Peter Thiel's moments of honesty are larely limited to him saying bitchy things about Elon Musk

A little bit of background: back in 1999, I was working for a large financial services company (you've heard of them). One of the biggest topics on everyone's minds was how to crack the online market. Every major bank was devoting serious money and resources to the question.This was also going on in the startup world. Two of the leading companies in this space were Confinity and X.com, which would merge about a year later into the company known as PayPal.You often hear about Elon Musk being the co-founder of PayPal, but that somewhat misrepresents what actually happened. These were two different companies with very different approaches and proposed products, and they brought very different things to the table. Confinity was focused on the area of payments and had already launched the PayPal product and had identified eBay as being the most important early market. Elon Musk's X.com was a more general, less well-thought-out idea for an all-services bank, something that would not be…