![]() Jawed Karim was one of PayPal’s first engineers and helped to create the real-time aspects of their anti-fraud protections. Most of these remained connected socially and professionally, working, investing, and founding new companies together in the following decades. By 2006, 38 of PayPal’s first 50 employees had moved on. Most of PayPal’s original employees and disruptors found it difficult to merge with eBay’s more mainstream corporate culture. ![]() Today, PayPal’s total worth is estimated at around $359 billion. In 2002, eBay, which had once considered PayPal a competitor, acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. In its first two years, PayPal ballooned to over 25 million users. In 2001, they officially rebranded X.com as PayPal to avoid baggage associated with the letter X, like the X Games, the X-Files, and porn. This made PayPal the first online service to use a freemium model. Once the users were on board, it would be easier to upsell a percentage of them to the site’s paid services, like their S&P index fund with no minimum. They planned to use PayPal’s popularity as a free service to help X.com acquire users. In early 2000, Thiel and Musk merged their sites in an attempt to corner the market and avoid crippling competition. The site provided banking services with an email-based payment processor similar to PayPal. In early 1999, Elon Musk, another former Stanford student, opened a site called X.com. They started the company together, eventually calling it Confinity and linking customer accounts to their emails instead of their Palm Pilots. In 1998, freshly graduated from Stanford, Peter Thiel confided in his friend Max Levchin about an idea he’d had for a company that could relay money between Palm Pilots, pre-smartphone handheld computers from the 1990s. It lets anyone anywhere use their personal electronic devices to transfer finances safely via a heavily encrypted process. PayPal, the software behind the moniker, has become one of the world’s most popular online payment processors. The group leaned into the publicity in 2007 when Fortune magazine ran an article titled “The PayPal Mafia” with a photo of many of the members dressed as mafiosos. Coined a few years after PayPal’s sale to eBay, the name “PayPal Mafia” became popular mainly due to these prolific post-PayPal successes. Many of the alumni of the PayPal Mafia went on to found or invest in some of today’s most important tech companies, including YouTube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, and SpaceX. Most had attended either Stanford University with Thiel or the University of Illinois with Levchin. During the group’s heyday, the average age of a member was only 23. Most of the members of the PayPal Mafia were friends or associates of PayPal’s co-founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, who preferred to hire the smartest disruptors from their inner circle over outside specialists. The PayPal Mafia was the playful pseudonym given to a group of PayPal’s co-founders and employees in the early days of the company. ![]() In many ways, they set the standard for what it means to be a successful tech entrepreneur, and their legacy continues to inspire the next generation of innovators. The members of the PayPal Mafia are known not only for their immense success but also for their unique outlook on business, which prioritizes disruption, innovation, and risk-taking. The “PayPal Mafia” is a legendary group of entrepreneurs who founded, worked at, or invested in PayPal in its early days. While they all went their separate ways after PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, the members of the PayPal Mafia continued to make waves in the tech industry, founding companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, and Palantir.
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