This was one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. I honestly knew very little about the founding of PayPal, its war with eBay, or the origin of many of the internet payment features we take for granted today. I also had no idea the number of recent college grads and dropouts who began their path to becoming American oligarchs following the success of PayPal’s IPO — one of them rhymes with Blelon Blusk. (Peter Thiel, one of PayPal’s early investors, was already well on that path, but this certainly accelerated him, too.)
In fact, reading about the personalities of these figures at this early moment in time provided a lot of insight into the political predicament we find ourselves in now. I mean, a company that had “world domination” as its business goal involved people with bigger plans than helping people facilitate payments for beanie babies. (Musk, in particular, originally began his dream of creating X — the “everything app” — during the PayPal years. He hasn’t let that dream go, as I wrote about early in the DOGE wrecking ball era.) I’m very excited to talk to author Jimmy Soni this afternoon about Musk, Thiel, and more — I hope you will join us!
If you are not able to join this afternoon, the talk will be recorded and posted for paid subscribers tomorrow. Please join at the following link at 2 p.m.:
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