The Paypal Mafia

The Paypal Mafia   (Deep state faction, Big tech)
Members of the PayPal Mafia on Fortune magazine dressed in Mafia-style clothing, to simulate a The Sopranos like picture. From left to right, top to bottom: Jawed Karim, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andrew McCormack, Premal Shah, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, David O. Sacks, Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Roelof Botha, Russel Simmons. Elon Musk was not on the original picture, due to a scheduling conflict, and was later individually photographed for this.
Formation	2002
Headquarters	Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois
Type	Deep state faction
Interests	Twitter, Intelligence agencies, mass surveillance
Interest of	Sam Altman, Barrett Brown, Kevin Harrington
Membership	•  Peter Thiel •  Max Levchin •  Elon Musk •  David O. Sacks •  Scott Banister •  Roelof Botha •  Steve Chen •  Reid Hoffman •  Ken Howery •  Chad Hurley •  Eric M. Jackson •  Jawed Karim •  Jared Kopf •  Dave McClure •  Andrew McCormack •  Luke Nosek •  Keith Rabois •  Jack Selby •  Premal Shah •  Russel Simmons •  Jeremy Stoppelman •  Yishan Wong
“We all became each other’s social life. Because of that, we formed really deep connections.” The genesis of the biggest tech companies with spooky ties to organs of the Deep State such as the WEF and Bilderberg.

The PayPal Mafia is a suspected deep state faction of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and massively helped new tech companies achieve leading market shares. The large companies directed by the members have been linked to intelligence agencies and used for social engineering. The members all met at Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their adolescence. Some dropped out and started companies together during the 1990s Internet bubble. Some became WEF members or Bilderbergers. Peter Thiel, nicknamed The Don of the group was invited to his first Bilderberg meeting in 2007 after a Fortune article naming the group a "mafia", and became head of the Bilderberg Steering Committee in quite short time after.

Background

The Incredible Story of The PayPal Mafia, NeoScribe, June 2018

The NYT reports that Levchin said the pace at PayPal was so intense that employees had little time for much else. “We all became each other’s social life,” he said. “Because of that, we formed really deep connections.” Many of those bonds were already in place, and life at PayPal merely strengthened them. From the beginning, PayPal hired people whom its founders or other early employees already knew. Thiel tapped his network of friends from Stanford, many of whom had worked at the Stanford Review, a libertarian magazine that Mr. Thiel co-founded in 1987. They populated PayPal’s business ranks. Levchin, for his part, hired engineers in large part from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had earlier been home to the team that developed the software that would be the basis for Netscape’s Web browser.

According to a book The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002 and 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.

A number of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms in subsequent years promising to keep supporting each-other politicly. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined, after which Fortune published the The Soprano's like picture and coined the term.

The group started to invest small and very large sums in big tech companies in small markets that all seized market share. Some companies, such as Thiel's and Alex Karp's Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX, soon received CIA funding. The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the 1990s.

Problems

As the consolidation of corporate media has shown, when the same group of people all become the main investors or investors of companies having a leading market share in big markets (like the media), the persons running them become mightier than governments and start to act like a hostile government itself, against ethical interests of the public.

Examples of companies started or developed by the members

A list by Wikipedia as seen on May the 5th of 2022.

Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.

Methods

One of their key methods in growing their companies is the Hidden Revenue Model. Although promoting their business as free, its source of revenue is through user monetization via adverts. Another key method is platformization, or a Multi-Sided Platform Model, like implemented by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and investors from the PayPal Mafia, like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. Many of the clan adopted this business model that serves as “invisible middlemen” in interactions among buyers and sellers, allowing more data of the users on these sites to be sold to companies harming privacy.

World Economic Forum

Several members were made Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, even though they didn't finish their BA or masters degree. Peter Thiel even became a Bilderberg Steering Committee member.

Connections

https://fleximize.com/paypal-mafia/

The group has had a hand in every emerging technology from the 1990s up to and including the 2020s, from videos on the internet with Youtube, and the start of internet forums such as with Reddit and Quora to AI-startups and the "gig" and platformization-economy with Uber, Lyft and AirBnB.

The owners seem to all follow the same patterns; working with intelligence agencies after massively growing their companies to a market share. Reddit (experienced a massive growth with illegal or controversial content such as creating a subforum for sexually discussing underage children during the early 2010s under CEO Yishan Wong's reign) Facebook (invested in by Peter Thiel) & Youtube (founded by Chad Hurley & Steve Chan) and their history is a perfect example for this group. Ken Howery was made U.S Ambassador to Sweden in 2019. Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022.

Reddit

A 2012 blog post revealed the city with the most "Reddit-addicted" turned out to be US Air Force Base Eglin, in Florida. How a base with just 8,500 military personnel and approximately 4,500 civilians was the leading city in terms of page views of a site with 37 billion page views per year remains unanswered. Eglin has worked on multiple studies in cooperation with the University of Florida, one being called "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity".

Youtube

Full article: Elsagate

Beginning in 2014, reaching a peak in 2017/2018, Youtube hosted videos geared towards very young children that depicted disturbing scenes and which became known as Elsagate. Youtube was forced to remove the content since there was common agreement that it is harmful. However, due to the massive distribution and monetization, Youtube must have been aware that their platform is used for this. In November 2021, YouTube removed "dislike" buttons from their site, after corporate media had been heavily disliked during COVID-19.

Space X

Space X was founded with the help of Mike Griffin, who worked for CIA's venture capital arm and was later appointed as NASA administrator by George W. Bush.

Starlink

Following the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Musk, in March, tweeted that he was deploying Starlink, his company SpaceX’s satellite internet venture, to help keep Ukraine online. Starlink promises high-speed internet to remote locations where access is anywhere from unreliable to entirely unavailable. Starlink's receivers have been set up on hospitals, energy plants and companies, and more. Musk was ostracized by The Washington Post as falsely claiming he, as a gesture, paid for Starlink deployment himself. The Biden Administration actually paid for the deployment. The United States Agency for International Development or USAID (called the CIA's little sister and completely filled with their officers by former director John Gilligan) omitted this after earlier publication from their report.

Bilderberg

Peter Thiel has attended all subsequent Bilderberg meetings after the Fortune article (since 2007, together with co-founder of Palantir who joined him in 2012, Alex Karp), being one of the 181 since 1956 to become a Steering Committee-member. Reid Hoffman has attended at least 9 Bilderbergs since 2011.

GCHQ

Thiel founded Palantir with Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale in 2004, a company which at least by 2008 was collaborating with GCHQ & the NSA.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn - founded by Reid Hoffman - has been accused of poor privacy and security standards, silently programming their mobile apps to reroute all the emails of their users mobile devices through their own private LinkedIn servers, for undisclosed purposes. Given that LinkedIn has been the target of a dozens of hacks, by multiple intelligence agencies, a choice that seemed not logical.

Palantir

How Palantir And Its Data-Mining Empire Became So Controversial, CNBC, September 2020

Palantir worked with Cambridge Analytica, who was implicated in using big data of Facebook to instigate coups worldwide and influence elections. Palantir has been contracted by the CIA for aiding ICE & the NSA creating illegal hacking software such as XKeyscore, an NSA hacking tool that was disclosed by Edward Snowden, and the CDC (for AI-predicting software and help with Operation Warp Speed). Palantir has been called "Silicon Valley's Most Secretive Company". and the "War on Terror's Secret Weapon". "Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics that look like spider webs."

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Elon Musk	“Despite having perhaps the greatest entrepreneurial streak of all the PayPal Mafia, Musk was purged from PayPal like some kind of toxin. Soon after the merger, Thiel resigned. Musk became CEO of the combined company and decided it was time for a technological overhaul. Specifically, he wanted to toss out Unix and put everything on a Microsoft (MSFT) platform. That may sound innocent enough to laypeople but not to Unix zealots like Levchin and his team. A holy war ensued. Musk lost. The board fired him and brought back Thiel while Musk was on a flight to Australia for his first vacation in years. “That’s the problem with vacations,” Musk deadpans. Musk still contends he didn’t deserve his fate, that his biggest flaw was being cut from different cloth. “Peter, Max, and I are not directly aligned philosophically,” he says. “Peter’s philosophy is pretty odd. It’s not normal. He’s a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the singularity. I’m much less excited about that. I’m pro-human.””	Elon Musk Fortune	2007

 

Known members

6 of the 22 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Roelof Botha	South African actuary, PayPal CFO from 2000 to 2003
Reid Hoffman	Venture capitalist, CEO of LinkedIn
Ken Howery	Paypal Mafia billionaire, Young Global Leaders/2012, turned US diplomat
Max Levchin	Founded Paypal with Peter Thiel in 1998.
Elon Musk	US businessman, Paypal Mafia underboss, big tech kingpin, WEF YGL billionaire
Peter Thiel	Billionaire financier, Bilderberger

Rating

8 August 2023 Jun  A group of obnoxious millennial kids not liking corporate structure all leave a big tech company and promise to take over tech and support each other no matter what. 20 years later they lead deep state factions, tech companies, intelligence agencies and mass surveillance companies. And they all got funded by the CIA when the left Ebay.
If your group of friends call themselves a mafia, gain stakes in tech companies forming cartels and working with intelligence agencies that fund and supply war crimes with big data, and actively help start civil wars and more ways to expand mass surveillance... aren't you a part of some mafia?

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