Max Levchin

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Person.png Max Levchin   Twitter WebsiteRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(businessman, computer scientist)
Max Levchin (2013).jpg
BornMaksymilian Rafailovych Levchyn
July 11, 1975
Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, USSR
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Children2
SpouseNellie Minkova
Founder ofPayPal
Member ofThe Paypal Mafia, WEF/Young Global Leaders/2011
Founded Paypal with Peter Thiel in 1998.

Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, Levchin and Peter Thiel founded Fieldlink. In 2001, the name changed to become Paypal.


 

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

 

Events Participated in

EventStartEndLocation(s)Description
WEF/Annual Meeting/201323 January 201327 January 2013Switzerland2500 mostly unelected leaders met to discuss "leading through adversity"
WEF/Annual Meeting/201422 January 201425 January 2014World Economic Forum
Switzerland
2604 guests in Davos considered "Reshaping The World"
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References