Musk
How a referral loop inside X.com taught Elon Musk the lesson that would echo through every company he touched.
In 1998 Elon Musk sold Zip2 to Compaq for $300 million. Most founders disappear. Musk built X.com, an online financial services platform that would become PayPal. He was not trying to make money, he was trying to reinvent currency. The key insight was the referral loop. Every time someone received money from X.com, they saw the system. No account needed, no friction. That person sent money to someone else and suddenly two people were inside the network. By 2000, X.com had 50,000 users. By 21, it had 1.5 million active accounts, all from word of mouth. The business model looked strange.
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