11/5/2023 0 Comments Elon musk paypal moneyAs the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer. Well, we started off first by offering people $20 if they opened an account. SAL KHAN: And how did it start? How did people just even know to use it? I mean, obviously, both buyer and seller have to be involved.ĮLON MUSK: Yeah. After the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers. So we started Paypal on University Avenue. And that actually created major problems. Here's a conversation between Salman Khan and Elon Musk about it that corroborates the story (you can watch the video here, starting at 11:20 ):ĮLON MUSK: I didn't expect PayPal's growth rate to be what it was. ( NOTE: Want a referral program like PayPal's? Try ReferralCandy free today.) The bonuses were gradually phased out, first by reducing them to $5, then by adding more verification hoops (like bank account verification) so they became more difficult to get. (PayPal acquired 1 million users by March 2000 and 5 million by summer 2000.) We must have spent tens of millions in signup and referral bonuses the first year. Users could send it to someone else or withdraw it. The money was simply added to their account. "Initially users just had to sign up, confirm their email address, and add a (unique, authorized) credit card. Referrals helped PayPal get 7 to 10% daily growth, catapulting their user base to over 100 million members.Īccording to David O Sacks, original COO of PayPal, PayPal used to literally pay people to invite their friends: In 2015, the company had a market capitalization of US$46.6 billion. According to Elon Musk, PayPal spent about US$60 million on its referral incentives. PayPal's referrals happened almost entirely through email, blogs and IMs.ĭespite that limitation, it was incredibly successful. The simple answer is that the Internet just wasn't so big then. This might seem counter-intuitive: Why isn't the story of PayPal's referral program more popular than Dropbox's? With a net worth of more than $15.3 billion thanks to his holdings in Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity, Musk can purchase whatever he likes, including defunct domain names.Few people know that Dropbox's famously successful referral program was actually inspired by PayPal's. But PayPal later went public and got scooped up by Ebay for $1.5 billion in 2002, netting Musk somewhere in the range of $160 to $180 million after taxes.įast forward a decade and a half - and three multi-billion-dollar enterprises in the electric car, solar energy, and space transport industries later - and Musk is now one of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet. However, the entire company was rebranded as PayPal in 2001, a year after Musk left the company over disagreements with other executive members. More from The Verge: The news industry is worried Facebook and Google have far too much power Tesla wins bid to build world's largest lithium-ion battery for South Australia Hackers are targeting nuclear power plant operators in the USīack when the two companies merged, it was decided by investors and board members that X.com had more brand recognition than Confinity. Confinity was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, now notable internet entrepreneurs and investors - Thiel became a billionaire by investing early in Facebook, while Levchin went on to help found Yelp and currently operates a digital loan service called Affirm. To understand the significance of the URL, you have to dial all the way back to 2000, when Musk's online financial services company X.com merged with Confinity, which at the time operated a little-known money transfer service called PayPal. "We are delighted to sell the domain X.com back to its previous owner, Elon Musk," a PayPal spokesperson said in a statement given to BI. Now, Musk has reclaimed a bit of that internet history for himself by purchasing the defunct domain name X.com from his former employer PayPal, which confirmed the purchase to Business Insider after internet domain blog Domain Investing reported on the purchase earlier today. Elon Musk was a successful internet entrepreneur long before the first Tesla Model X rolled off the assembly line and SpaceX fired its first rocket into orbit.
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