PayPal Holdings, Inc.

PayPal was not originally called PayPal. Confinity — founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin — built software that could beam money between PDAs. At the same time, Elon Musk founded X.com, an online bank. In March 2000, they merged. The combined company was renamed PayPal in 2001, after a product Musk reportedly disliked.

While Elon Musk was on his honeymoon in October 2000, the board voted to remove him as CEO and replace him with Peter Thiel. Among the complaints: Musk wanted to migrate the entire payment platform from Unix to Windows servers. Musk was furious. The company kept Unix.

PayPal went public in February 2002. Eight months later, eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion. This group — Musk, Thiel, Levchin, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks — became known as the "PayPal Mafia" and went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Palantir, SpaceX, and dozens of other companies.

After years of activist investor pressure, eBay spun off PayPal as an independent publicly traded company in July 2015. PayPal's market cap at separation was $46 billion. eBay's was $33 billion. The subsidiary had become more valuable than the parent.

PayPal reached a peak market cap of over $360 billion in July 2021. Rising interest rates, competition from Apple Pay and Stripe, and slowing growth sent the stock down over 75% from its peak by 2022 — one of the most dramatic falls of any major U.S. fintech.