Peter

"In hiring David Sacks, Thiel pulled rank and overruled the team’s objections. This was a rare move for Thiel, who believed Sacks a rare candidate: After all, few people would come into an interview guns blazing against their prospective employer’s flagship product. Thiel valued bracing honesty, and he trusted that Sacks would speak candidly. “Peter said, ‘I need people here I can scream at,’ ” Sacks remembered."

"“Peter is even less tolerant of bullshit than I am,” the famously administrivia-averse Musk remarked. “My bullshit tolerance is low, but Peter is like zero.”"

"Sacks relented. But his resistance spoke to what would become a perennial balancing act at PayPal between the website’s security, its usability, and its coffers. “Peter called it ‘the dials,’ ” Sacks remembered. “It’s easy to stop fraud if you’re willing to kill usability. What’s hard is maintaining a sufficient level of usability without letting fraud get out of control. So Max controlled the fraud dial. I controlled the usability dial. And we’d come together to agree on a compromise.”"

"eBay now stood a real chance of reclaiming payments and each change it made sent executives—particularly Thiel and Sacks—into paroxysms of anger. “David and Peter would get totally hysterical and say things like They can’t do this! and How dare they?” an executive observed. “And we’re like, ‘It’s their platform. They can do whatever they damn well want.’"

"“Peter is even less tolerant of bullshit than I am,” the famously administrivia-averse Musk remarked. “My bullshit tolerance is low, but Peter is like zero.”"

"Sacks relented. But his resistance spoke to what would become a perennial balancing act at PayPal between the website’s security, its usability, and its coffers. “Peter called it ‘the dials,’ ” Sacks remembered. “It’s easy to stop fraud if you’re willing to kill usability. What’s hard is maintaining a sufficient level of usability without letting fraud get out of control. So Max controlled the fraud dial. I controlled the usability dial. And we’d come together to agree on a compromise.”"

"eBay now stood a real chance of reclaiming payments and each change it made sent executives—particularly Thiel and Sacks—into paroxysms of anger. “David and Peter would get totally hysterical and say things like They can’t do this! and How dare they?” an executive observed. “And we’re like, ‘It’s their platform. They can do whatever they damn well want.’ ”"

"You thought it was tough going from dealer to dealer for Clairtone every single summer, signing for the new models, competing against Admiral and RCA and so on. Try doing it with car dealers ... Clairtone has only six hundred dealers; Studebaker has eleven hundred. So it ain’t for me, Peter. I’m well off. Why should I waste my life? We're on top of the heap. I’m young, and there’s no way I want to do this for the next five years. You've got my backing if you want to go through with it, but you're on your own, kid. It’s your decision, but it’s also your pain.”"

"It was small but it was very interesting. I remember Brian Meikle saying, “Here are these seven thousand acres. If you stood on this piece of ground, on one side is Newmont’s big Genesis mine producing about 4 million ounces, and 180 degrees up the valley there is the Bootstrap and Dee mines, producing probably another 2 million ounces of gold.” Goldstrike was a little “Ma and Pa” organization running on a shoestring with a lot of haywire, but they were making reasonable money at it. I talked to Joe Rotman and said, “Joe, if we could buy Western States would you be willing to sell your halfe” and he said, “Sure.” And that’s when I went to Peter and said, “Let’s take a crack at this.”"