>Musk had very little to do with PayPal.That's rather inaccurate. Musk's company was X.com and Thiel/Levchin/Noseks's was called Confinity. They had a 50/50 merger in early 2000, and at first the new company was called X.com.
Furthermore, Confinity[1] was doing Palm Pilot payments under the PayPal brand[2], while X.com was working on internet money transmission over email. Which idea was more useful in the long run? (hint: if you chose Palm Pilot's - you're wrong)
Much of the disinformation stems from a book called the "The Paypal Wars" written by a Thiel fanboy, that is embarrassingly biased. Musk writes:
"The only negativity in recent years was due to a book called The PayPal Wars, written by a sycophantic jackass called Eric Jackson. This guy was one notch above an intern at PayPal in the first few years of the company, but gives the impression he was a key player and privy to all the high level discussions. Eric couldn't find a real publisher, so Peter funded Eric to self-publish the book. Since Eric worships Peter, the outcome was obvious - Peter sounds like Mel Gibson in Braveheart and my role is somewhere between negligible and a bad seed. However, to his credit, Peter didn't realize the book would be as bad as it was and apologized to me personally at a Room 9 board meeting at David Sacks's home in LA."[3]
Post-merger it's hard to say who did what exactly, and Levchin for example was instrumental in Paypal's anti-fraud system, a key development that allowed the company to navigate around a potentially ruinous situation.
The bottom line is, 3 hyper-smart guys (Thiel, Levchin and Nosek), don't give away essentially 50% of their shares to some someone else (X.com) on a whim. This was a calculated and deliberate decision. Similarly, it's unlikely Musk would have succeeded alone either, and thus why they are all called co-founders of PayPal, Inc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity
[2] http://www.halplotkin.com/cnbcs029.htm
[3] http://gawker.com/230076/an-alternate-history-according-to-e...