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Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

>PayPal is the main reason I'm not positive on Elon Musk's history... they've been "known bad" for many years, including when he was there. He started his fortune from building a company that knowingly scams people. :(

There's plenty of possible things to criticize him for, but this seems like a weird one. PayPal was started by Confinity. He founded X.com in 99ish and they merged like a year after, but then he got the boot as CEO in a matter of, months? Weeks? Don't remember why, but while he still owned a ton of stock he was out in management. Then Ebay bought it all in like 2002. 20 years after his departure, itself before he had any real chance to make a mark, and 18 years after being bought, seems like a bit of a stretch to hold that of all things against him?

Edit: also man what a crazy time, I mean it was obviously crazy even at the moment but still thinking back on the timelines it's still wild.

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>20 years after his departure, itself before he had any real chance to make a mark, and 18 years after being bought

You seem to imply PayPal being scummy is a new development. Always has been.

I remember reading where Elon talked about Paypal. They implemented policies he thought were stupid but he was out.

It’s even more bizarre because things like Patreon and SMS text authentication weren’t around in 2002 and hardly even in 2012.

Might as well criticise Tim Bernes-Lee for not developing the HTTPS spec in the 80s

Ahhh, I haven't really had a close interest in Elon's stuff. Only really know of him as PayPal -> Tesla -> SpaceX.

Re: PayPal, just knew he used to run it, and they've been scammy pretty much from the start. Thus the poor impression from that.

Also Re: PayPal: I used to know a guy that worked there from the very early days, and he told wild stories about employees freezing people's accounts and withdrawing the money for their own use. Apparently it was widespread, and pretty common.

That seems incredibly doubtful and highly illegal. I can’t imagine that happening without lawsuits being filed.

Yep, clearly very illegal.

It's kind of funny you say that too, as people have been saying that forever. eg "If they were so bad, stuff would have been done" (sic).

Look at PayPal's reputation going back a decade or two, and you'll see there are tremendous amounts of stories about it. People used to set up dedicated websites collecting the copious horror stories. Not kidding about that, in any way.

At the same time, there were multitudes of other people going "Oh, I've never had a problem with them, you must have done something wrong". (etc)

They've cleaned up their image _a bit_, so things don't seem as obviously bad now (latest development aside). Back then though... sheesh...

I avoid PayPal like the plague, but I would require some hard evidence to convince me that employees were regularly stealing users money.

No idea if that's still the case (hopefully not), but it was widely known when they were a young company. It shouldn't take much effort to look into, if you actually care enough to investigate. :)

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