In September 2000 Elon Musk boarded a plane for Australia as chief executive of X.com, the company that owned PayPal, and by the time he landed the board had replaced him with Peter Thiel. This episode follows the whole story: Zip2 and X.com, the rivalry and merger with Thiel and Max Levchin's Confinity, the fight over Microsoft and Unix, the X name, the record losses, the vote, the separation agreement that protected one word, and the eBay sale that left Musk as PayPal's largest shareholder.
Founder Stories tells the story of one founder per episode, told plainly and in order.