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unscrupulous. The creation of X.com would ultimately reveal a great deal about Musk’s creativity, relentless drive, confrontational style, and foibles as a leader. Musk would also get another taste of being pushed aside at his own company and the pain that accompanies a grand vision left unfulfilled. Musk assembled what looked like an all-star crew to start X.com. Ho had worked at SGI and Zip2 as an engineer, and his peers marveled at his coding and team-management skills. They were joined by a pair of Canadians with finance experience—Harris Fricker and Christopher Payne. Musk had met Fricker during his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia, and the two really hit it off. A Rhodes scholar, Fricker brought the knowledge of the banking world’s mechanics that X.com would need. Payne was Fricker’s friend from the Canadian finance community. All four men were considered cofounders of the company, while Musk emerged as the largest shareholder thanks to his hefty up-front investment. X.com began, like so many Silicon Valley operations, at a house where the cofounders began brainstorming, and then moved to more formal offices at 394 University Avenue in Palo Alto. The cofounders were aligned philosophically around the idea that the banking industry had fallen behind the times. Visiting a branch bank to speak with a teller seemed pretty archaic now that the Internet had arrived. The rhetoric sounded good, and the four men were enthused. The only thing stopping them was reality. Musk had a modicum of banking experience and had resorted to buying a book on the industry to help understand its inner workings. The more the cofounders thought about their plan of attack, the more they realized the regulatory issues blocking the creation of an online bank were insurmountable. “As four and five months went by, the onion just kept unwrapping,” said Ho.* From the outset, there were personality clashes as well. Musk had become a budding superstar in Silicon Valley and had the press fawning over him. This didn’t sit that well with Fricker, who’d moved from Canada and pegged X.com as his chance to make a mark on the world as a banking whiz. Fricker, according to numerous people, wanted to run X.com and do so in a more conventional manner. He found Musk’s visionary statements to the press about rethinking the entire banking industry silly since the company was struggling to build much of anything. “We were out promising the sun, moon, and the stars to the media,” Fricker said. “Elon would say that this is not a normal business environment, and you have to suspend normal business thinking. He said, ‘There is a happy-gas factory up on the hill, and it’s pumping stuff into the Valley.’” Fricker would not be the last person to accuse Musk of overhyping products and playing the public, although whether this is a flaw or one of Musk’s great talents as a businessman is up for debate. The squabble between Fricker and Musk came to a quick, nasty end. Just five months after X.com had started, Fricker initiated a coup. “He said either he takes over as CEO or he’s just going to take everyone from the company and create his own company,” Musk said. “I don’t do well with blackmail. I said, ‘You should go do that.’ So he did.” Musk tried to talk Ho and some of the other key engineers into staying, but they sided with Fricker and left. Musk ended up with a shell of a company and a handful of loyal employees. “After all that went down, I remember sitting with Elon in his office,” said Julie Ankenbrandt, an early X.com employee who stayed. “There were a million laws in place to block something like X.com from happening, but Elon didn’t care. He just looked at me and said, ‘I guess we should hire some more people.’”* Musk had been trying to raise funding for X.com and had been forced to go to venture capitalists and confess that there wasn’t much in the way of a company left. Mike Moritz, a famed investor fromPDF Image | SpaceX and the Quest
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