Difference between revisions of "The Paypal Mafia"

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The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the [[1990s]].<ref>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/DDOH107DLG.DTL</ref>
 
The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the [[1990s]].<ref>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/15/DDOH107DLG.DTL</ref>
  
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===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 become mightier than governments. The rise of the companies of the Paypal Mafia has ran simultaneously with the [[platformization]].
  
 
==Examples of companies started or developed by the members==
 
==Examples of companies started or developed by the members==

Revision as of 04:46, 8 May 2022

Group.png The Paypal Mafia
(Deep state faction, Big tech)Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png 5
File Paypal Mafia 2014.jpg
Members of the PayPal Mafia on Fortune magazine dressed in Mafia-style clothing, to simulate a The Soprano's 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.
HeadquartersUniversity of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois
TypeDeep state.jpg Deep state faction
Interest ofSam Altman, Barrett Brown, Kevin Harrington
Membership• Peter Thiel.jpg Peter Thiel
• Max Levchin (2013).jpg Max Levchin
• Elon Musk Twitter.webp Elon Musk
•  David O. Sacks
•  Scott Banister
• Roelof Botha.jpg Roelof Botha
•  Steve Chen
• Reid Hoffman in SF 2011.jpg 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
IF you thought the consolidation of media wasn't bad enough, most big tech companies started in the 2000s are mostly owned by the same group of friends. And, connected to Intelligence services, the WEF and Bilderberg as well.

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 members all met at Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their adolescence and some even dropped out and started companies together during the Internet bubble of the 1990s. Some became WEF members, or Bilderberg members, and Peter Thiel, nicknamed The Don of the group even became head of the Bilderberg Steering Committee.

Background

This was already in 2007.

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.[1]

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, 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. The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the 1990s.[2]

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 become mightier than governments. The rise of the companies of the Paypal Mafia has ran simultaneously with the platformization.

Examples of companies started or developed by the members

Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[3]

Why ex-PayPal Employees Run the Tech World - Newsthink

World Economic Forum

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

Connections

The owners seem to all follow the same patterns; working with intelligence agencies after massively growing their companies to a market share. Reddit & Youtube (both partially owned by a member) their history is a perfect example for this.

Bilderberg

Peter Thiel has attended all subsequent Bilderberg meetings (since 2012, together with together with co-founder of Palantir, Alex Karp), being one of the 181 since 1956 to become a Steering Committee-member.

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.[4].

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been accused of poor privacy and security standards, silently programming their mobile apps to reroute[5] all the emails of their users mobile devices through their own private LinkedIn servers, for undisclosed purposes[6][7]. Given that LinkedIn has been the target of a dozens of hacks, by multiple intelligence agencies, a choice that seemed not logical.

Palantir

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

Palantir had worked with Cambridge Analytica, who was implicated in using big data of Facebook to instigate coups worldwide and influence elections.[8] Palantir has been contreacted by the CIA (for aiding ICE, NSA[[creating illegal hacking software), and the CDC (for AI-predicting software and help with Operation Warp Speed).

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.”


 

Related Quotation

PageQuoteAuthorDate
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:

MemberDescription
Roelof BothaSouth African actuary, PayPal CFO from 2000 to 2003
Reid HoffmanVenture capitalist, CEO of LinkedIn
Ken HoweryPaypal Mafia billionaire, Young Global Leaders/2012, turned US diplomat
Max LevchinFounded Paypal with Peter Thiel in 1998.
Elon MuskUS businessman, Paypal Mafia underboss, big tech kingpin, WEF YGL billionaire
Peter ThielBillionaire financier, Bilderberger


Rating

5star.png 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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References