People often talk about how far Rudy Giuliani, once “America’s Mayor,” has fallen. But what if he was always bad news? After all, Jan. 6 wasn’t the only time he whipped up a crowd into a violent mob. One of the stories in Walter Isaacson’s new bio of Elon Musk highlights a disastrous meeting the future Tesla/Space X/X guy had with Giuliani, which ended with him declaring him a weirdo. The meet-up didn’t happen a couple years ago. It happened in the year 2000.
The Daily Beast teased out a bit from Isaacson’s Elon Musk, in which his subject, then CEO of PayPal, went to New York to meet with Giuliani, hoping to hire him as a “political fixer.” Giualini, who was in his penultimate year as mayor of New York City and not long from becoming beloved for the way he handled the September 11 attacks, did not impress him.
“It was like walking into a mob scene,” said Michael Moritz, a PayPal investor who joined Musk on his trip. He said he was “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.”
Giuliani, Moritz claims, demanded a 10 percent stake in PayPal, which obviously would have made him wealthy beyond his dreams. Judging from how he’s doing these days, that obviously didn’t happen. Instead, Musk saw right through him, saying, “This guy occupies a different planet.”
Perhaps one can imagine an alternate timeline in which Musk wasn’t quickly turned off by Giuliani’s chaotic energy, and the two became pals. Maybe Musk never would have been kicked out of PayPal, and never used the earnings he’d acquired there to form Space X. But a Giuliani-Musk team-up doesn’t sound much better than the crap timeline in which we’re all stuck.
(Via The Daily Beast)