David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. There’s a classic case of Elon being Elon and doing what he does best and that’s focus. Yup. No more Palm Pilots. Then in February 2002, PayPal goes public and it’s… actually, this is interesting. Remember this is February 2002, this is after the crash, after the .com crash. This was the first consumer internet company to go public in 18 months, and it does pretty well. PayPal has a close on the day of the IPO, has about $1.2 billion market cap. Very quickly thereafter, only a few months later in July 2002, eBay announces that they’re acquiring PayPal in all-stock deal depending on how you account for the transaction somewhere between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion, which was about a 20 percent premium to the stock’s closing price the day before. So interesting and we’re going to dive far more deeply into this. But pretty quickly the whole team leaves. I believe the status is within four years of the acquisition, over half of all PayPal employees have left and including all of the founders of both Confinity and X. com. Interestingly, actually the history of PayPal, the president of PayPal within eBay has been a little bit of a… I don’t want to say a hot seat, but some interesting figures have gone through there including Scott Thompson. Do you remember him, Ben? This is the guy who left being the president of PayPal to become the CEO of Yahoo! and then it was very quickly revealed that he had completely fabricated his resume. His pre PayPal resume?…

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