Present Story of the PayPal Mafia
Do you believe in teamwork? I believe in it deeply. In my university, I lead a team of six members. Every time we work as a team, we achieve excellence through our dedication. Today, we are discussing an iconic team that is the best in history.
I think you all know about PayPal. Yes, you already know it. PayPal is a money transfer system, renowned and widely used across the world. PayPal was not created by a single person. It was created by a group of people, and now every single one of them is a billionaire. Today, we will discuss their present story. What are they doing now? Where are these people?
PayPal started its journey in 1998 and released its product publicly in 2002. Its USP was making it easy to transfer money globally. They simplified everything to outpace their competition at the time. Their main competitor was eBay’s personal pay. Eventually, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.
The founding team was a team of excellence. Every member was a mastermind, dedicated to building a great product and satisfying customers. They had almost 15 team members, many of whom now run their own businesses or have founded new unicorns.
Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel was the founder and CEO of PayPal, born in October 1967. He was nicknamed “The Don.” He founded the company, hired masterminds for key positions, and empowered them to run the business better than he could. He is now a celebrated investor and was the first investor in Facebook. Currently, he runs the Thiel Fellowship, a popular program for young people with ideas but needing seed funding. A key rule of the fellowship is that participants must drop out of school to qualify.
Steve Chen
Steve Chen was a product engineer at PayPal. Later, he co-founded YouTube, the internet video platform we use every day. After PayPal was sold, he invested his share in starting this iconic venture. However, due to maintenance and data security issues, YouTube was sold to Google for $1.65 billion.
Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim, a Muslim, worked at PayPal as an engineer. Later, he founded YVentures, a venture capital firm investing in startups. He was also one of YouTube’s co-founders alongside Steve Chen. He uploaded the first video on YouTube in 2005.
Yishan Wong
Yishan Wong was an engineering designer at PayPal. Later, he worked at Facebook during its early days. He eventually became the CEO of Reddit but resigned in 2014. In 2019, he founded Terraformation Inc., which focuses on forest restoration. Terraformation Inc. is now valued at over $50 million.
Russel Simmons
Russel Simmons was a lead engineer at PayPal. With his earnings, he started his own ventures and later co-founded Yelp. Yelp is a platform where users can find and connect with local businesses. It has both app and web versions. Yelp is a public company and went public via IPO. In 2023, Yelp raised approximately $1.5 billion in revenue.
Reid Hoffman
Reid Hoffman was the Vice President of PayPal. After leaving PayPal, he founded LinkedIn, one of the most widely used professional networking platforms. LinkedIn was sold to Microsoft for nearly $29 billion. Hoffman was also an early investor in Facebook. He now serves as a board member at Microsoft.
Elon Musk
Now we come to the richest man on Earth—Elon Musk. Elon joined PayPal as its last member. Initially, he started another money transfer company called X.com, which later merged with PayPal to create a bigger impact. When PayPal was sold to eBay, Elon received $175 million as an investor. The rest, as they say, is history. Elon Musk now runs some of the most prominent companies in the world, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. He also acquired Twitter for $44 billion and renamed it X.com. Elon Musk’s net worth is now nearly $400 billion, making him the first person to hit that milestone.
So here is the short story of the main characters of the PayPal Mafia. Every single person in this team is now worth collectively more than a trillion dollars, which is why they are called the PayPal Mafia.
Do you have a team as madly brilliant as the PayPal Mafia? Thank you for reading. See you in another blog.