What do the founders and leaders of Tesla, YouTube, and LinkedIn have in common? They all started their early careers at PayPal, the online payment company. This group of highly ambitious twenty and thirty-year-olds has been dubbed the “PayPal mafia” and once even dressed up as mafia members for the cover of Fortune magazine.
They went on to found or run some of the largest tech companies in the world. Elon Musk was absent the day of the shoot because of a scheduling conflict. This is by no means all of them. Peter Thiel estimates that the “mafia” is around 220 people.
Thiel is a famous start-up investor often referred to as the “don” of the PayPal mafia. PayPal began when Thiel and Max Levchin created software company Confinity as a way to transfer money through the once-popular Palm Pilot.
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