Perhaps X.com is truly where Musk managed to really flaunt his money for the first time. He founded the company in January 1999 after the sale of his Zip2 corporation. He invested about $12 million into co-founding X.com with Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. They all had a connection to one another from a previous period. Musk knew Fricker from his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia and Payne was a friend of Fricker’s. Yet Ed Ho happened to be a former engineer at Silicon Graphics and was one of the executives at Zip2.
[Image via Engadget]Former Intuit CEO Bill Harris then came in around December of 1999 to serve as the company’s first CEO. That helped a lot and X.com managed to attract 200,000 people to sign up within two months. Power struggle issues led to a sale by March 2000. Through all of this, one man was left out when it came to the main tech behind X.com. Ed Ho was responsible for most of this. Even on his very own LinkedIn bio, Ho claims to be “responsible for software architecture and development at X.com.” Musk was pretty much the money and Harris had to come in as CEO because Musk was not capable of running the business side properly either.