Since the “PayPal mafia” term was coined by Fortune magazine in 2007 (amplified by a striking photo shoot in which 13 of the group dressed as mobsters), they have only become richer and more revered. Today, the roughly two dozen members continue to finance one another, sit on each other’s boards, and work at each other’s companies. The family also includes Tesla’s Elon Musk, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and the founders of YouTube, Yelp and Palantir. His consigliere and co-founder Max Levchin backed the likes of Stripe and Pinterest. Its don, Peter Thiel, PayPal’s former chief executive, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and remains one of tech’s most powerful venture capitalists. Sacks is one member of the “PayPal mafia”, the network of the first employees at the payments company who have gone on to enjoy immense wealth and influence in the tech industry. This Cosa Nostra does not go around breaking windows, but in Silicon Valley, it is just as notorious. It was later bought by Microsoft for $1.2bn. Sacks went on to found Yammer, a social network for offices. But as one big screen mobster famously said, just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in. The dotcom bubble had burst, and Sacks could have put his tech days behind him. The result, 2005’s Thank You For Smoking, became a sleeper hit, and returned its $10m budget many times over. When David Sacks left PayPal, shortly after eBay paid $1.5bn (£1.2bn) for the company in 2002, the first thing he did was finance a movie. With the possibility of deplatforming looming for some, cryptocurrency supporters have naturally promoted the “Bitcoin cures this” narrative, owing to the network’s decentralization and censorship resilience.The so-called 'PayPal mafia' represent the best, worst, and most controversial aspects of Silicon Valley All of which may be seen as leaning right politically, or as having opposing viewpoints.Įlon Musk, the now-CEO of Twitter as well as the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, responded to the Free Press story by saying that the platform has become an episode of Black Mirror - a British television series that generally depicts some type of dystopian future where humans are dominated by technology. To name a few, PayPal has deplatformed accounts associated with the censorship-free Freedom Phone venture, news website Consortium News, the Free Speech Union, and the skeptical blog The Daily Sceptic. “The CEO has like every woke award you can get,” Sacks observed, adding, “It’s a symbiotic relationship-he executes their agenda, and they give him prizes, and that furthers him up the corporate totem pole of woke capitalism.” Sacks told TFP that PayPal, under current CEO Dan Schulman’s leadership, is attempting to cash in on the woke culture trend by excluding those with opposing viewpoints. Thiel is known as the “Don” of the famed “PayPal Mafia,” a collection of founders and former workers, including Elon Musk, who have gone on to create or work at other important software businesses.ĭavid Sacks, a PayPal Mafia member and the company’s original CEO, has also spoken out against PayPal’s deplatorming tactics in recent years. “If the online forms of your money are blocked, it’s like economically hurting people, reducing their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel said, adding, “There’s something about economically destroying people that feels like a lot more dictatorial thing.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal in 1998 and CEO until 2002, told The Free Press (TFP) on December 14 that the company’s mission has evolved dramatically away from its founding purpose of providing global people more control over their money. PayPal’s previous leadership, dubbed the “PayPal Mafia,” has lambasted the payments giant’s recent debanking policy, with one co-founder calling the freezing of cash “totalitarian” and another comparing it to an episode of Black Mirror.ĭespite becoming more crypto-friendly in recent years, the payments tech behemoth has received a lot of attention and criticism for its de-platforming practices, which reportedly involve a rather abrupt process of freezing funds, fines, and frosty negotiations to unlock its users’ accounts for various reasons. The “PayPal Mafia,” which includes co-founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, has blasted the payments platform’s “totalitarian” debanking tactics.
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