Reid Hoffman

Former COO, PayPal; co-founder, LinkedIn

Reid Hoffman (born 1967) was an early executive and board member at PayPal, serving as chief operating officer through its 2002 sale to eBay. A core member of the “PayPal Mafia” alongside Musk, he co-founded the professional network LinkedIn in 2003 — later acquired by Microsoft for about $26 billion — and became a leading venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, backing companies including Airbnb. His path shows the reach of the PayPal network Musk helped build: its alumni went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Palantir, SpaceX and Tesla, among many others. Hoffman has since become a prominent political critic of Musk, but the two were part of the same founding cohort that reshaped Silicon Valley.