Joining the Mafia 97
After the burst of the dot.com bubble, those who knew
Elon had founded an Internet company asked his wife, “So
are you guys all right?” They had obviously not noticed
that Elon’s McLaren F1 was still parked in their garage, so
she assured them they were doing okay.^142
Elon’s ambitious vision was that X.com would be-
come a financial supermarket. This supermarket included
an online bank, a mortgage broker, an insurance vendor,
and a mutual fund company. “The huge brick-and-mortar
financial institutions, the Bank of Americas, the Chase
Manhattans, the Citibanks, all have gigantic investments
in existing assets, which include thousands of branches,
millions of tonnes of concrete, steel and glass, legacy in-
formation systems, and organizational boundaries between
service divisions,” Elon said. “From a consumer standpoint
these make the coordination of different services into a
unified package expensive, complicated and confusing. A
really well-done, pure Internet-based service, without all
that overhead baggage, could pass along enormous savings
to consumers in the form of discounts.”^265
The only real experience Elon had from the finance
industry was a short internship at the Bank of Nova Scotia
and a tiny detour as an amateur stock trader in South
Africa.^56 So Elon used the same strategy as when he
founded Zip2: read books and learn by doing. Now he could
also use his experience from Zip2. “I guess my expertise is
that I know how to build a killer Internet company with a
solid foundation,” Elon said. “I didn’t know anything about
the media business when starting Zip2, but figured it out