His goal was to turn the company into an online financial superstore, combining consumer banking, investment banking, insurance, and financial advisory services under one roof.Īt about the same time, Peter Thiel teamed up with Max Levchin to form Confinity. He poured his newfound fortune into X.com. Elon Musk was fresh from selling an earlier startup and walking away with $32 million.
How PayPal came to beĪt first, there were two companies, not one. Levchin appears at number 2664 on the Forbes billionaires list with net worth of $1 billion. He was an early investor in Yelp and became its largest shareholder. Since leaving PayPal not long after the company went public, Levchin has founded several companies, including Slide (sold to Google for $182 million). These included, most notably, a novel approach to cyber fraud and a program that was one of the first commercial implementations of the CAPTCHA challenge to identify Internet bots.
#PAYPAL FOUNDERS SOFTWARE#
A Ukrainian-American immigrant, he is a software engineer who designed several of the mission-critical features that made PayPal’s success possible. Max Levchin is the least well-known of the three principal cofounders at PayPal. Palantir software is widely employed by federal and state government agencies and major corporations to combat terrorism, computer fraud, and other cyber crime. However, Thiel did found a software company named Palantir Technologies, a $3 billion enterprise with some 3,000 employees. Instead, he identifies as a venture capitalist. Although Thiel served as CEO of PayPal during a stretch of its most consequential years, he is not an entrepreneur. As I write, he’s in the process of sending enormous campaign contributions to favored reactionary Republican candidates around the country. Thiel is a right-wing libertarian who scorns both political parties and the democratic system as a whole. However, it’s enough for him to wreak havoc on the American political scene. He weighs in at only number 551 on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list, with net worth estimated at a paltry $5.1 billion.
Peter Thielīy comparison, Peter Thiel is poor. With the possible exception of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, no one has shined as brightly in the technological firmament as Elon Musk. (Musk is the founder or cofounder of all these companies except Tesla, for which he serves as CEO and product architect.) And at this writing he seems to have bought Twitter as well. He’s also famously the man behind Tesla and SpaceX as well as The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI. A South African immigrant (by way of Canada), he is routinely identified as the richest person in the world, with a fortune pegged at $270 billion as I write. Image: Tosca – Fortune The three principals of the PayPal mafia Elon MuskĮlon Musk needs no introduction to anyone who’s awake in the United States in 2022. Nearly all in the photo later founded or cofounded other Silicon Valley companies. The image includes the principal early figures in PayPal except for Elon Musk, who was photographed separately. The controversial “PayPal Mafia” photograph published in Fortune in 2007. The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni (2022) 496 pages ★★★★☆ But a reading of The Founders makes clear that three men were central to the company’s success: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin. And there were, indeed, many people involved at the outset. So, after a fashion, diversity was a fact of life at PayPal.
It’s true that a third of the people who worked for the company in its early years were women, and a majority of those in the most senior positions were foreign-born. Elsewhere, I’ve read there were 20 founders. The iconic 2007 photo in Fortune of the “PayPal mafia” includes 13 people, all men. The implication, of course, is that all eight were “founders.” By contrast, Wikipedia lists seven founders, all men. The cover of the Kindle edition of The Founders features cameo sketches of five men and three women. A company with many fathers (and mothers) That’s the story that emerges most vividly from the pages of Jimmy Soni’s “group biography” of the team, The Founders. What’s truly remarkable about PayPal, though, is the enormous impact its founders - the so-called PayPal mafia - have had in the years following their departure from the company. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, not to mention Tencent and Alibaba in China, all dwarf PayPal on all the metrics used to measure success in Silicon Valley. As tech companies go, PayPal is a piker compared to the bold-faced names of the industry.
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