Paypal is not from Musk, and he was eventually ousted when he tried to rebrand it to X.
The company was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink, later it was renamed Confinity, a company which developed security software for hand-held devices. When it had no success with that business model, it switched its focus to a digital wallet.
In 2000, Musk had become CEO after the merger of his X.com and Confinity, the venture-backed company co-founded by Peter Thiel that owned the PayPal program that was a more popular money-transfer service than the one offered by Musk. The board ousted Musk as CEO and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.
Tesla is also not of his own. He pretty much just bought an already working company.
He certainly made it his own over the years, investing early on and then overseeing its growth from niche luxury carmaker to mass production, adding on a solar business, and pushing self-driving technologies. However, the tech titan – and now the world’s richest man – was actually Tesla’s 4th CEO when he took that role in October 2008.
I have no idea about Space X, but Paypal and Tesla are absolutely not from Elon Musk. He just happened to cross roads with those companies and invest his emerald money in those.
If he contributed to those companies, it’s via money, not ideas and intellect.
SpaceX’s reusable rockets is from SpaceX if I understand it correctly but…
Obviously musk didn’t build the rocket or planned the rocket but that is not the point.
Nasa had plans for reusable rockets but for the longest time, the financial risk of development was higher than the value of reusable rockets. SpaceX didn’t care about the financial risk because they needed thousands of satellites for the most brain dead idea ever, starlink and because Elon is bad with money (Twitter…)
So SpaceX was “successful” because they were crazy enough to run 2 extremely dangerous projects.
