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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone else, like me, thought eBay owned PayPal:

> On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. On September 30, 2014, eBay Inc. announced the divestiture of PayPal as an independent company, which was completed on July 20, 2015.

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Yes. The Masters of the Universe decided that there was "value to be unlocked" by spinning off PayPal. Or at least...someone's spreadsheet said there was value to be unlocked..

Carl Icahn to be exact

And there actually was... PayPal itself is still (after this news) worth more than both eBay and PayPal were as a single company. Add both together and it was an obvious win.

Strange that since eBay probably owns a lot of PayPal stock that they would try to tank Paypal. Maybe eBay sold their Paypal stock holdings ahead of this change.

Wouldn't that be insider trading?

eBay has no stake in PayPal, that was the whole purpose of splitting it out. Shareholders of eBay before the split were given PYPL shares on a 1:1 basis.

I think to win that game you have to wait a few years and then compare the aggregate value vs the pre-split value adjusted for average sector gain over the period.

I remembered that eBay spun off PayPal, but I thought PayPal still owned x.com. But after checking, it looks like Elon Musk held onto that domain before selling his steak in PayPal.

Elon bought x.com back from PayPal in July 2017.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/884580654117076992

Paypal steak does not sound like it would taste good

Luckily, there's a cryptocurrency for that: https://steaktoken.com/

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