How to Think About the PayPal Mafia — Shanley Writes
So, if you’ve been following tech closely in any way, you’re probably heard the term “PayPal Mafia”. This post is not to map out its detailing, documented in various books and articles over the years, but rather, this is to help with HOW you think about the PayPal mafia and about the major conspiracies and conspiracists in Silicon Valley more generally. Most importantly, it will update your understanding of what the PayPal mafia is; since the 90s when PayPal began, there are other players and institutions in the mob, without which, it is difficult to understand what is going on now.
The tech industry seems very complicated to outsiders; this is an illusion that tech strives to maintain, because at the end of the day, its not very complicated at all. The story of the PayPal Mafia is itself simple: PayPal was founded in 1998, and it became one of Silicon Valley’s first real success stories. It made it through the dot com crash. And it was a direct shot into the center of the global financial system, something that the industry as a whole needed to accomplish in order to get the wealth and control it aspired to. The financial market was an ambitious undertaking, difficult to get into, due to the dominance of legacy providers, traditional financial institutions, regulations, and outdated e-commerce systems, the technical implications of a digital system that large; but PayPal did it, and we now recognize it as one of THE major pieces of financial infrastructure; a giant coup for a very young industry, to get a shot across the global playing field like that. One of the first places we see the true appetite and aspirations of the industry. Good job, my little mafiosos!
As you can probably guess, PayPal made a lot of people, a lot of money. But it made a few people… absolutely fuck tons of money. Those are the ones we call the PayPal mafia today (it’s rounded out with a few losers from marketing who never got off the teat, like Dave McClure, who had to step down from his VC firm due to sexual harassment, one of several sexual abuse incidents with the Mafia). Anyhow, full of cash and funding and fame and bravado, the PayPal mafia had a huge step up on everyone else in the Valley, and they burst forward from PayPal, yearlings, bravely galloping Ponies of the Apocalypse, into their various industries and endeavors, bent on takeover, fashioning the world to their design. They invested in other companies, often together, founded other companies, often together, started their own venture capital firms, worked with the other’s, went in on deals together. Shared rounds and CEOs and engineers and innovation and contracts and think tanks and non-profit tax shields and plans for underground bunkers where Peter Thiel and friends can survive a nuclear apocalypse, a result they find concerningly plausible. The Mafia moved always in a coordinated rhythm. Always working together in some way, shape or form, using their network, money, strategies, teams from PayPal to help everyone get ahead.
Those in the PayPal Mafia have gone on to be not only multi-billionaires, but to control huge swathes of the technology industry, deciding what is built, controlling the flow of funding, influencing mergers and acquisitions, driving massive relationships with the military industrial complex, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, as well as engaging with the government on issues from negotiating massive tax breaks for startups, to influencing the regulations regarding local real estate, to installing and funding favorable candidates across the political spectrum. (On the point of military and intelligence connections, you will note that Musk, through his space initiatives, and Thiel, through Palentir, have two of the greatest interfaces with government agencies of any others in the industry.)
Its a classic story of the rich get richer and the powerful get more powerful through straight up cronyism and crime-bossery and conspiracy. These are very literal folks: when they said Mafia they meant Mafia. The relationship between Musk and Thiel is, for all intents and purposes, a blood oath; neither should ever be mentioned without the other, because it would cause you to lose sight of the scope of the matter. If Elon owns Twitter, so does Peter Thiel. If Peter Thiel is Trump’s closest advisor, Elon is in the room too. Elon runs space, Thiel designs weapons… they are two sides of the same coin in many ways. In Silicon Valley, making money is the most inviolate bond.
Their partnership has been incredibly fruitful. Thiel was the first outside funder in SpaceX in 2008. Thiel also funded Musk’s Boring Company through Founders Fund. And also funded Musk’s Neurolink. Elon and Musk have both been operating as serious heavyweights, for more than 20 years now, driving towards common goals and ambitions, all of which involve the never-sated imperial appetite. Their connection is so glaringly obvious that I am genuinely mystified why people seem to think that Elon Musk buying Twitter to stoke the fires of fascism and right-wing extremism in America, has nothing to do with Peter Thiel being actively on the campaign trail and campaigning for Trump, developing the overall Republican strategy as Trump’s #1 strategist.
It’s literally RIGHT there. This is THE MOST BASIC CONSPIRACY OF ALL TIME.
Stop thinking about these people as specific members of the conspiracy per se, but rather to think of this as one entity. In this case, the same entity that is guiding Trump’s re-election campaign, has bought Twitter and is now onboarding and energizing organized fascist terrorism to uphold extremist right-wing viewpoints and media figures. So thus you would say something to the effect of: “The conspiracy purchased a vital piece of American political infrastructure as it backed Trump for election in 2024”.
The straightforward monkier “PayPal Mafia”, would be convenient if every party we want to address, every party that is most active in the various tech conspiracies playing out today, was in fact all from PayPal. But you’ve got a big piece missing; the other “Three Musketeer” that Thiel and Musk have come to be as intimately linked as they are within the original PayPal team itself, and beyond that level: Marc Andreessen, the most powerful person in Silicon Valley, the king, the one everyone reports to. He is our beloved dictator, and he plays a role so critical in these so-called “PayPal mafia” conspiracies, that you can’t actually understand how the “PayPal mafia” is operating without including him, and it makes me alarmed that the name “PayPal Mafia” has become misleading, risking public ability to see what is going on.
So, to go back in time a little, while Thiel and Musk were getting their start, so was another young man; his name is Marc Andreessen, and he invented the web browser, and went on to work at AOL as the CTO back in the hey day of the first bubble when all of us were just starting to learn what the internet was. While they all would know each other from the Valley — it was a much smaller world back then — they made a key connect at Facebook, where Thiel and Andreessen were both early funders, made an enormous amount of money, and were both on the board of directors of Facebook, together, for a long time; one of the most coveted board seats in the Valley and in the world, giving them insane levels of influence over the data core of the industry itself. The importance of the connection between Andreessen and Thiel that was forged at Facebook, is of equal importance in the course of the Valley as the meeting of Musk and Thiel. And I would argue, more so. Thiel is one of the only people in the world that Andreessen is truly appreciative of, and they are fantastic friends in addition to *checks notes* co-criminals.
From those halcyon early days scamming people out of money and decimating America with hell-tech, Marc is today the head of the venture capital firm a16z, the pre-eminent investor in the Valley. If you want to know what is going on in the industry, you need look no further than Marc; he is a hyper concentration point in the system and following his actions is also a great way to set up your financial strategy: the man does not lose. (Well, he was sad he didn’t get to invest in Square, but he took one of Jack’s companies, he can take another!!)
Marc’s VC firm, a16z, and Peter Thiel’s VC firm, Founder’s Fund, have served as complementary entities and wealth vehicles. Co-investing is the main way that tech super powers are coordinated. Investment is what gives them total control over companies, along with the ownership stake. Founder’s Fund will fund something, the CIA will throw in, and then a16z will as well, and the gang’s all here!. Co-investment ensures a mutual investment in making the company WORK. This is the behind-the-scenes of monopoly building; this is a machine for MAKING monopolies; to align super powers towards a common goal, sealed by a financial contract. With Thiel and Andreessen on the board of Facebook for so many years, it’s no wonder that no alternatives to Facebook were formed or were funded all these years, except as outsourced feature-building for Facebook; you had not only Facebook but these powerful venture capital firms, doing everything they can to keep potential competitors away: primarily, by cutting off any access to funding whatsoever and creating a hostile business ecosystem for competitors, to protect their massive Facebook investment.
These three, Musk, Peter and Andreessen (you should consider Mark Zuckerberg part of this group too, although he has a somewhat narrower focus), these three/four have come to be a constellation of incredible power, incredible wealth, incredible political impact, singular architects of the direction of modern technology, and between them, encompass all of the major innovations playing out right now in the industry. They all have huge stakes in space development, web 3.0, the Metaverse, in weapons manufacturing, in cryptocurrency, and in surveillance, and they have the greatest sway over what happens, than any other configuration I have been able to identify.
Now, a few observations on the functioning of these parties:
To start, I think its important to know that all of these parties have shown extraordinary interest, going back to their early days, in setting up civilizations that are outside of the control of the US and the government. Thiel has long been a fan of ideas like sea-steading which would let tech escape government oversight; and Elon, well, we know he wants to build a moon or Mars colony or something, ANY colony will do, for these colonizers in search of colonies. This is actually an essential attribute of the PayPal Mafia that is ignored as a common feature: PayPal and crypto have everything to do with breaking away from the existing financial and government systems. This is a necessary context to understand cryptocurrency today: the ones who have had the most impact on crypto are the same players from the PayPal days and their associates, like Marc. The original vision for PayPal was a cyptocurrency that would operate independently of any system besides the technology one. PayPal was the ideological birthplace of crypto as we know it today, even though the technical development needed to launch it wasn’t there at the time.
What makes the PayPal Mafia + Marc (a16z), so potent compared to the rest of the psychopathic crooks in the Valley, is that these parties are at the root of the evolution of the financial system under tech’s purview. They are a dynasty though which we can trace an entire legacy of the biggest financial players, innovations and disruptions, in the Valley today. What the PayPal Mafia had that was different about it, as opposed to any number other of loosely organized white collar crime syndicates in the Valley, and what made them so much more powerful: they were inside the financial system itself and that was the unifying point of their conspiratorial direction. The PayPal Mafia points to the longest-run financial crimes in the Valley, and flowing from it is a dynasty of tech’s invasion and takeover of the financial system.
When we start to add the a16z piece of the puzzle into things, a fuller picture emerges. Like how Max Levchyn, a member of the PayPal mafia, founded Affirm, now one of the largest fintech companies in the world, in 2012, and Peter Thiel’s firm, Founder’s Firm, invested in it, and so did Marc Andreeseen’s VC firm. Stripe, which is now also one of the biggest companies in the finch space, was funded by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk… and Marc Andreessen’s VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. The group is, of course, massively invested in crypto as well. Founder’s Fund made a giant investment in Bitcoin in 2018. A16z has the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase; Thiel funded a cryptocurrency startup in 2017, that was purchased by Coinbase in 2020. Coinbase itself now has its own “Mafia” as the conspiracy has grown. Thiel himself has a Bitcoin-mining startup, and has invested at LEAST hundreds of millions of dollars (I assure you it is far more), as reported in 2018. I encourage you to follow this thread down, and start poking around where Thiel and Marc in particular have been investing together for decades. More than crime buddies, they are also extremely close “friends” and this history will point you to the strength and seriousness of this “friendship”. (Can two psychopaths be friends? The alliance between Marc and Peter heartwarmingly suggests yes, and perhaps the only true friend to a psychopath, is another one.)
You find Musk, Thiel and Andreessen together architecting the tech invasion of yet more cities; a16z setting up offices on Miami Beach where Peter Thiel bought a huge mansion and Founder’s Fund has a growing presence, with another top member of the PayPal mafia now working for Founder’s Fund moving there as well, where he has hosted various political events for right-wing extremists (same guy who had the sexual harassment case at Square). In another city targeted for tech takeover, Tesla makes extremely aggressive moves in Austin, Texas; Thiel has been operating a Bitcoin-mining operation out of Texas for some time and moved his capital management firm there in 2018.
OK, now I need you to add just one more character into the mix. Palmer Luckey; aka “PayPal Mafia: The Next Generation” (well, he’s Marc’s boy, we really have to change the “PayPal Mafia” moniker). He started Oculus at just 22, which was invested in by a16z AND Founder’s Fund, and then was acquired by Facebook, which was funded by a16z AND Founder’s Fund, and the founders of such, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, were on the board of Facebook when the acquisition was made. Palmer has gone on to start the VC military currently being built out under the a16z banner of “American Dynamism”… which, you guessed it, is from a16z and Founder’s Fund. So if Peter and Marc were Lestat and Louis, Palmer is Claudia.
And this is exactly how much of the dealmaking in Silicon Valley goes. A network develops around the criminals: everyone they’ve funded, plus all the companies those executive teams go on found, and so on, ad nauseum. I would be interested to see how many hops in the Valley exist between literally any random ass programmer and this specific criminal conflagration. A map of it would look like just scribble all over the place between the suspects, as really its just a never-ending cocoon of money, power, money, power, money, power, all cosseting them together, investments and returns, investments and returns, creeping relentless acquisition of infrastructure and wealth, eating the world. You know, vampire ass shit.
So as you can see, these VCs are working (cough, conspiring, cough) together in a variety of ways. They are able to pool resources and keep other investment parties out of key deals. They are able to converge on shared marketing, such as developing the Web 3.0 concept and the American Dynamism concept, and push out consistent messaging about the Metaverse, or about cryptocurrency, using not only their own firm’s marketing arms, but the marketing arms of everyone they’ve ever given money to. These are actually really good examples of how VCs work in lockstep to sway the attention and labor of an entire, multi multi multi multi trillion dollar industry, setting its agenda. Members of the conspiracy can make waves through their respective companies, confidants, intelligence partners, the media companies they own, the social media companies they own, and so on. Now, they are able to create technology earthquakes out of non-events, events manufactured by VCs that is then magically being reported on like the development of an organic phenomenon: web 3.0, the metaverse are great examples. VCs occupy the highest status in the ecosystem, so what they personally are communicating about the field actually causes changes in it just based on their word. No one gets money without VC say-so. They have a giant apparatus and the lines between different specific companies and offices and firms are much more porous than we think. They develop a massive, trusted pool that comes with loyalty to the system: executives move from various a16z and Founder’s Fund startups and boards and VC positions to the next, they are swapped around and matched with companies based on needs, programmers move around to the various companies, perhaps become founders themselves eventually. You come to have a solid deck of people that have a binding thread of allegiance to these entities, people who are living entirely within this network for their entire professional lives; that truly is an eco-chamber, an ecosystem that exists entirely in the purview of one criminal organization.
People significantly underestimate the power that VCs have — these are not just people who sign up to write the check and then disappear until its payday. They are not only the current provider to startups when they hand over initial investments, but they are likely needed by the startup to fund additional rounds in the future; this obviously gives VCs all of the leverage. They have board seats and can fire the CEO. They are the source of many customer and partnership referrals, and VCs control the tech media cycle, so they are also dependent on VCs for marketing material and inclusion in conferences and awards lists and so on. VCs get involved with product decisions and timelines and launches all the time. They bring in other trusted parties to make changes and adjustments. A VC-funded startup is under not just general abstract influence, but rather, the startup is sublimated into the already-running criminal infrastructure; it is a major reason why startups succeed, and without it, they can’t.
One thing that gets people tripped up about conspiracies, is they assume that there is ONE exact path to success that is established by the conspirators who then explicitly execute on that in a very step-by-step way, when really, real-time conspiracies work more… directionally. Later, what we come to know as the specific details, are simply the route the conspiracy ended up going to meet its goals; but it could have gone another way as long as it was towards the same result. As in, the group of conspirators has some high-level understood goals: in this case, to establish their own sovereign nation, take over American cities, replace the financial system with something they control, become multi-trillionaires, and so on. They haven’t had one specific plan — they’ve thought about sea-steading, about seceding as California from the United States, about tampering in elections — but they’re going to take whatever steps towards sovereignty they can, by any route. As time has gone on and America has weakened, I believe their plan for sovereignty has shifted to focus on *taking over* more and more of America to feed its own stratospheric growth.
These are heavily opportunistic, flexible organizations: for example, the unexpected pandemic, a black swan on whose wings tech has flown closer to the sun of revolution. First, they had people captive at home. People were using their devices more, using more apps — the increase of data, which is directly correlated with the increase in their money; they more than doubled their riches during these times, giving them a chance to further penetrate markets and set up reliance on the industry. Delivery services, consumer and office communications apps, remote health and learning, were all huge boons during this time period.
These are conspiracies that are unfolding across huge time frames. It’s been decades. They make strides where they can, invest in as many key ecosystem companies that they can, circulate money through the system and use their marketing machines, etc. Ready to pounce at all times.
Another good example of the opportunistic, directional nature of large-scale conspiracies, is what you are looking at ongoingly with regard to tech’s political engagement. Tech hasn’t pursued a singular or even primarily Democrat or Republican perspective; instead, it donates here and there as it seems advantageous. In the past few years, as the Democrat establishment failed to provide tech with, I.e., the major boon that the “Social Media President” (Obama) did, they have shifted Republican; not because they give a shit, but because that makes more sense for the direction they want to go.
Look, they don’t even have to talk to each other about any of this shit anymore. They can simply publicly broadcast some ideas and see if they are picked up, they can signal the roll-out of something like American Dynamism, they can go in on a telling seed round. One thing about having an authoritarian industry and a highly disciplined one, with an incredibly clear chain of command, particularly at the top, is that ideas and “trending topics” engineered by VCs, are able to proliferate across the industry extremely quickly. VCs have tentacles everywhere, influence and control over every part of the industry. They can communicate with their actions in the market alone.
The secret point of this post, is to get you to expand your thinking on the PayPal mafia. Correct identification of the conspiracists is necessary, and looking only at the popular configuration of the “PayPal Mafia” is not sufficient to understand what is happening here, most importantly because it leaves out the role of a16z. If you are only looking at the PayPal mafia and NOT looking at a16z, you don’t even know half of the picture. And if there was only one person you could watch to figure out what is actually happening in this industry, it isn’t the “PayPal Mafia” — it is, specifically, Marc Andreessen, king of the valley, not any member of the PayPal Mafia proper.
That said, I again want to caution you from thinking about these things in overly personal terms, to be viewing this through who Elon is as a person, who Thiel is as a person. You have to understand the complexity and enormity of someone’s operation when they have that much money. You and I are just people walking around at the end of the day; usually nothing more glamorous than maybe having a few people who report to you at work if you’re some kind of manager. You and your little friends are not empire. These people are JUST IN AND OF THEMSELVES BEFORE THEY EVEN ARRIVE AT THE OFFICE, outside of any specific company or cause or mission, an entire empire. They have massive estates all over the world, they employ a ton of personal staff, they have their lawyers, their have their own PR advisors, they have teams of people who work on their health; they are “philanthropists” pouring tax-free money into tech-sympathetic causes, they slip god knows how much funding into the political system, and who knows what they are personally funding that isn’t required to be disclosed to the public (I.e., on the grounds that it is a classified CIA project or some spymaster bullshit). (I always worry about the possibilities of “startups” that no one knows about, working away on whatever god awful projects). Noooooooo. For managing their personal wealth they need financial advisors, bankers, fucktons of accountants, tax lawyers; they have personal security forces. THEIR OWN LIVES *outside* of the umbrella of their various VC firms and startups that they advise and invest in and boards they are on and advisory positions they are in (I.e. To the CIA), are a significant enterprise in and of themselves.
Think of these people as AVATARS of a collection of interests, and its always important not to overly individualize; this has the effect of humanizing them. When one of them is online being an asshole for unknown business or personal ops and depravities, keep in mind that you are dunking on what is certainly a sociopath, definitely a psychopath, and probably a serial killer, someone who has already committed over and over, systemic acts of depravity to deprive the life and liberty of others, has funded weapons that have killed, have repressed social movements that could have saved lives, and created a wealth gap that itself, inherently, has casualties, driving people into further poverty and further away from health care and societal resources.
It’s dangerous to take someone like that, and put a clown mask on him, even if they are playing the fool in public. The way you respond to a laughing stock, and the way you respond to a mass killer, are necessarily different; this mistake could cost us everything, and they know they have you caught up in the performance.
Venture capitalists love fucking around online and they are terminal narcissists and trolls — remember, trolling comes from the tech industry and of course is practiced in its highest echelons. You can take their word on things inasmuch as it is consistent with the trajectory of their conspiracies; anything outside of that, is a waste of time. They are running social media experiments and ops all the time. A lot of their antics online aren’t aimed at you at all, they are building up rabid on-demand harassment gangs, so a lot of this is about appealing to those groups and drumming up energy and so on, ditto their core base of business, finance and tech workers. If you are a liberal or a leftist, their performance is not addressed to you, it is inciting other bases to attack you.
Look, there’s a lot more there, and we’ll explore this more in other articles. Please understand your enemies. The moniker “PayPal Mafia” is rapidly too misleading to explain the events which are now unfolding. PayPal Mafia is certainly an important concept in laying out the Silicon Valley super structure, but it leaves too much out, and it isn’t up to date with what is going on. Know who the REAL power players are. We need to create a full map of the co-investments and ties between these parties going back to the 90s. We need investigative teams that can begin to map out in a useful, accessible way and continue to establish evidence on the venture capital conspiracy. There’s A LOT of evidence to be gathered here, especially as the “PayPal Mafia” moniker has caused people to reason about it in ways that don’t include major players.
We have to stop these conspiracies. We are at war with these fucks. Always take them with gravity, and know who, and what, we are facing here.
