I don't care either way. Nor about Tesla, nor about Musk. Calling yourself a founder when you aren't, regardless of the merits of him funding Tesla, is still very odd.
I don't think the OP was referring to Tesla since technically they are a car company, not a "tech" company, but still you can find interviews with real founders of Tesla who stated on record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder", but since they took his money, he is their boss (or was).
I think he was referring to PayPal, a tech company. Even now all over the net you can see articles claiming Musk founded Paypal. Nothing further from the truth. Musk started X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website. Problem for PP was that back then no sane bank or financial institution would touch any company that is hooked up to the internet. Musk had a tremendous leverage because of the only bank who would go ahead and plug their gateway into the net (I believe it was Stanford Federal Credit Union, but I don't remember) was okay for doing it because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA, and put a huge collateral "just in case" something goes wrong. Musk didn't have to have a working website to have a $300,000,000 leverage over PayPal and PP knew it will be years before they get any bank to agree to work with them. It was smart for Thiel to offer large stake of PP for Musk just for ability to change which site will be using the bank's gateway. This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet, but - putting my conspiracy hat on - these days you find nothing about it at least not by Googling. So I don't really know - to me it doesn't sound he founded PayPal, they would eventually got their permission from some bank but at that point we would be X'ing each other money, not "Paypalling" it.
> record they don't understand why Elon calls himself a "Tesla founder"
And I explained why it is really not that insane. It was basically him throwing them a bone, they should be grateful. And of course they were horrible and ran Tesla into the ground and hid facts from Elon.
> I think he was referring to PayPal
I don't think so.
> X.com and designed a very simple page where you put two peoples email addresses and you "could" send them money. It was happening at the same time as PayPal had the same idea and similar website
This is not true. X.com from the beginning was payment company. Confinity was originally a security company for Palm platform. From there they switched to payments.
From Wikipedia:
> In March 2000, Confinity merged with x.com, an online financial services company founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk.
The two companies merged so all the people of both companies are rightly called founders. And non of the others disagree with that.
> because personal leverage of Musk father, who owns multiple diamond mines in ZA
Please provide evdience. This 'dimond mine' nonsense has mostly been discredited. The best researched story about that basically showed that it was like a 30k investment sometime in the 80s. Certainty not enough to convince a bank to do anything.
Musk father was wealthy because he was an engineer.
> This story was somewhat easy to find and popular back in the old days of the internet
I don't care about all that.. I just think he is a liar for claiming he founded Tesla and for spreading bullshit that he founded PayPal... I literally thought he founded both..
