PayPal Mafia


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, such as LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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. 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. They remained connected as social and business acquaintances, 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. The term 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.

Members

People the media calls members of the PayPal Mafia include:
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the reemergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot-com bust of 2001. 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. 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 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. PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal. 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.

Politics

Some members of the group, such as Thiel, Sacks, and Musk, later expressed libertarian and conservative political views. By contrast, Hoffman has been a top donor to many Democratic Party campaigns and political efforts.
After the 2024 United States presidential election, The Economist wrote that ⁣⁣the PayPal Mafia would "take over America's government" with Trump's reelection. Thiel protégé JD Vance is Trump's Vice President, Musk became head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, and Sacks became Trump's advisor on AI and cryptocurrencies. Musk alone donated over $250 million to Trump's 2024 campaign.