the way, he either fell into lucky circumstances and managed to get everyone to feed his ego. I suppose his “skill” was taking credit for Tesla despite only being a source of funding way early on.