- A company of early 2000s PayPal employees and founders came to be known as the “PayPal Mafia.”
- The members have all gone on to burden Silicon Valley by founding and developing major companies.
- The group includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and the designers of both YouTube and Yelp.
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What do the founders of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, and LinkedIn have in run-of-the-mill? Apart from creating some of the biggest companies in tech, they all share a common résumé line element: they’ve all worked at PayPal.
Many of PayPal’s early employees went on to become major names in tech and the put down capital world, founding, funding, and otherwise developing successful companies. This elite group came to be certain as the “PayPal Mafia,” a nickname that gained popularity after Fortune featured the term in a 2007 piece along with a photo of some of the fellows dressed in gangster attire.
Members of the group include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, along with over with a dozen others. Here’s a rundown of the most prominent members of this exclusive group and what they’re up to once more two decades later.