Some may have heard of the tech geniuses who compose “The PayPal Mafia.” The mainstream media glamorizes them as “tech visionaries,” a band of rebellious geniuses who disrupted finance and went on to build empires. Yet, beneath the surface of the so-called PayPal Mafia is not innovation for the public good, but the construction of a new form of oligarchy—one more dangerous than the robber barons of the 19th century. Why? Because this new class of elites doesn’t merely build companies. These men influence monetary systems, shape global narratives, and fund policy engineering through unelected channels.
PayPal emerged in the late 1990s during the dot-com bubble, which I had warned would crash by 2000. PayPal became a clever workaround to bypass the traditional banking system, cloaked under the premise of convenience. This so-called “mafia” includes Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Scott Banister, Roelof Botha, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, Premal Shah, Yu Pan, and Yishan Wong, among others who had roots in PayPal. Each went on to build their own tech empire spanning across biotech, social media, space, venture capitalism, and surveillance.
Fortune Magazine ran an article about these men in 2007, and even asked them to dress up as traditional mafia gangsters. These men are the new tech elite who wield immense power and influence. Elon Musk’s deep ties to Donald Trump shone a new light on how deeply the so-called PayPal Mafia has become embedded in politics and geopolitical affairs.
I reported how Peter Thiel provided J.D. Vance a platform to enter politics. Thiel introduced Vance to Silicon Valley and welcomed him into the scene of the tech elite. Theil’s Palantir was recently awarded a massive contract to create the first US federal centralized government database that will house every piece of data on every American citizen. Again, this is happening under the premise of convenience.
Hellbound and Down 