Peter Thiel

Co-founder & former CEO, PayPal; investor

Peter Thiel (born 1967) co-founded Confinity, which merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000 to form PayPal, where Thiel served as CEO. After eBay bought PayPal in 2002, he became the informal figurehead of the “PayPal Mafia” — the group of PayPal alumni, Musk among them, who went on to found or fund an extraordinary run of technology companies. Thiel co-founded the data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies and the venture firm Founders Fund, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. His career alongside Musk illustrates how the PayPal cohort seeded much of 21st-century Silicon Valley, from payments to defence software to social media. Musk and Thiel clashed over the X.com/PayPal merger and Musk's removal as CEO, but both describe the PayPal years as formative — and Founders Fund later became an early investor in SpaceX.