Elon Musk is on his way to buying Twitter. Connoisseurs of his figure already know that before Tesla and SpaceX Musk made his initial fortune thanks to Zip2, a company he founded together with his brother Kimbal and that was a kind of Yellow Pages from the pre-bubble era dot comand, later, with PayPal, a reference name where he coincided with Peter Thiel.
However, Musk’s name has now gained in popularity for many people who were not linked to the sphere of technology, which has caused his life to be reviewed in a thousand ways. In this context, the name of the named PayPal Mafia has resurfaced.
What is ‘PayPal Mafia’ beyond a catchy name
As PayPal Mafia is known from a photo published by the magazine fortune in 2007 where a good part of PayPal’s executive leadership appeared, from which those who would later become CEOs and directors of other successful technology companies would come.
The name of Mafia in Spanish it has the connotations that it does, but in the United States, it can be assumed to be something more like gang or gang. But, that avoids that the cover of the magazine was not aimed at marking that that group was at that time destined to control Silicon Valley.
Who’s Who in the PayPal Mafia
The article was reviewing with names godparents each one of them. The first is Peter Thiel. According to the article, the Don, become one of the best-known investors in the Bay Area. He co-founded Palantir, was the first investor in Facebook. Thiel is also a controversial figure, no doubt being an outspoken donor and supporter of Trump.
also appeared in the photo Max Levichin. Known as the consigliereone of the people who promoted several anti-fraud systems known today, such as the first versions of the Captcha test.
also appeared in the photo Jawed Karim: one of the co-founders of Youtube. The first and well-known video in the history of YouTube was Karim at the zoo. Steve Chen or Chad Hurley also appear, the other co-founders of YouTube.
Jeremy Stoppelman and Russell Simmonsco-founders of Yelp, and also Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and also an investor in Facebook, Flickr, and a member of the Microsoft Board since 2017.
And of course in this gang is Elon Musk, but also Yishan Wong, who was CEO of Reddit from the end of 2011 to 2014 and who during the process of buying Twitter published an opinion against Musk being able to stop his intention of taking freedom of expression in the social network to the extreme . I mean what happened.
Mafia or concentration of talent
What made this group become the most relevant investors and technology entrepreneurs, nobody knows. But beyond the mafia connotations, it may simply have been an unparalleled concentration of talent and money.
It was Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek who started PayPal in 1998. The company was originally called Confinity to focus on the world of digital payments.
In March 2000, Confinity merged with a fintech startup called X.com and changed its name. This bank was founded by none other than Elon Musk, who was promoted as CEO.
Over time, some bad trends that had been inserted within the company have been remembered. To begin with, there was no woman in that photo. And, in addition, a certain inbreeding was created around Stanford University. As if that were not enough, it is said that they did not admit anyone who played basketball for a kind of personal bet.
In 2001, the company had 10.2 million users. In February 2002, four years after the initial idea, and just a few months after rebranding as PayPal, the company successfully went public, going from $13 to a closing value of $20.
In July 2002, Ebay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. All those who were part of the company were millionaires.