It’s been nine years since [Peter] Thiel and [Max] Levchin first dined together at Hobee’s, near Stanford University. Levchin had an idea for a company, and Thiel wanted to invest. In short order Thiel joined as a co-founder, and together they set out to “create the new world currency.”
Their brainchild would change the course of the Internet. They’d bring on several hundred employees to what would become PayPal. […] Most of PayPal’s key employees left [when] eBay [bought it], but they stayed in touch. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. And the mafiosi have been busy.
During the past five years they’ve been furiously building things – investment firms, philanthropies, solar-power companies, an electric-car maker, a firm that aims to colonize Mars, and of course a slew of Internet companies. It’s amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.
Besides Facebook and Slide, there’s Yelp, Digg, and YouTube. Thiel and Levchin, the don and consigliere of the mafia, figure that all told, there are dozens of enterprises worth a total of roughly $30 billion – and that value is growing rapidly, as evidenced by Thiel’s good fortune with Facebook.
The PayPal-ers who didn’t possess Thiel’s anti-establishment streak as new hires had it by the time they left. The PayPal culture wasn’t just antigovernment. It was anti–mainstream thought.
Thiel, ever the freethinker, has donated $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a life-extension-research organization run by the controversial academic Aubrey de Grey, who believes humans will one day live to 1,000.
Thiel sits on the board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which concerns itself with the coming merger of man and machine. In the early days at PayPal, he even discussed establishing cryogenic storage as an employee benefit.
Somehow I don’t have much empathy for someone driven to extend their natural life. I would be much more impressed if he donated some of that $30 BILLION towards those trying to just live. While the donated amount sounds impressive, it is actually less than 1/10 of 1% of his worth.
I didn’t like PayPal when they owned it. Their dispute mechanism sucked then and as I understand it, it still sucks today. When I purchase something on-line I always insist I will NOT use PayPal. If we can’t do business, then I don’t buy it.