I was away for two weeks and the management team decided I wasn’t the right guy to run the company.
Instead of fighting during a critical time, I thought it was best to concede.456
It’s not a good idea to leave the office when there are a lot of major things underway that are causing people a great deal of stress. I left for a trip, a combination of needing to raise money and I had gotten married earlier that year and had not had a vacation or honeymoon. It was kind of a combined financing trip and honeymoon. Also not a great idea.
I got removed as CEO of PayPal because I wanted to do a bunch of things that seemed extremely risky. I think they would have worked out, but at a time when companies were dropping like flies, I was proposing we do all these things that sound risky—it was much too scary for the rest of the team.457
I didn’t agree with their conclusion, but I understood why they took the action they did. Peter, Max, David, and the other guys are smart people with the right motivations. They did what they thought was right, for the right reasons. The reasons weren’t valid in my opinion but it’s hard to argue with the ultimate outcome, which was positive.
It would be easy to be bitter and hate them forever, but the better course of action is to turn the other cheek. I put a lot of effort into making things good between us, and they became good. I invested in some of Peter’s companies, including Founders Fund, which is made up primarily of former PayPal people. Peter, who replaced me as CEO, later invested in SpaceX.458
Life is too short for long-term grudges.459
Q: What was the exit like?
In about February of 2002, PayPal went public. I think we were the only internet company to go public in the first part of 2002. It went reasonably well, although I can imagine we set a record on SEC rewrites. This was right around the time of Enron and other corporate scandals, so they put us through the wringer.460
It was a tough, long-running battle between PayPal and eBay’s payment system, and it was certainly challenging. There were times it felt like trying to win a land war in Asia. They got to set the ground rules. It was like trying to beat Microsoft inside their own operating system. It took a lot of effort to beat eBay in their own system. One of the long-term risks for PayPal was eBay would one day prevail. One way to retire that risk was to sell to eBay.461
In October 2002, we struck a deal to sell PayPal to eBay for about $4.5 billion.462
I could go and buy one of the islands of the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.
I haven’t spent my winnings.
I’m going to put almost all of it back into a new game.463