PayPal Mafia: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and others

• A group of PayPal employees and founders from the early 2000s became known as the “PayPal Mafia.”
• Its members have all impacted Silicon Valley by founding and developing major companies.
• The group includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and the founders of both YouTube and Yelp.

What do the founders of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla and LinkedIn have in common? In addition to founding some of the largest technology companies, they all share a common resume line item: they all worked at PayPal.

Many of PayPal’s early employees went on to become big names in the technology and venture capital worlds, founding, financing, and otherwise developing successful companies. This elite group became known as the “PayPal Mafia,” a nickname that gained popularity after Fortune used the term in a 2007 piece along with a photo of some members dressed in gangster garb.

Members of the group include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, along with more than a dozen others. Here’s a look at the most prominent members of this exclusive group and what they’re doing more than twenty years later.