PayPal Mafia: The millennium's most influential techies?

IBM, Microsoft and Apple were all launched in the last century. When you look at companies launched in the new millennium, then the influence of the so-called PayPal Mafia (who even have a Wikipedia page named after them) cannot be denied.

PayPal was launched as Confinity in 1998. It was merged with X.com in 2000. It was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, it came out with an IPO and was acquired by eBay. The events of 2002 made half a dozen Paypal billionaires and many millionaires. They went on to be probably the most influential group in Silicon Valley in the new millennium. A look at what those founders and employees achieved…

Elon Musk: The most famous of them all. He co-founded Internet city guide Zip2, which was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. Then he launched X.com, which merged with Confinity and became Paypal. Musk exited PayPal as a billionaire and then really got going. He launched SpaceX which became the first really affordable private space agency. SpaceX came out with Falcon Heavy, which is the most powerful rocket in the world. It is also launching the Starlink satellites, which will give Internet service across the world. 1000+ have been launched and tens of thousands are planned (There are less than 10,000 satellites currently up in space).

Then Tesla probably became the first Smart Car manufacturer and Musk became the man who made electric vehicles sexy. Tesla could rule the world of connected and driverless cars of tomorrow. In conjunction with that he launched SolarCity and led a revolution in batteries for both cars and otherwise. Musk has great plans for tomorrow too. There's his Boring Company and Hyperloop projects. With Neuralink he wants to merge the human brain and Artificial Intelligence and he's also launched OpenAI to ensure that AI is beneficial to the human race.

The rest of the mafia

Peter Thiel: Called the Don of the PayPal Mafia, he was Paypal CEO when it was acquired by eBay. He is Chairman of Palantir and Valar Ventures, President of Clarium Capital and Partner in Founders Fund. In 2004 he invested half a million dollars in Facebook to take a 10.2% stake and made another billion off it (after Paypal) and he is still a director there today. He was also a partner with Y Combinator. Recently Palantir, into Big Data Analytics and deals with governments, came out with an IPO and was initially worth $20 billion.

Reid Hoffman: Another PayPal billionaire, he was the COO at that time and went on to co-found LinkedIn. He was the Executive Chairman there and is now a partner with VC Greylock Partners. Hoffman also invested in Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Zynga, Digg and Technorati.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim: These former PayPal employees formed YouTube in 2005 which was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion. Today it's the number one video site and second in Alexa global rankings (only behind Google Search).

The others: Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman founded Yelp.com, which is into crowd-based reviews and reservations. David O. Sacks founded Geni.com and Yammer, an enterprise social networking site. Jared Kopf co-founded Slide, HomeRun and NextRoll. Eric M. Jackson co-founded CapLinked. Andrew McCormack co-founded Valar Ventures. Roelof Botha became a partner in Sequoia Capital. Yishan Wong became CEO of Reddit, the controversial social news aggregator.

Post Script...

This article was written in 2020 and in 2022, Musk took over Twitter.

The same year ChatGPT also became a sensation. That was founded by Musk and Y Combinator's Sam Altman. So the Paypal Mafia is clearly not done yet!