One of PayPal's early employees said his biggest takeaway from working with Elon Musk is that he's never doing only one thing at a time

• An ex-PayPal worker said one of his observations of Elon Musk is that he never does just one thing.

• Jason Portnoy spoke with "The Tim Ferriss Show" about working at PayPal, where Musk was CEO in 2000.

• He said Musk might benefit from being able to apply lessons from one company to another.

Elon Musk might be one of the world's busiest businessmen, but there's a benefit to having so much going on, a former PayPal employee turned author said.

Jason Portnoy, a former vice president of finance at PayPal, where Musk was CEO in 2000, told the "Tim Ferriss Show" podcast last week that one of his biggest observations from working with Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman — members of the so-called PayPal Mafia — is that "they were never only doing one thing at a time."

Portnoy said he thought this was interesting because, logically, when people work on something, they focus just on that thing. Musk, Thiel, and Hoffman were involved in multiple companies and ventures during and after their time at PayPal.

"I feel like they got a lot of benefit out of doing that because they would be getting exposed to different ideas, or solving different problems, or meeting different people," he said. "There was just all this stuff that they were interacting with. And then they would bring that back with them into the PayPal office."

Portnoy, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who also served as the chief financial officer at Palantir, the data company founded by Thiel, appeared on the podcast to discuss his book, "Silicon Valley Porn Star," in which he documents his career in Silicon Valley, where he was PayPal's 34th employee, as well as his descent and recovery from a porn addiction.