How PayPal Mafia Built a $1.3 Trillion Fortune?

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a part of the most infamous group in Silicon Valley? Did it ever cross your mind that Silicon Valley is run by some of the most powerful and rich CEOs? These individuals and groups have been coined together as the Paypal mafia.

To be a part of the group, the requirements entail being a former Paypal employee, knowing how to become a founder of a billion-dollar company, and having the worst fashion sense in the world. These ridiculously dressed men above with their baggy, ill-fitted business suits and ridiculous tracksuits are worth billions upon billions of dollars.

Unfortunately, we can laugh at them all we want but they can just wipe their tears with their stacks of dollar bills. The Paypal mafia has been successful in raking in the dough and becoming the biggest founders of billion-dollar companies (which is perhaps even more impressive). Take a look at how these big-shot entrepreneurs managed to pull it off.

What is the Paypal Mafia?
Contrary to its name, this group of misfits isn’t actually a mafia group. Think Illuminati, but a lot less serious than that. It’s more of a diaspora. In other words, it is a migration of people from one large company to a gathering.

The group started in the 1990s as the executives of what was PayPal. Although Paypal was sold to eBay in 2002, the ‘Mafia’ still continued to work and invest together in many businesses and venture capital investments. Between them, they have founded, funded, or led some of the world’s biggest tech companies such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. The mafia includes billionaires like Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and even the internet-famous Tesla CEO, Elon Musk.

"Basically, we were kicked out of our homeland and they burned down our temple. So, we were scattered to the four corners of the globe, and we had to make new homes." That's how David Sacks, former COO of PayPal and current CEO of Yammer, put it into words. The mysterious arsonist in this story is eBay, as they are partly responsible for PayPal's success and the departure of the creators of PayPal. eBay became both the villain and the hero in the PayPal Mafia narrative.

It's bizarre that the majority of PayPal's early employees, and the PayPal Mafia in general, were recruited by friends rather than by headhunters. But despite the idea being unconventional, it actually worked like clockwork in the long run. Sacks proclaimed that this group of individuals were "cut from the same cloth." He explained that this is how they all had such a strong entrepreneurial mindset from the start.

What’s more out of the ordinary is the exit becoming the spark for the renewal of a local economy and a specific type of investment. Despite all odds, this is what happened when PayPal was acquired by eBay in the summer of 2002. Some of the original PayPal team members went on to found some of the most famous startups and make some of the most successful investments of all time. In Silicon Valley, the PayPal Mafia is defined as the Mountain View PayPal team either pre-IPO or pre-acquisition, depending on which founding member you ask. Talk about legendary work.