He wasn't there from the beginning. PayPal was trademarked and was at MVP stage when they merged. He was the biggest shareholder, absolutely. His operational input to PayPal was four months in 2000, before being fired. Since then his involvement was "collecting shareholder dividends".
He wasn't the marketing guy. He was the guy who got fired because his tenure as CEO was "I don't understand this Java stuff, and I want to contribute to the codebase, so we really need to rewrite it in Classic ASP", problematic on so many levels.
No - this is all from Max Levchin (who actually did build the MVP of PayPal) in Founders at Work.
Musk made some amusing comments that he thought were insightful about this that showed how little he really knew:
He also suggested that PayPal should have written its front end in C++ (because C++ in 2000 was an excellent choice for front-end web development?!?), and later cited Blizzard writing WoW in C++ as proof that this was the correct decision that Max and the board never understood.
(Oh, and "Microsoft has a DLL library for anything you could possibly ever want to do, but you can't get Unix libraries for anything.")
He also said that Max "never really understood this" despite Musk's efforts to educate him, and that these decisions are also why PayPal "hasn't been able really add any new features".
He then complained about the Board's decision to fire him as making him "more careful about who he allowed to invest in his companies in the future": 1) he was the largest shareholder, but it was not "his" company, he only held a fraction of it, and 2) the idea wasn't even his! Really what he means here is "I want to make sure to hand-select a bunch of yes-men so I get what I want regardless of whose idea it is, how good the idea is, and what I want to do with it."
He wasn't the marketing guy. He was the guy who got fired because his tenure as CEO was "I don't understand this Java stuff, and I want to contribute to the codebase, so we really need to rewrite it in Classic ASP", problematic on so many levels.