David Marcus might not be the golden payments guru some (hint: Facebook) are making him out to be.

A former PayPal executive with extensive knowledge of the goings-on there told Bank Innovation today that Marcus was anything but loved at PayPal. The source said PayPal “needed” to split from Marcus, because eBay Inc., the payments company’s parent, will have difficulty successfully spinning off PayPal in an initial public offering — as Carl Icahn demanded last March — until it has suitable leadership. And Marcus wasn’t that leader, apparently.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if John got David the job at Facebook,” the source told us, referring to John Donahoe, eBay’s CEO. “John and Sheryl go way back.”

Sheryl is Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. Facebook hired Marcus to run its Messaging unit yesterday.

Requests for comment from Facebook and PayPal remain pending.

According to the PayPal source, Marcus came to PayPal’s leadership role in 2012 as a “breath of fresh air,” with the mandate to innovate at PayPal. Instead, PayPal seemed to engage in a follow-Square strategy, launching products such as PayPal Here, a Square knockoff that cost the company a reported $800 million and generated scant returns, the source said. Additionally, Marcus was anything but the leader, the source said, claiming that a large swatch of PayPal employees appeared to have been alienated by Marcus.

Marcus came to PayPal as the founder of Zong mobile payments, which PayPal acquired in 2011. Marcus had never previously run an organization as large as PayPal, which employs more than 10,000.

Indeed, Marcus’s “do yourself a favor, go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere” flap recently might have something to do with that. Last February, a leaked memo written by Marcus lambasted PayPal employees at the company’s Sam Jose, Calif., headquarters who were not using a test PayPal mobile payments app at a nearby cafe. 

There’s more. Even Icahn, when he pressured eBay to IPO PayPal last March, complained about Marcus in his formal letter to the parent company that argued for the spinoff (courtesy of Business Insider):

[F]rom our research, it is clear to us that eBay and PayPal have faced significant challenges in recruiting top talent. In the words of Mr. David Marcus, the President of PayPal: “Under the old format many great technologists left. If you had a choice between Google and PayPal, you’d go to Google.” While Mr. Marcus may believe this problem is no longer the case after only two years in his current post, we believe the reality is that the best minds are not going to eBay. We hope that Mr. Marcus has started changing the perception of eBay, but we believe PayPal would be much better positioned to attract and motivate top talent, which is the lifeblood of its business, with an incentive plan that was tied to the successful operating performance of PayPal and its own stock price. Just recently (February 2014), in an email from Mr. Marcus to PayPal employees at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, Mr. Marcus lamented how disinterested employees were relative to other PayPal offices. This type of direct communication from PayPal’s President only reinforces our belief that PayPal employees will be more motivated when the company operates independently of eBay, with a clear strategic vision and a currency which would be more closely aligned with the performance of its employees.

To be fair, other sources indicate, echoed by public reports, that there was much shock at PayPal upon Marcus’s departure. Marcus has a 80% approval rating on Glassdoor, the company employment ratings site. Employees at PayPal rate working at the company a 3.3 out of 5, with some employees complaining that there are “too many people moving about throughout the company; every six months is very fast and creates conflicts among management and employees; [and] employee tenure is very bad,” according to Glassdoor. As a point of reference, Jack Dorsey, Square’s founder and CEO, has an approval rating on Glassdoor of 91% and the company scores a 4.2 out of 5 among employees.

PayPal generated $1.8 billion of revenue last quarter, 20% higher compared to the same period in 2013, according to company data. Most of that growth came from overseas expansion.