00:00And then we will come forward in time and see how it all kind of culminates into one big company.
00:05Let's start off by talking about Elon Musk's role at PayPal.
00:09You may not realize it, but he was actually an early employee there.
00:13He actually founded an online payment platform called XCOM in 1999.
00:19And in March of 2000, his online payment platform merged with another online payment platform called Confinity.
00:26And if you're wondering what Confinity was, well, it's basically what would eventually become Venmo and other services as well.
00:34Elon Musk was the CEO of XCOM and Max Levshin was the CTO of Confinity.
00:39And after the merger, Musk became the CEO of the new combined entity and Levshin became the CEO.
00:45Peter Thay was also a co-founder and early investor of Confinity.
00:48And he became the chairman of the executive board of this new combined company.
00:53The company decided to brand itself under the name PayPal.
00:56But before we get into the PayPal story, I want to take a moment to ask you to consider subscribing.
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01:06And now let's get back to the PayPal story.
01:09And so in June of 2000, PayPal opened up its service to the public.
01:14But around this time, the dot-com crash happened.
01:17And if you're too young to remember the dot-com crash, it was basically a period in the early 2000s
01:23when a lot of Internet-based companies went out of business because they were overvalued.
01:28So these companies were spending more money than they made.
01:31And eventually they ran out of cash.
01:33And so many of them had to file for bankruptcy.
01:36PayPal was in a similar situation where they were spending more money than they were making.
01:40They ran out of cash.
01:41And they needed to find a way to make money.
01:43So they started charging their users fees for certain transactions.
