PayPal

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Group.png PayPal
(BankFacebook LinkedIn Website YouTubeRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
Formation1998
Founder• Peter Thiel.jpg Peter Thiel
• Max Levchin (2013).jpg Max Levchin
HeadquartersSan Jose, California, US
Member ofBusiness Roundtable, Council on Foreign Relations/Corporate Members, Highlands Forum, WEF/Strategic Partners
Online payment website

Confinity, which later became "X" (in 1999 this was before Twitter was changed to X") and Paypal in 2001, is a online payment company Fieldlink was founded Max Levchin, Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman, and West-German Peter Thiel. It operates like a bank, but without legal protections for banks or fractional-reserve banking and acts as a middle person hiring the operational infrastructure of other banks to provide "bank-like" services such as debit cards.[1] Like Apple and Intel, its corporate structure has fuelled a lot "ambition-minded" individuals.[2]

Origin

Credit: Companymen

Confinity was first a personal payment system between personal digital assistant, an early form of the smartphone. Confinity made these PDA's but only started making significant profits of around $50 million after two name changes, a merge and an argument between Petel Thiel and X.com founder Elon Musk, resulting in Musk being fired. Paypal was using the personal budgets of Musk and Thiel to give people money for simply signing up for the site.[3][4] After being bought by Ebay and rewarding use of Paypal on it, Paypal became market leader as online payment application.[5]

PayPal Mafia

Full article: Rated 5/5 The Paypal Mafia

According to a book The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley[6] 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[7]. 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 Palentir, soon received CIA funding.[8][9] The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the 1990s.[10]


 

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

 

Employee on Wikispooks

EmployeeJobAppointedEnd
Roelof BothaCFOMarch 2000January 2003

 

Related Documents

TitleTypePublication dateAuthor(s)Description
Document:Omidyar’s PayPal Corporation Said To Be Implicated in Withheld NSA Documentsarticle11 December 2013Sibel Edmonds
Document:PayPal Partnering With Anti-Defamation League to Share Info With Law Enforcement, Determine Who Can Use Their ServicesArticle26 July 2021Cassandra FairbanksThe censorship industry colludes with law enforcement and financial services in order to censor more.
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References