WHERE ARE THEY NOW? The PayPal "Mafia" Is More Powerful Than Ever

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? The PayPal "Mafia" Is More Powerful Than Ever:

the godfather

Ebay bought online payment company PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

As often happens with these big deals, a lot of early PayPal employees got a nice payday.

But in a rare turn of events, a surprising number of these folks went on to even greater success.

Only a handful of other companies have spawned so many powerful investors and founders — Google, Microsoft, Oracle maybe. But those companies are massive and powerful themselves.

PayPal wasn't. It had only about 600 employees when it filed to go public in late 2001, and had sales of about $50 million in its last quarter as a public company. So it's surprising that so many of its employees have become such bigshots.

There's even a term for it: the PayPal "mafia," first coined by this 2007 Fortune article.

Since that article appeared, the group has become even more powerful. Check it out.

Peter Thiel: making big bets and courting controversy

Peter Thiel cofounded the company that became PayPal (it was originally called Confinity) and oversaw its IPO in 2002 and sale to eBay a few months later.

He went on to form a hedge fund, Clarium, and a VC firm, Founders Fund. He was also one of the first investors in Facebook -- his angel investment of $500,000 got him a 10% stake in the company, which is now worth billions.

He's most prominent now through his work with Founders, which looks for companies and founders who are trying to change the world rather than "me too" ideas.

Thiel likes to make big public statements, too, like giving promising college students $100,000 to drop out and form a company and pouring money into startups in New Zealand, which he has called "utopia." Most recently, we saw him criticize the U.S. government for being too big and too disorganized and afraid to focus on long-term goals -- he called it "socialism without the five-year plan."

Reid Hoffman: becoming one of the most connected investors in Silicon Valley

Hoffman was on PayPal's founding board of directors and later took a role as executive vice president, where he handled most outward-facing duties.

When PayPal sold, he turned around and founded LinkedIn. That company had a few years of struggles, but eventually benefited from the recent run-up in social media. It went public earlier this year, turning Hoffman into a billionaire, even though he's no longer its CEO -- he stepped down in 2007 to become its chairman.

He is also one of the most successful angel investors in the Valley, with stakes in Zynga, Last.fm, and social network Tagged, among many others. Earlier this year, he joined Greylock Partners, one of the strongest VC firms.

A New York Times profile last weekend called him the "king of connections."

Elon Musk: making huge risky bets that are finally starting to pay off

Musk joined PayPal when his Internet bank, X.com, merged with Confinity, which was fonded as Thiel. He took over as CEO briefly when Thiel resigned, but tried to move the company's servers off Unix and onto Microsoft's platform. He lost that fight and was ousted from the company.

Since then, he's gone on to found several big-bet companies, including SpaceX, which is trying to commercialize space flight, and Tesla, which is making electric cars. Tesla almost drove him into bankruptcy, but the company was saved by a timely IPO last year and a big loan from the Department of Energy this year. Now, it's rolling out its mid-size sedan, the Model S, which it hopes will expand Tesla from niche to mainstream.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

See Also: