Originally Posted by
UltraFan
Oookay, a little history lesson is in order, methinks.
PayPal was founded by six people and Elon Musk... wasn't one of them. He tried to ride the dot-com wave and founded a company called X.com. His idea was to sell very expensive PDAs to people who would then somehow perform banking transactions using the said PDA's... infrared port. The idea failed miserably, but Musk was backed by Greg Kouri who had money. X.com offered a merger to a company called Confinity. The companies merged in 1999. In 2000, Musk "decided that X.com would cease operations", read "it flopped". Since being the cash cow was his only role in the affair, two weeks later Musk was thrown out of Confinity (or, as his official biography says, "he was replaced as the CEO", and the name of the company was changed to PayPal.
He was, but you failed to mention he remained on the board and collected $165M in 2002.
Originally Posted by
UltraFan
And finally, the SpaceX. Musk's fast talking gained him access to NASA's technology which helped built something resembling a rocket. And it kind of works, even though "reusing" rocket boosters has been proven to be a very bad and very expensive idea. It's not the technical part of the project that's of interest, however, but the financial one. Must finances SpaceX with the money advances for future launches, including from DoD and NASA. Rings a bell?
Laughable...
That'll be why Ariane is developing reuseable boosters...