I love what Musk has done post PayPal, but no reason to rewrite history here.
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...
Regarding the name, PayPal the product -- which included a web app and not just the Palm Pilot product -- launched before the merger. I remember evaluating both x.com and paypal when I was in high school selling computer parts on auction -- at Haggle.com.
Finally, starting your comment with "Sigh, blah blah middlebrow blah blah" just kind of makes you seem.... yeah.
It must be fun to give more weight to the side you support.
> It must be fun to give more weight to the side you support.
No, actually an interview with Musk is a primary source, too. You realize "primary source" is an actual thing and not just something I made up? Are you trolling or just being argumentative for no reason?
It's very hard to say if PayPal would have succeeded without him. For one, it would have probably been much harder for PayPal to raise 100 Mio without the X.com merger. They got that amount shortly before the dotcom crash, so it was crucial for their survival.
That's false.