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Sequoia Capital, backed the company nonetheless, making a bet on Musk and little else. Musk hit the streets of Silicon Valley once again and managed to attract engineers with his rah-rah speeches about the future of Internet banking. Scott Anderson, a young computer scientist, started on August 1, 1999, just a few days after the exodus, and bought right into the vision. “You look back, and it was total insanity,” Anderson said. “We had what amounted to a Hollywood movie set of a website. It barely got past the VCs.” Week by week, more engineers arrived and the vision became more real. The company secured a banking license and a mutual fund license and formed a partnership with Barclays. By November, X.com’s small software team had created one of the world’s first online banks complete with FDIC insurance to back the bank accounts and three mutual funds for investors to choose. Musk gave the engineers $100,000 of his own money to conduct their testing. On the night before Thanksgiving in 1999, X.com went live to the public. “I was there until two A.M.,” Anderson said. “Then, I went home to cook Thanksgiving dinner. Elon called me a few hours later and asked me to come into the office to relieve some of the other engineers. Elon stayed there forty-eight straight hours, making sure things worked.” Under Musk’s direction, X.com tried out some radical banking concepts. Customers received a $20 cash card just for signing up to use the service and a $10 card for every person they referred. Musk did away with niggling fees and overdraft penalties. In a very modern twist, X.com also built a person-to-person payment system in which you could send someone money just by plugging their e- mail address into the site. The whole idea was to shift away from slow-moving banks with their mainframes taking days to process payments and to create a kind of agile bank account where you could move money around with a couple of clicks on a mouse or an e-mail. This was revolutionary stuff, and more than 200,000 people bought into it and signed up for X.com within the first couple of months of operation. Soon enough, X.com had a major competitor. A couple of brainy kids named Max Levchin and Peter Thiel had been working on a payment system of their own at their start-up called Confinity. The duo actually rented their office space—a glorified broom closet—from X.com and were trying to make it possible for owners of Palm Pilot handhelds to swap money via the infrared ports on the devices. Between X.com and Confinity, the small office on University Avenue had turned into the frenzied epicenter of the Internet finance revolution. “It was this mass of adolescent men that worked so hard,” Ankenbrandt said. “It stunk so badly in there. I can still smell it—leftover pizza, body odor, and sweat.” The pleasantries between X.com and Confinity came to an abrupt end. The Confinity founders moved to an office down the street and, like X.com, began focusing their attention on Web and e-mail- based payments with their service known as PayPal. The companies became locked in a heated battle to match each other’s features and attract more users, knowing that whoever got bigger faster would win. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on promotions, while millions more were lost battling hackers who had seized upon the services as new playgrounds for fraud. “It was like the Internet version of making it rain at a strip club,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, an X.com engineer who went on to become the CEO of Yelp. “You gave away money as fast as you could.” The race to win Internet payments gave Musk a chance to show off his quick thinking and work ethic. He kept devising plans to counter the advantage PayPal had established on auction sites like eBay. And he rallied the X.com employees to implement the tactics as fast as possible using brute-PDF Image | SpaceX and the Quest
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