PayPal Mafia

The PayPal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley,^[1] such as LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.^[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.^[3]

Members of the PayPal Mafia on Fortune magazine dressed in mafia-like attire. From left to right, top row to bottom row: 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

History

Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity, which merged with X.com in 1999. Later, X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002.^[4] 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.^{[5][page needed]} They remained connected as social and business acquaintances,^{[5][page needed]} and 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.^[4] The term^[6] gained even wider exposure when a 2007 article in Fortune magazine featured the group, along with a now-iconic photograph of its members dressed in mafia-style attire, highlighting their influence in Silicon Valley and their role in founding or investing in major technology companies.^[7]

Members

Individuals whom the media refers to as members of the PayPal Mafia include:^{[5][page needed][6]}

• Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former CEO who is sometimes referred to as the "don" of the PayPal Mafia. He serves as Chairman of the Palantir board, was a founder of Founders Fund, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Since 2025, he helps the management of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for Second presidency of Donald Trump.
• Max Levchin, founder and chief technology officer at PayPal. Current CEO of Affirm.
• Elon Musk, co-founder of Zip2, and founder of X.com (which merged with Confinity to form PayPal), SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. He bought a controlling share in Tesla Motors and purchased Twitter (rebranded as X). He is the wealthiest person on Earth, with a net worth of $384 billion. Since 2025, he was former senior advisor to United States President Donald J. Trump and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
• David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO who later founded Geni.com and Yammer.
• Scott Banister, early advisor and board member at PayPal.^[8]
• Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO who later became a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
• Steve Chen, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube.
• Reid Hoffman, former executive vice president who later founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook and Aviary. Currently sits on the board of Microsoft.
• Ken Howery, former PayPal CFO who became a partner at Founders Fund, and later served as the US ambassador to Sweden during the Trump administration.
• Chad Hurley, former PayPal web designer who co-founded YouTube.
• Eric M. Jackson, who wrote the book The PayPal Wars and became chief executive officer of WND Books and co-founded CapLinked.
• Jawed Karim, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube. Founder of YVentures.
• Dave McClure, former PayPal marketing director who later co-founded 500 Global and became a super angel investor for startup companies.
• Luke Nosek, PayPal co-founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy who later became a partner at Founders Fund.
• Keith Rabois, former executive at PayPal who later worked at LinkedIn, Square, Khosla Ventures, and Founders Fund.
• Jack Selby, former vice president of corporate and international development at PayPal who co-founded Clarium Capital with Peter Thiel and is the founder of AZ-VC (formerly invisionAZ Fund), which focuses on Arizona.^[9]
• Premal Shah, former product manager at PayPal who later became the founding president of Kiva.org. Serves on the Change.org board.
• Russel Simmons, former PayPal engineer who later co-founded Yelp.
• Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who later co-founded Yelp.
• Yishan Wong, former engineering manager at PayPal who later worked at Facebook, became the CEO of Reddit, and founded Terraformation Inc.
• Yu Pan was one of the co-founders of PayPal and played a role in designing the company's user interface and user experience. He later became involved in private ventures and some successful startups.^{[clarification needed]}

Legacy

The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001.^[10] The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor.^[4] They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill sets.^[4] PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal.^[4] An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie among former employees.^[4][11]

Politics

Some members of the group, such as Peter Thiel, David Sacks and Elon Musk, later expressed libertarian and conservative political views.^[12] By contrast, Reid Hoffman has regularly been a top donor for many Democratic campaigns and political pushes.^[13]

After the 2024 United States presidential election, The Economist wrote that ⁣⁣the PayPal Mafia would "take over America's government" with the reelection of Donald Trump.^[14] Thiel protégé JD Vance became Trump's Vice President,^[14] Musk became head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),^[15] and Sacks became Trump's advisor on AI and cryptocurrencies.^[16] Musk alone had donated over $250 million to Trump's re-presidential campaign.^[17]

See also

• Pierre Omidyar
• Technolibertarianism
• Traitorous eight
• America PAC