X.com becomes PayPal
Musk founds the online bank X.com, which becomes PayPal — acquired by eBay for $1.5B and seeding the "PayPal Mafia."
$1.5B
eBay acquisition (2002)
~$160–180M
Musk net proceeds
Months after the Zip2 sale, Musk founded X.com in 1999 — one of the world's first online banks. In March 2000 X.com merged with rival Confinity, whose money-transfer product was called PayPal; Musk was the combined company's largest shareholder and briefly its CEO. The company adopted the PayPal name and pioneered frictionless online payments at the dawn of e-commerce.
In October 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock. Musk, its largest shareholder, netted an estimated $160–180 million — the fortune he then poured into SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity.
PayPal's founding team became the legendary "PayPal Mafia" — Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks and others — who went on to seed an outsized share of Silicon Valley, from LinkedIn and YouTube to Palantir. Few startup teams in history have produced as much.
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