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When PayPal started

PayPal started in December 1998, when Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek founded it under the name Confinity.

The company did not use the PayPal name at first. It reached its current form through a product launch, a merger and a rename over the following years.

  • December 1998: Levchin, Thiel and Nosek set up Confinity.
  • 1999: The first version of the PayPal electronic payment system went live.
  • March 2000: Confinity merged with X.com, an online bank that Elon Musk had founded in 1999.
  • 2001: The combined company was officially renamed PayPal.
  • 2002: eBay acquired PayPal, which stayed part of eBay until 2015.

Because the payment product appeared in 1999 and the company name changed only in 2001, a PayPal overview may list different start dates depending on which event it counts. The founding date that histories of the company, including Wikipedia, give is December 1998.

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