MONEY and Politics: background material on Elon Musk and his friends

Most of these names are familiar to the general public. But, not all.

So, how did all this collaboration of men (who became billionaires) begin?

https://milliondollarminds.medium.com/the-incredible-story-of-paypal-mafia-49dd5e155792

( I'm quoting from the article below)

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Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek founded Confinity. Thiel and Levchin met at Stanford University after Thiel gave a guest lecture

and the two began to work together on the concept of a digital wallet. The company initially focused on mobile payments sent from

Palm Pilots and other PDAs, but a Confinity employee developed a way to send money transfers through email. That service became PayPal in 1999.

After gaining traction and taking its first few steps on the eBay platform, Confinity merged with Elon Musk's X.com, taking the parent company's name.

Eventually, after proving its success as a product, the company adopted the name PayPal, Inc. Doing things in their own way paid off for the PayPal team

as they were able to file for an IPO in late 2001, later completing the IPO in February 2002. Later in 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for USD 1.5 billion.

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So, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk were merged into PayPal, Inc. The names Levchin and Nosek have disappeared from the spotlight, but they didn't retire.  See below.

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Key members of PayPal Mafia:

Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former CEO is referred as the "DON" of PayPal Mafia.

He diversified his investment across different assets which include investment in Clarium Capital, Palantir Technologies,

Facebook (as an angel investor), Founders Fund, Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital.

Elon Musk got fired at eBay. He went on to build numerous companies that include Tesla Inc, SpaceX, Neuralink, OpenAI,

The Boring Company, and is the Chairman of SolarCity. He is the most impressive among the lot because he has done something outside of the IT space as it is harder to do things in the world of atoms.

Luke Nosek, PayPal co-founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy, became a partner at Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery. Luke was first investor in Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO, later became a partner of venture capital firm Sequoia Capital — the firm that focuses on technology industry.

It has backed companies that now controls USD 1.4+ trillion of combined stock market value. The fund manages multiple investment funds including funds specific to India & Southeast Asia, Israel, and China.

David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO later founded Yammer, a freemium enterprise social networking service used for private communication within organisations. 

Eventually, Microsoft acquired Yammer for USD 1.2 billion. Currently, Yammer is included in all enterprise plan of Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Jawed Karim, former PayPal engineer along with Steve Chen co-founded YouTube, second most popular site after Google. This venture was  eventually sold to Google for USD 1.65 billion. It has since evolved from a small video streaming platform to a large service influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. As on date, YouTube content creators upload over 500 hours of content per minute.

Reid Hoffman, former executive vice president went on to create LinkedIn, world's largest professional networking site with over 750+ million users from 200 countries.

Also, he was an early investor in Facebook, Aviary, Friendster, and few other companies.

Yishan Wong, an engineering manager at Paypal went on to become the CEO of Reddit. As of February 2021, Reddit ranks as the 18th most visited website in the world  and 7th most visited website in the US, according to Alexa Internet.

Russel Simmons, former PayPal engineer co-founded Yelp Inc along with Jeremy Stoppelman. As of June 2021, the site has 43 million unique visitors to its desktop webpage and 52 million unique visitors to its mobile site.

Dave Mcclure, former PayPal marketing director, a super angel investor for startup companies and founder of 500 Startups which has 500+ investments till date.

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Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies does a lot of work for the U.S. government. It's a very high-tech, very secretive spying company that collects massive information from the American people. He's a Libertarian Right-Wing Republican who has been actively supporting Republican politicians.

However, not long ago there was a banking crisis in California where Thiel led a group to do a bank run on SVB, a very special kind of bank that backs and handles funds for venture firms in Silicon Valley.

Something happened at that time to disappoint Thiel, and he declared he would not be giving any campaign contributions this cycle.

Roelof Botha and Sequoia Capital would hardly be familiar to a lot of people, but they're very well known on Wall St.

From Wikipedia on Botha:

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Botha's father, also named Roelof, is an economist.^[8][18] His uncle was the rock musician Piet Botha. His grandfather was Roelof Frederik "Pik" Botha,^[8] a South African politician who served as the country's last foreign minister under the Apartheid government

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From Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Capital

Botha is listed as a "Key person".

They're very big.

"Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had backstopped Sequoia's $1 billion in deposits in the bank.^{[36] "}

But then, ...

Elon also had an affair with Brin's wife, causing Brin and his wife to divorce.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62288139

^{Where does this lead us? It tells us that this group has been incredibly successful in technical and financial terms.}

^{It tells us they can be politically influential as they want to be.}

^{What does it NOT tell us? That Thiel is also quite comfortable with Wall St., making the SVB collapse less of a surprise and more  notable.}

From the Wikipedia profile of Thiel:

Thiel has worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, a speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett,

and a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996

Example: He gave us J.D. Vance.  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-trump-vp-peter-thiel-billionaire/

They have the money, the technical skills and tools, and the political interest to be involved in many ways.

Musk is somewhat famously known for being born in S. Africa. He is jokingly, "an African-American", but the others are interesting too.

Thiel was born in Germany (and later lived in SW Africa), Botha was born in Pretoria, S. Africa, and Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia.

 

From Wikipedia on Thiel:

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Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on 11 October 1967, to Klaus Friedrich Thiel and his wife Susanne Thiel.^[15][16]

The family emigrated to the United States when Peter was one year old and lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a chemical engineer.^[17]

Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia).

Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a school in Swakopmund that required students to wear uniforms and utilized corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler. He said this  experience instilled a distaste for uniformity and regimentation later reflected in his support for individualism and libertarianism.^[20][21]

Thiel to co-found The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, in 1987. The paper received funding from Irving Kristol.^[26]

Thiel was The Stanford Review's first editor-in-chief until he graduated in 1989.^[27]

^{[ Note:  Irving Kristol was/is the father of Bill Kristol, the noted Conservative pundit who is often on television. His father was a firebrand while Bill is less radical. ]}

Wikipedia on Brin:

Larry Page seems to be the most normal of the bunch, except for being a tremendous geek. His technological achievements have been compared to Gutenberg's printing press.

From Wikipedia on Page:

However, there is one very curious thing:

"In 2023, the US Virgin Islands tried several times to serve Page a subpoena in the lawsuit over JPMorgan Chase's links to Jeffrey Epstein.^[126][127]"

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My comments:

How is it that Epstein was connected to everything?

I keep wondering, how does all this connects. Well, the Right-Wing political activities, the geeky technological side, and then the Epstein name seems like a warning of some kind. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but my willingness to accept things as coincidences these days is wearing thin.

How did Trump win ALL the swing states while Dem candidates for senator won in those states?

I don't like all this uncertainty and the lack of clear-cut evidence.

Elon Musk and American Politics

Here is a small view on Musk's view of South Africa today.

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-10/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-south-africa-myths

This is a great article with a lot of fascinating information which I have never read or heard before. It describes a rich kid from a very racist family in S. Africa, at the time of the change from all-white rule to majority-rule, leaving his country to avoid conscription, illegally coming into America. It describes a young man who was raised by someone a lot like Donald Trump. It even appears their personalities fit together like Musk and his father. I can easily imagine Musk as the primary adviser to Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign.

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In July, the tech entrepreneur commented on a Florida media personality's post on X that alleged that South Africa's "black party" was encouraging a genocide against white South Africans. "They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa," Musk commented, and asked why president Cyril Ramaphosa was "say[ing] nothing." The claim was a layer cake of stale myths and gibberish that few South Africans — even those concerned about white people's future in the country — bothered to amplify: The political party to which the original poster referred is not South Africa's "black party." More than 80% of South Africans are black, but the Economic Freedom Fighters hold only 11% of seats in the parliament. And the fringe allegation that black South Africans intend to massacre white people has circulated for decades, attaching itself to some new potentiality when the original theories, like that the genocide would begin the night Nelson Mandela died, don't pan out. Musk's concern, however, was taken up by a range of non-South African white supremacists: Patrick Casey, founder of the Neo-Nazi Group Identity Evropa, posted, "In 2016 South African white genocide was a fringe issue — now, the richest man in the world, who also owns Twitter, is drawing attention to it. Things are moving in the right direction!"

...

Some things Isaacson [author of a biography of Musk] recounts are extremely unlikely to have happened as he describes them. In the 1980s, Isaacson claims, as a young teen, Musk and his brother once "had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain" while getting off a train to go to an "anti-apartheid music concert"; at these concerts, "often, brawls would break out." But there were no explicit "anti-apartheid concerts" in South Africa in the '80s. The apartheid government strictly censored music, and bands that played songs with lyrics perceived to criticize apartheid — or even bands with members of different races — were regularly harassed and arrested. "I cannot believe the 'knife in the head' story," Charles Leonard, a DJ and journalist who attended many gigs in apartheid-era Johannesburg, told me. "The concerts I attended were always peaceful."

"The 'wading through blood' is invented, I'm sure," Shaun de Waal, another Johannesburg journalist who covered 1980s South African society, said. By the late 1980s, crime in South Africa had increased significantly and by 1991 the country had one of the highest murder rates of any in the world on a per capita basis. But violent crime was far rarer in the heavily policed areas around the Johannesburg railway stations and in the white-only neighborhoods where Musk grew up.

Musk and his brother Kimbal, Isaacson writes, said that "their father is a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated and at other times delusional." Isaacson writes that Musk left South Africa in 1989 principally to get a break from his dad. That story strikes other South Africans as bizarrely incomplete. Whenever a white boy in his late teens left South Africa in the 1980s, he was ipso facto escaping conscription.

...

Over the last few years, Musk has seemed to work off the theory that if your false statements are diverse enough in content and size, and if some sound like jokes, you can develop a reputation as an admirable troll rather than as a dangerous liar. The more varied and hyperbolic someone's yarns are, the less they seem to demand or even allow for detailed factual rebuttals.

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Here is a background story on the Trump + Musk connection.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3178774/exclusive-elon-musk-says-destiny-of-america-is-on-the-line/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Pmax_USA_Magazine_21-June-Intent-Audience-Signals&gad_source=5

This article is about Musk and the Immigration issue.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-06-03/elon-musk-immigration

So first of all, Musk and his brother appear to have come into America and stayed illegally. They benefit tremendously from being here. Apparently Elon Musk wants immigration reform, but not at the cost of having other changes which he doesn't like tied to it.

This article talks about Musk and government, how he wants to reshape it, and some paranoia.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-trump-endorses-pac-administration-cabinet-connection-rcna178549

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On the campaign trail, Musk has at times dramatized the stakes of the election for himself. In an October appearance with talk show host Tucker Carlson, he alleged that Harris might want to exact "vengeance" on him personally if she wins the election.

"If he loses, I'm f----d," Musk told Carlson, referring to Trump.

Laughing, Musk added, "How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?"

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I don't suggest jailing Musk. That's his bizarre fantasy, I suppose. I suggest learning about him in order to have a more clear idea of what he might influence a Trump administration to do.