PayPal Mafia
Term for a group of former PayPal employees
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The PayPal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed other 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]
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History
Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity, which merged with X.com in 1999. X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002.[4] PayPal's 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] They remained connected as social and business acquaintances,[5] and several of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms. 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 Fortune magazine article 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
People the media calls members of the PayPal Mafia include:[8][6]
- Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former CEO.[9] Sometimes called the "don" of the PayPal Mafia, he is a founder of Palantir and chairs its board, a founder of Founders Fund, and the first outside investor in Facebook.[10] In 2025, Thiel and Palantir began collaborating with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for the second Trump administration.[11]
- 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.[12] He bought a controlling share in Tesla Motors and purchased Twitter (rebranded as X). As of October 2025, he is the wealthiest person on Earth, with a net worth of $750 billion.[13] In 2025, he was a senior advisor to President Donald Trump and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).[14]
- David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO who later founded Geni.com and Yammer. In December 2024, President Trump named Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar for the incoming administration.[15]
- Max Levchin, founder and chief technology officer at PayPal, CEO of Affirm, and co-founder of Glow.
- Scott Banister, early advisor and board member at PayPal.[16]
- Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO who 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 founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook and Aviary. He sits on the board of Microsoft.
- Ken Howery, former PayPal CFO who became a partner at Founders Fund and served as the US ambassador to Sweden during the first Trump administration and US ambassador to Denmark during the second Trump administration.
- Chad Hurley, former PayPal web designer who co-founded YouTube.
- Eric M. Jackson, who wrote the book The PayPal Wars, 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 co-founded 500 Global and became a super angel investor for startup companies.
- Andrew McCormack, founding partner at Valar Ventures.
- Luke Nosek, PayPal co-founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy who became a partner at Founders Fund.[17]
- 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.[18]
- Premal Shah, former product manager at PayPal who became the founding president of Kiva.org. Serves on the Change.org board.
- Russel Simmons, former PayPal engineer who co-founded Yelp.
- Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who co-founded Yelp.
- Yishan Wong, former engineering manager at PayPal who later worked at Facebook, became the CEO of Reddit, and founded Terraformation Inc.[19]
- Yu Pan was one of the co-founders of PayPal and played a role in designing the company's user interface and user experience.[20] He later became involved in YouTube and co-founded Kiwi Crate, Inc.
Legacy
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the reemergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001.[21] 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.[22] According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their 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][23]
Politics
Some members of the group, such as Thiel, Sacks, and Musk, later expressed libertarian and conservative political views.[24] By contrast, Hoffman has been a top donor to many Democratic Party campaigns and political efforts.[25]
After the 2024 United States presidential election, The Economist wrote that the PayPal Mafia would "take over America's government" with Trump's reelection.[26] Thiel protégé JD Vance is Trump's Vice President,[26] Musk became head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE),[27] and Sacks became Trump's advisor on AI and cryptocurrencies.[28] Musk alone donated over $250 million to Trump's 2024 campaign.[29]
