The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley, [1] such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. [2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity, which merged with X.com in 1999. Later, X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002. [3] The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay's more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left. [4] They remained connected as social and business acquaintances, [4] and a number of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms in subsequent years. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined. [3] The term [5] gained even wider exposure when a 2007 article in Fortune magazine used the phrase in its headline and featured a photo of former PayPal employees in gangster attire. [5]
Individuals whom the media refers to as members of the PayPal Mafia include: [5] [4]
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. [7] The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. [3] They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill sets. [3] PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal. [3] An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie among former employees. [3] [8]
Some members of the group, such as Peter Thiel, David O. Sacks and Elon Musk, later expressed libertarian and conservative political views. [9] However, not all are this way. Reid Hoffman is regularly a top donor for many Democratic campaigns and political pushes.
After the 2024 United States presidential election, TheEconomist wrote that the PayPal Mafia would “take over America’s government” with the reelection of Donald Trump. [10] Thiel protégé JD Vance became Trump's Vice President [10] , while Musk became head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) [11] and Sacks became Trump's advisor on AI and cryptocurrencies. [12] Musk alone had previously donated over $250 million to Trump's re-presidential campaign. [13]
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of US$11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. His other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X, and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Musk is the wealthiest individual in the world; as of December 2024, Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$432 billion.
The Stanford Review is a student-run newspaper that serves Stanford University in Stanford, California. It was founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel and Norman Book.
X.com was an American online bank founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Elon Musk, and Christopher Payne in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. It merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to PayPal in 2001. Starting in 2023, the x.com internet domain name began to be used for Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequently rebranded to X.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
David Oliver Sacks is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is a general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal, and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for ten months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb. In December 2024, President-elect Donald Trump named Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar for the incoming administration.
Russel Simmons is an American businessman. He co-founded Yelp, Inc. with Jeremy Stoppelman and served as CTO from July 2004 until he left in June 2010. Prior to co-founding Yelp, Simmons was a co-founder of PayPal, where he was a Lead Software Architect, and has been described as a member of the "PayPal Mafia." In 2014 he founded Learnirvana.
Confinity Inc. was an American software company based in Silicon Valley, best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company.
Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $12 billion in total assets under management as of 2023. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook. The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX.
Łukasz Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur, notable for being a co-founder of PayPal.
Kimbal James Musk is a South African-born Canadian and American businessman and restaurateur. He co-owns The Kitchen Restaurant Group, a collection of restaurants in Colorado, Chicago, and Austin. He is the co-founder and chairman of Big Green, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has built hundreds of outdoor classrooms called Learning Gardens in schoolyards across the United States. Musk is also the co-founder and chairman of Square Roots, an urban farming company growing food in hydroponic, indoor, climate controlled shipping containers. Musk currently sits on the boards of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX; his brother Elon is the current CEO of both companies. He was on the board of Chipotle Mexican Grill from 2013 to 2019. He is the brother of Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, son of Errol and Maye Musk, and a major shareholder in Tesla.
Joseph Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-founded companies including Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and OpenGov, and co-founded and serves as the managing partner at the technology investment firm 8VC.
Keith Rabois is an American technology executive and investor. He is a managing director at Khosla Ventures. He was an early-stage startup investor, and executive, at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. Rabois invested in Yelp and the Xoom Corporation prior to each company's initial public offering (IPO). For both investments he insisted on being a board of directors member.
Jeremy Stoppelman is an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1999. After briefly working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the idea for Yelp Inc. He turned down an acquisition offer by Google and took the company public in 2012.
Yu Pan is an engineer and entrepreneur mentioned in one source as one of the original six people who started PayPal and the first employee at YouTube, as an early software engineer. He is a former Google employee and also a co-founder of Kiwi Crate, Inc.
Zip2 Corp. was a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to newspapers. The company was founded in Palo Alto, California as Global Link Information Network, Inc. on November 9, 1995, by Greg Kouri and brothers Elon and Kimbal Musk. Initially, Global Link provided local businesses with an Internet presence, but later began to assist newspapers in designing online city guides before being purchased by Compaq Computer in 2000.
Bruce Cannon Gibney is an American writer and venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors at PayPal, and went on to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium and his venture capital company Founders Fund. His first book, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, was published by Hachette in 2017.
All-In is an American business and technology podcast hosted by four venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. The podcast covers current events, market trends, political issues, and industry insights.
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