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> It does seem like Etsy has basically become eBay

That’s what Etsy’s board chose when they appointed ex-eBay executive Josh Silverman to be Etsy’s CEO: https://www.etsy.com/team/member/jsilverman (2017)

More background: https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/abblog/blog.pl?/pl/2018/8/1... (2018), https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/9/4/20841475/etsy-free-sh... (2019).

Chad Dickerson ran Etsy. Josh Silverman turned it into eBay.



As a parallel, I'm not sure how Elon Musk would turn SpaceX into PayPal.


You wouldn't hire Elon Musk to turn anything into PayPal, as he wasn't a founder nor truly even an employee or executive of PayPal. Musk joined PayPal via merger with his fledgling X.com online bank. It was Confinity's PayPal product that continued from the merger, not Musk's X.com product. Musk was appointed CEO of the combined business, but contributed nothing of note to it. He was only there for a few months before the board ousted him from the company, while on vacation: his regular absence from the job was one of the reasons. The other was that his contribution to the engineering direction of the company amounted to "let's stop working on the business, and instead rewrite the platform on .NET to run on Windows servers", which the organization found so preposterous they circulated a petition to the board among the engineers to have Musk removed. The board did so.


I suppose he could let rando users load their crap into a launch and then have people bid on "owning" a bit of spacejunk memorabilia orbiting the planet. Think, "Shamrock Beanie Baby, but orbiting the Earth!".

Probably not great if you want the actual thing, in hand. No one spending 3x the price of a Steam Deck right now will want that price going towards launching it into orbit instead of having it in hand, playing games. Still, maybe there's a market for "owning" orbiting space debris contributing to Kessler Syndrome? Sort of like buying & burning an item to make an artificial scarcity NFT? Only this way you get to contribute to the destruction of mankind's ability to easily launch anything into orbit.




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