X.com, the company that would later merge with Confinity to become PayPal, is launched by Elon Musk. The company idea is due to Max Levchin, and Thiel is initially interested only in being an investor, but Levchin convinces Thiel to become CEO of the company. Ĭonfinity, the company that would later launch the first version of PayPal, is founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Yu Pan, Ken Howery, and Russel Simmons. The spinoff from eBay is completed on July 20, 2015, with the company trading independently under the ticker 'PYPL' on the NASDAQ. It is announced that PayPal will be split off eBay. It acquires competitor startup Braintree, a payments gateway company. It debuts new hardware and collaborates with brick and mortar stores for its in-store payments options.

PayPal moves aggressively into new territory, including micropayments, mobile payments, in-store payments, international expansion, and more tools for small and medium businesses. The product and userbase grow steadily, faster than the parent company eBay.

PayPal is acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in eBay stock.

PayPal competes fiercely with Billpoint, raises a huge amount of money, and even IPOs in February 2002. eBay responds with its own payment service, Billpoint. PayPal adopts eBay as a key platform to grow its userbase, because of the need for an online payment system on eBay. The combined entity, initially called X.com, later changes its name to PayPal. The first iteration of the PayPal product is released by Confinity in later 1999.Ĭonfinity and X.com merge. The two companies, Confinity and X.com, that will eventually merge to become PayPal, launch separately and build competing financial products. This is a timeline of online money transfer and e-commerce service PayPal, owned by eBay from 2002 to 2015 and an independent company before and after that.

Timeline of the history of PayPal Holdings, Inc.

Paypal play store