Elon Musk is a South African tech entrepreneur responsible for running three of the world’s most successful companies: Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. He also was the architect of many other crucial aspects of the tech world, but one specifically stands out: PayPal.
Everyone knows about Elon’s current successes with Twitter and Tesla. But to truly understand his creativity, we must go back to the very beginning. In 1999, Elon Musk founded a company known as X.com. It was a hybrid website combining online banking with e-mail. In fact, it was one of the first online banks that was federally insured with FDIC. In 2000, X.com merged with Confinity another online bank, to streamline profits, as X.com was not as well-known as Confinity’s emerging software PayPal. Musk, then established Microsoft as their software system for running PayPal. This created a divide between many employees who preferred a different style software system. However, this Microsoft base code would propel PayPal to new heights even after Elon musk's departure from the board as CEO. As a result of the success of the Microsoft based system, eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Musk received $176 million from the sale.
His divergent thinking when using the Microsoft base code was definitely unpopular among the staffers at PayPal. However, it allowed the company to move forward with a software that would stand the test of time. The old software, known as UNIX, is a very intricate system with multiple subsidiaries and multiple different types of language associated with the program. However, by using Microsoft, Elon Musk was focused on the long-term future of the company. This is pay dividends for PayPal in the following years since its acquisition by eBay. This is because, now every website with a transactional service or good has a PayPal option. The simple UNIX software would not have been able to handle all the traffic that PayPal currently receives today. It was a very smart business and logistical decision to switch over to Microsoft.
Additionally, his neurodivergence allows him to see things other people are not able to. Elon Musk has Asperger's Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism that causes lack of nonverbal communication skills, along with mental rigidity, and an ability to hyperfocus on things that are of interest to them. This hyperfocus pairs with the ability of many people with Asperger's to think of unorthodox solutions to the problems that are in front of them. This ties directly back into PayPal. No one at the current state of PayPal in 2000 would have thought to completely terraform the software system to make it for the long term. But Elon Musk did, and it allowed PayPal to blossom into the online banking super network that we know and love today. This Asperger's syndrome diagnosis also empowers other people socially. Before Elon Musk came out with his diagnosis during his monologue on Saturday Night Live, people thought of Asperger's progressively, but with limitations on what people with this ability could do. Now, the full potential of Asperger's syndrome is on display with Elon Musk, all the way from a young man who founded a banking company that transformed the world, to an old soul launching rockets into space with the goal of colonizing Mars.
This is interesting because I was unaware that Elon Musk was involved in PayPal. However, I do think that you should have spent time going over some of his more notable achievements with the rockets and electric cars because I feel that those innovations are going to have a greater impact than PayPal. One other thing that I did like was that you mentioned that his Asperger's has also played a part in allowing him to become this divergent thinker.
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