
22. Co-Founding X.com
In 1999, the same year that Compaq purchased Zip2, Musk used $10 million of his earnings to start the website X.com. X.com enabled secure payments using email accounts, which is commonplace today that we hardly ever think about it.
Yet when X.com launched, it was named one of the 10 worst business ideas. People must have thought that writing checks and mailing them to people who would then go to the bank to cash them was the best way to send people money. But Musk’s idea became a central feature of how we use the Internet in the twenty-first century.