Max Levchin

Co-founder & former CTO, PayPal; founder, Affirm

Max Levchin (born 1975) co-founded Confinity — the company behind the original PayPal product — and served as PayPal's chief technology officer, where he built much of the anti-fraud technology that made online payments viable at scale. A central figure in the “PayPal Mafia” that included Musk, he later founded the “buy now, pay later” fintech Affirm and the health-tech company Glow. Levchin's fraud-detection work is often credited as one of the reasons PayPal survived its early years — the foundation on which Musk and the other founders built the fortunes and companies that followed.