'A high-stakes poker game'

Elon Musk appeared only briefly in Sequoia Capital's online hall of fame before the venture capital firm remembered that he was only CEO of Paypal for a few disastrous months. The South African entrepreneur's reappearance on the Valley scene, however brief and virtual, triggered a few memories of his extraordinary chutzpah during the last boom. Here, after he sold one worthless company for $400m and before he traded in another for half of Sequoia's online payments company, the charismatic rascal receives a McLaren F1 supercar, with CNN recording.

Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins. There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world. I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my, you know, personal fiefdom. I'm much more interested in trying to create a new company. It's sort of like a series of poker games. And now I've gone on to a more high-stakes poker game and taken my chips with me. And I haven't gone and taken my winnings and spent a big chunk, but I've just really put almost all of it back into the new game. [Elon Musk interviewed in The Gold Rush, a CNN documentary on the first web boom, September 1999]

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