Joining the Mafia 100
to anyone who opened an account, and members who
referred new customers were awarded $10 for each referral.
“X.com is really a perfect case example of viral market-
ing where one customer act as a salesperson for you for
bringing in other customers,” Elon said. “So you had this
exponential growth. It was like bacteria in a petri dish. We
didn’t have a sales force. We didn’t spend any money on
advertising.”^364
Within two months, X.com had 100 000 customers. This
number can be compared with the then largest web-based
bank, Etrade Telebank, that had 130 000 customers. But
X.com wasn’t the only company in the payments industry.
X.com’s office had shared common space with a company
called Confinity before they needed a larger office.
The Ukrainian born Max Levchin had early learned
how to program on whatever he could find. When his
family moved to US in 1991, he went through dumpsters
to find things to rebuild while he taught himself English
by watching television. A degree in Computer Science
from the University of Illinois taught him how to create
and break codes.^261 “These crooks are intelligent, but they
leave clues. I’m the Sherlock Holmes of the Internet under-
ground,” Levchin said.^185
In the summer of 1998, at the same time as when Elon
fought for the future of Zip2, Levchin didn’t really know
what to do with his life. What he knew was that he wanted
to start a company within his passion: cryptography. To