They’re split on splitting PayPal from eBay.
PayPal’s colorful co-founders, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are on opposite sides of the fence when it comes to billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s call to separate the payments company from its parent company, online retailer eBay.
Thiel, one of Facebook’s earliest investors, said this week that he “is viscerally against” Icahn and his plan to split PayPal from eBay.
“This is not the right time for the companies to be split up,” Thiel told Forbes. “But there will be a lot of time to revisit it.”
Thiel’s comments come days after PayPal co-founder Musk, who now heads Tesla, sided with Icahn.
“It doesn’t make sense that a global payment system is a subsidiary of an auction website,” Musk said, also in Forbes.
“It’s as if Target owned Visa or something.” Icahn is pushing shareholders to vote on a proposal to split the two companies.
EBay CEO John Donahoe has argued that PayPal needs eBay’s stable stream of customers to thrive.