PayPal

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Formation	1998
Founders	Peter Thiel, Max Levchin
Headquarters	San Jose, California, US
Online payment website

Confinity, which later became "X" (in 1999, this was before Twitter was changed to X") and Paypal in 2001, is a online payment company originally to be used with phones or PDAs promoted by Fieldlink. The company was founded by Max Levchin, Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman, and West-German Peter Thiel. It operates like a bank, but without legal protections for banks or fractional-reserve banking and acts as a middle person (early on using platformization between small businesses and banks) hiring the operational infrastructure of other banks to provide "bank-like" services such as debit cards. Like Apple and Intel, its corporate structure has fuelled a lot "ambition-minded" individuals.

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Confinity was first a personal payment system between personal digital assistants, an early form of the smartphone. Confinity made these PDA's but only started making significant profits of around $50 million after two name changes, a merge and an argument between Petel Thiel and X.com founder Elon Musk, resulting in Musk being fired. Paypal was using the personal budgets of Musk and Thiel to give people money for simply signing up for the site. After being bought by Ebay and rewarding use of Paypal on it, Paypal became market leader as online payment application.

PayPal Mafia

Full article: The Paypal Mafia

According to a book The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley PayPal was purchased by eBay in 2002 and the original PayPal 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.

A number of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms in subsequent years promising to keep supporting each-other politicly. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined, after which Fortune published the The Soprano's like picture and coined the term.

The group started to invest small and very large sums in big tech companies in small markets that all seized market share. Some companies, such as Palentir, soon received CIA funding. The group was noted to be one of the few to survive the dot.com bubble of the 1990s.