Elon Musk Arm-Wrestled His Way To Settle Windows Vs Unix Debate For 1st Financial Venture X.Com, Reveals Biographer

One of Elon Musk's earliest business ventures was X.com, an online financial services company and his biographer Walter Isaacson shared an interesting anecdote from the venture's early days.

When X.com merged with Palo Alto-based Confinity, Inc., cofounded by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek, and took the name PayPal, Musk and Levchin did not agree about the software choice for the payment system, said Isaacson in a tweet of excerpts from his upcoming biography,

Musk was inclined toward Microsoft Windows as he admired the company's founder Bill Gates and loved Windows NT. He felt the operating system will be a more reliable partner. On the other hand, Levchin and his team felt Windows NT was “insecure, buggy, and uncool.” They preferred using various types of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and open-sourced Linux.

See Also: How Did Elon Musk Make His Money

One night when Levchin was working in a conference room, Musk barged in and picked up an argument over the same. Musk said eventually Levin will realize he was right, but the latter continued to insist that it wasn't going to work in Microsoft.

Musk then put forward an interesting proposition. “You Know what. I will arm-wrestle you for it,” he said. Levchin did not see any logic in the resolution proposed by Musk, thinking this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. To top it, Musk was almost twice the size of Levchin.

Since Levchin was “loopy” from working late hours, he agreed to arm-wrestle but promptly lost despite his best efforts. The Confinity co-founder told Musk, “Just to be clear. I'm not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.”

Musk reportedly laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it,” but he prevailed, Isaacson said.

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This illustration was generated using artificial intelligence via MidJourney