PayPal, which was founded in 1998, and its rival X.com, an online bank. One of X’s founders was a quirky young man who had scored $22 million from the sale of his first company, an online yellow pages type business that he had ultimately lost control of. His name was Elon Musk. No one had ever heard of Musk then, and he would be far down the tech hierarchy compared to Bezos, although later they would become fierce rivals in the space race. Musk did not initially clock in with me, and I hardly wrote about him when X merged with PayPal, a company filled with more promising entrepreneurs, like
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