What company bought Elon Musk’s startup Zip2 in 1999?

Compaq bought Elon Musk’s startup Zip2 in 1999.

Zip2 provided online city guides, business directories, and mapping tools for newspapers. Elon Musk founded the company with his brother Kimbal Musk in 1995, when newspapers were beginning to build digital versions of their local-information services.

Compaq acquired Zip2 for about $307 million in cash and stock options. The purchase gave Musk capital for his next venture, X.com, an online financial-services company founded in 1999. A frequent confusion is with PayPal: eBay bought PayPal in 2002, but Compaq was the company that acquired Zip2 three years earlier.