PayPal
Article
PayPal is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 14, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Thiel describes how PayPal solved this: they advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users”; “Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal”; “At PayPal, as per his first wife”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, Ashlee Vance, Boeing.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: February 14, 2023
- Last seen: September 18, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Twitter (3 shared issues)
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- Ashlee Vance (2 shared issues)
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- Boeing (2 shared issues)
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- Elon (2 shared issues)
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- Elon Musk (2 shared issues)
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- Facebook Threads (2 shared issues)
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- Gwynne Shotwell (2 shared issues)
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- Hyperloop (2 shared issues)
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- Mars (2 shared issues)
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- Musk (2 shared issues)
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- NASA (2 shared issues)
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- Peter Thiel (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Thiel describes how PayPal solved this: they advertised really heavily within the small community of eBay power users, who often buy and sell to other eBay power users. Eventually many of these people started using PayPal, and then other people who might want to transact with eBay power users started using it, and so on to the rest of society. Mark Zuckerberg solved this by starting with Harvard students, then other college students, and then the rest of the world.
Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart - a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.
At PayPal, as per his first wife:
This book taught me that everyone always predicts Elon will fail at whatever he does. When he started the original X (later PayPal), everyone who knew anything about finance told him he would fail. Just because he was a hotshot coder who could write software didn’t mean he could navigate the totally-different and heavily-regulated world of finance. Elon, who started out indeed knowing nothing about finance, learned on the job and got a $200 million exit. Gawker voted Tesla #1 in their Biggest Tech Flops of 2007 (also on their list were Facebook ads and the Android . . . maybe journalists don’t actually understand tech?)
Hmm. I was glancing at the new Isaacson biography. One of the sources is Max Levchin, another PayPal executive. Max is now a billionaire himself, and seems mostly retired. As far as I know he doesn’t depend on Elon for anything, and he’s rich enough that he would be hard to threaten. And he was mostly on Thiel’s side against Elon, and tells a lot of stories of Elon making stupid decisions at Paypal (which he explicitly calls out as stupid decisions). So he’s about as fair a source as we’re going to get. Still, he has stories like: