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Comment by LambdaComplex | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that he tried renaming PayPal to X, and that's actually the event that led to him being replaced (because there were actually people around then to tell him that it was a terrible idea).

He's been trying to have something named X for a long time.

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Almost. When Musk was fired from PayPal, it wasn't called PayPal yet. It was called X.com. PayPal was a competing company started by Theil.

The two companies merged, and a lot of discontent came about in that process, leading to Musk being kicked out.

Musk says it was because he was too insistent that the new company should be called X rather than PayPal, but everyone else says that it was because Musk was incompetent and that incompetence was hurting the company.

I don't claim to know who's closer to correct, but the ouster was brutal and each party had lots of vitriol to spew about the other.

> Musk says it was because he was too insistent that the new company should be called X rather than PayPal, but everyone else says that it was because Musk was incompetent

I feel like one of those is an example of the other :)

It wasn't about the name obviously, Must was pushing grandiose plan of creating an Internet-based financial... everything really (bank, payments, investments, etc etc). While Thiel, Levchin, and Co were pushing for much more modest (but also more realistic) business model of "payment over the email". In addition Musk also decided to do a complete rewrite of the entire Linux-based system with Windows and M$ dev stack (which obviously also required replacing the entire dev team). Once Thiel and his gang came to the board with the ultimatum, Musk was done.

> ... complete rewrite ... with Windows ...

Whaaa...?

Remind me the timeframe, this would have been very early 2000s, right?

Does anyone care to speculate on valid technical or business reasons for doing this? Could they perhaps have been battling flaky tcp/ip implementations or something?

My app doesn't offer comment editing, but I asked as a kneejerk before searching (doh).

It was for the toolchain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729

> There were more smart programmers in the gaming industry than anywhere else.

Having worked in the gaming industry... yeah, no. (This is a really common belief amongst non-engineers, tho.)

> Microsoft had huge support libraries. So you could get a DLL that could do anything, but you couldn’t get—you couldn’t get Linux libraries that could do anything.

Having read that amazing post-mortem of Microsoft's BSD->Windows migration for (parts of) Hotmail at around the same time... yeah, very no, certainly for web stuff circa 2000.

"...to be writing our front-end code in Microsoft C++ instead of Linux."

deserves to be with "Opening Twitter timeline results in thousands of RPC calls" :-)

I read "The Founders" and it quotes Musk stating "The stuff that was being done in video games was way more advanced than in any other field" as the reason to switch to rewrite the _front_end_ (the Web app) with Visual C++ and host it in Windows. So... yeah.

He, and his wife at the time, named one of his kids X Æ A-12.

Really.

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