Before Elon Musk Was The World's Richest Man, He Interned At A Bank In The Early '90s
Musk interned at the Bank of Nova Scotia in the early 1990s and wrote a mulit-billion bond trade proposal which he expected to be the biggest opportunity ever. He was quite confident of the idea and expected at least a $1/hour raise in his stipend of $14/hour but just like any other internship, his luck was not in his favour.
Before Elon Musk became the richest man in the world, he interned at a bank.
Musk interned at the Bank of Nova Scotia in the early 1990s and wrote a multi-billion bond trade proposal which he expected to be the biggest opportunity ever. He was quite confident of the idea and expected at least a $1/hour raise in his stipend of $14/hour but just like any other internship, luck was not in his favour.
When @elonmusk was 18 he did an internship at Nova Scotia bank. It was over there where he realized that money is low bandwidth and you don't need huge infrastructure resources to online transfer money from one bank to another. This knowledge set him up on course to start X .com
¡ª Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) May 18, 2021
His boss, Peter Musk liked his idea but the the CEO rejected the proposal, leaving Elon quite disappointed. However, now we can say that it was definitely the bank's loss since Elon is a billionaire now.
.@elonmusk basically revolutionized the way we transfer money now. So all those crypto "experts" before passing down toxic and hateful comments think about what he has done & he knows how the money works better than any of us
¡ª Pranay Pathole (@PPathole) May 18, 2021
Musk shared this story in reply to a tweet, along with an article by Yahoo Finance which spoke about his initial intern experiences.
In the article, the Tesla CEO says that how later in life when he competed with these banks, he remembered this article and realised that all banks do is copy and never try anything new. He said, ¡°If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn¡¯t pick it up either."
I worked for Peter Nicholson, who is awesome. Mostly, we exchanged math riddles, although I did figure out a multi-billion dollar arbitrage opportunity for the bank. Figured they¡¯d at least give me $1/hour raise, but no ¡ https://t.co/rdjDtPtPHz
¡ª Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2021
Musk's major takeways was that bankers are 'dumb and rich' which he apparently kept in mind when he first launched his finance startup X.com.
The site later merged with Confinity in 2000 and became PayPal.
After PayPal, Musk went to found companies like Tesla and Space X.
